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Amber Dunkerley Broadus and Katherine Field Western Sketches
GC 1249  
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Description
51 pen and ink drawings of cowboy life by Katherine Field, signed and dated 1934, 1936, 1937, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1948, 1949, 1950, and 1951; commissioned for use in calendars and in the Western Livestock Journal published by the Los Angeles Union Stock Yards Company. 49 drawings of cowboy and western life by Amber Dunkerley Broadus, all undated but signed either "D" or "Dunkerley." Items are not chronologically organized. The Los Angeles Union Stock Yards Company hired the artists.
Background
Biographical information compiled from http://www.cowboypoetry.com/openrange.htm#Photos regarding the book "Open Range; collected poems of Bruce Kiskaddon." The artists' drawings were published collaboratively with Kisaddon's cowboy poetry. Katherine Field was the daughter of a New Mexico rancher, friend to the Journal's associate editor, Frank M. King. The calendars may have begun publication in 1933. "In 1935 Field had married John Guerro, a Navaho who had worked for her father the previous year, and by the end of the year she was pregnant with the first of their two children..." "...Katherine is the youngest of nine girls that Mr. and Mrs. Nelson A. Field raised up there in high mountains of Northwest So­corro County, New Mexico and she has never been very far away from the ranch where she was born, except the four years the family lived at Santa Fe, during the father’s term as State Land Commissioner for New Mexico Nelse Field is known to New Mexicans as “Navajo” Field on account he has conducted an Indian trading store on his ranch since he established it in 1889..." "By the end of 1942 Katherine Field’s family situation left her unable to continue illustrating Kiskaddon’s poems. Both her parents were in poor health and in need of constant care, and her two children were of school age. She had moved to Albuquerque to be near doctors and schools, and her husband John worked on the ranch during the week and drove to the city on the weekends. Taking over Field’s work of illustrating poems for the Stock Yards calendars and Western Livestock Journal was Amber Dunkerley, a trained commercial artist about fifteen years older than Field..." "Some time in 1948 Kiskaddon and Field arranged to renew their partnership, and their published collaborations resumed with the January 1949 Stock Yards calendar."
Extent
(Boxes: 1 legal)
Restrictions
Permission to publish, quote or reproduce must be secured from the repository and the copyright holder
Availability
Research is by appointment only