This is the final version of the cover I’ve chosen for my new collection of Christmas tales set in the West.

The image is a detail from a painting by Frederic Remington called The Fall Of the Cowboy. The full painting shows a dismounted cowboy opening a gate in a barbed-wire fence for himself and the mounted cowboy you see. It was meant to suggest the fencing in of the open range, which didn’t do away with the cowboy but changed the nature of his trade,

It dates from 1895, when the culture at large was beginning to think about the passing of the Old West.

Click on the image to enlarge.