After spending time with him, she set aside her own novel and offered to help write his story. Abbot had been trying to write a book of his own adventures without much success. Smith wrote that, “Today he is seventy-eight years old, tough as whipcord, diamond clear as to memory, and boiling with energy.” The timing was fortunate for both of them. She tracked him down and found him living with his wife, Mary, on a ranch outside of Lewistown, Montana. Fortunately, for generations of Western history enthusiasts, her search led to an old-time cowboy and cattle rancher by the name of Edward Charles “Teddy Blue” Abbott. In the summer of 1937, Helena Huntington Smith, a writer and lover of the old West, was searching for some authentic background material for her novel about the cowboys and cattle drives of the 1870s and 1880s. A 1939 epic book that chronicled the cowboy adventures of Teddy Blue Abbott
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