This episode first aired in May 2018.
For generations, the Wrights of southern Utah have raised cattle and world-champion saddle-bronc riders ― some call them the most successful rodeo family in history.
Now, Bill and Evelyn Wright, parents to 13 children and grandparents to many more, find themselves struggling to hang on to the majestic landscape where they’ve been running cattle for 150 years as the West is transformed by urbanization, battered by drought and rearranged by public-land disputes.
Could rodeo, of all things, be the answer? Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Branch chronicles three years in the life of the Wrights in “The Last Cowboys: A Pioneer Family in the New West.”
John Branch is a reporter for The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2013 for "Snow Fall," a story about a deadly avalanche in Washington State, and was a finalist for the prize in 2012 for his series of stories about Derek Boogaard, a professional hockey player who overdosed on painkillers. His first book, “Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard,” won the PEN/ESPN Prize for Literary Sports Writing. Raised in Colorado, he lives with his family near San Francisco.
