Ross Santee (August 16, 1888 – June 28, 1965) was a cowboy, writer, and illustrator. He specialized in works set in the U.S. state of Arizona.

Biography

Born in

Thornburg, Iowa Thornburg is a village in Keokuk County, Iowa, Keokuk County, Iowa, United States. The population was 45 at the time of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census. Its sole enterprise is the Tri-County Community School District (Iowa), Tri-County ...

, Santee's boyhood ambition was to become an artist and

cartoonist A cartoonist is a visual artist who specializes in both drawing and writing cartoons (individual images) or comics (sequential images). Cartoonists differ from comics writers or comic book illustrators in that they produce both the literary and ...

. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but in early manhood found no demand for his work. Unemployed and discouraged, he drifted westward to central Arizona in 1915. The Grand Canyon State had been admitted to the Union only three years earlier, and major cattle spreads were still hiring frontiersmen to serve as

cowboy A cowboy is an animal herder who tends cattle on ranches in North America, traditionally on horseback, and often performs a multitude of other ranch-related tasks. The historic American cowboy of the late 19th century arose from the '' vaquer ...

s. The Eastern artist found that he could function as a horse wrangler, and began to put pen to paper to depict his new life. His Western-themed drawings were bought by magazines such as '' Arizona Highways'', and he was given commissions by book publishers. His career as an illustrator moved from failure to commercial success, and he married Eve Farrell in 1926 and established residences in both Arizona and his wife's state of Delaware. He wrote Arizona-themed mass-market stories and novels in line with the themes of the works he illustrated. Critics classify his work as in line with literary realism rather than romanticism. After becoming a widower in 1963, Santee closed his Delaware home and studio and consolidated his life in Arizona. In his final years he was significantly befriended by fellow illustrator

Ted DeGrazia Ettore "Ted" DeGrazia (June 14, 1909 – September 17, 1982) was an American impressionist, painter, sculptor, composer, actor, director, designer, architect, jeweler, and lithographer. Described as "the world's most reproduced artist", DeGrazi ...

. He died in Globe, Arizona, in 1965.

Bibliography

* ''Apache Land'' (1947) * ''Cowboy'' (1928) * ''Dog Days'' (1955) * ''Hardrock and Silver Sage'' (1951) * ''Lost Pony Tracks'' (1956) * ''Men and Horses'' (1926) * ''Rummy Kid Goes Home: and Other Stories of the Southwest'' (1965 anthology) * ''Sleepy Black'' (1933) * ''The Bar X Golf Course'' (1933) * ''The Bubbling Spring'' (1949) * ''The Pooch'' (1931) * ''Wranglers and Rounders: The Cowboy Lore of Ross Santee'' (1981 anthology)

Legacy

Ross Santee is identified by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin as a significant figure of American culture in the 1920s. The primary collection of Ross Santee papers is in the

Arizona Historical Society The Arizona Historical Society (AHS) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to connect people through the power of Arizona's history. It does this through four regional divisions. Each division has a representative museum. The statewide di ...

. A secondary collection of Santee papers can be found in the University of Arizona.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Santee, Ross 1880s births 1965 deaths Artists from Arizona Writers from Arizona