DVD DOCUMENTARIES: Telling the little known stories of cowboys, ranches and ranchers in old pictures, films and “old timers” interviews, the “Cowboys in Tall Grass” documentaries can be purchased in Tulsa at Steve’s Sundries, Gilcrease Museum and Lyons Indian Store. In Bartlesville it can be found at the Historical Museum, Woolaroc Museum and the Frank Phillips home.
Courtesy DIANNA BURRUP
After four years, Ken Greenwood’s labor of love has paid off nicely. “Cowboys in Tall Grass” has been named best documentary of 2008 by the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (formerly Cowboy Hall of Fame) and the Distinguished Service Award from the Oklahoma Heritage Association.
For those years Greenwood, widely known for his work on radio station KRMG (AM740), has been compiling recollections of the days when cowboys pushed cattle across the Oklahoma prairie to Kansas towns with railroads, Oklahoma produced some of the world’s greatest Wild West shows, and a fellow named Frank Phillips would get some of his less than law abiding pals together for a one-day annual shindig in which no arrests would be made.
The result is “Cowboys in Tall Grass,” a collection of six DVDs, each one devoted to a specific topic but because the subject matter is so intertwined they often spill into each other.
Take the DVD on Tom Mix; he got started on the famed 101 Ranch, so it is understandable that he would spill over to the disk that tells the history of that legendary enterprise. In addition to DVDs on Mix and the 101 Ranch, there are episodes detailing Phillips (who built Woolaroc Ranch, taking the name from woods, land and rocks), the fabled Dewey Roundup which for half a century was one of the biggest rodeo get-togethers in the states, th
