Released from active duty,1958. Bought cattle and horses in Chihuahua, Sonora, Baja California, Coahuila, and Jalisco. Worked on cowboy crew caring for 6,000 cattle on Imperial Valley, California pasture. Moved to Navojoa, Sonora in 1960 to buy cattle for American rodeo. Rode horseshoe trails of the Sierra Madre Occidental from Chinipas, Chihuahua to Sahuaripa, Sonora. Ranched and bought cattle on the coastal desert near the Sea of Cortez from southern Sonora to Arizona border. Built the first dipping vat for the eradication of the fever tick in the municipality of Navojoa. Among founders of the Navojoa charter of the Mexican National Charro Association. Champion amateur boxer at Saint Michaels, Notre Dame, and Marine Corps. Fought professionally in Mexico,1963 and 1964. In Mexico began to write stories that became first novel, Jim Kane, in 1960. 1968,helped gather Art Linkletter's Lida, Nevada ranch. 1970, Jim Kane published by Dial Press, N.Y. The Outfit, based on Lida experience published by Dial. 1974, Cattle Ranched at Snowflake, Arizona. 1977-2003, worked in Tucson as a member of the Teamsters Union Movie Wranglers, provided cattle,horses, stunts, acted in bit parts in movie business. National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City keeps a collection of J.P.S. Brown's books. Received the Will James Society's Big Enough Award for literary achievemnt in the cowboy tradition,1999. Received Arizona Historical Society's Lawrence Clark Powell Award for lifetime achievement in Southwestern letters, 2003. Jim Kane made into the movie Pocket Money with Paul Newman and Lee Marvin, 1972. Other fiction: The Forests of the Night, Dial, 1974; Steeldust, Walker, 1986; Keep the Devil Waiting, Bantam, 1992; The Arizona Saga,(four books:) The Blooded Stock, The Horseman, Ladino, Native Born, Bantam and Doubleday,1989-1994; The Cinnamon Colt, Doubleday, 1996; novel The World in Pancho's Eye published by UNM Press, October 2007;Jim Kane novel about Mexican border strife titled Wolves At Our Door,completed,May 2006, published by UNM Press on March 2008.

J.P.S. Brown's award-winning books are keeping the romance and reality of the working cowboy alive.

Patagonia author J.P.S. Brown knows the joys and heartbreaks of the cattle business like few writers today because he's been there. At 77, he has spent a lifetime cowboying on both sides of the Mexican border, trading and crossing cattle from Sonora, gathering wild cattle in Nevada, buying ranches -- losing them, due to the rancher's two eternal enemies, drought and bad markets.

His two best known books from the 1970s Jim Kane (made into the movie Pocket Money starring Paul Newman and Lee Marvin) and The Outfit are classics now. These were based on his own experiences, while his "Arizona Saga," consisting of The Blooded Stock, The Horseman, Ladino, and Native Born,were based on stories his 100-year-old aunt told him about his ranching ancestors. All of these books are back in print, along with a new novel based on his life growing up in a southern Arizona ranching family, The World in Pancho's Eye.

Brown is a fifth generation Arizona rancher. His great-great grandfather William Parker came through Arizona in 1850 and was taken with the San Rafael Valley that he decided to homestead there. His grandfather on the other side of the family, A.B. Sorrells was a horsetrader from Arkansas who came west, married William Parker's daughter Melvina, and homesteaded in Harshaw Canyon near Patagonia.

By the time Joe Brown was born in 1930, members of his extended family were running 30,000 mother cows and counted among their ranches the Buena Vista on both sides of the Mexican border, the Rail X at Patagonia and the Oak Bar on the Mexican line.

Brown's father, Paul Summers came to Arizona in 1914 at the age of 12 with a bunch of Texas cattle bought by Nogales rancher Quince Leatherman. He stayed to marry Mildred Rex Sorrells, who inherited a share of the Sorrells cattle, and they bought the Rock Corral Ranch near Tubac (where the Santa Cruz Chile Company now stands). After his parents divorced and lost the ranch in the Great Depression, his mother married a rancher and cattle trader named Vivian Brown. Brown kept his biological father in his two middle names, and became Joseph Paul Summers Brown.

"After he lost the ranch, my dad went to work in Mexico for Les Woodell, who was a famous cowman in this area," Brown says, "They called him 'Cabezon,'or 'Big Head,' because he was a little guy and wore a big hat." At five, little Joe Brown was already following his dad horseback gathering cattle in the Sierra Madres of Mexico.

"We were more like Sonorans," he recalls, "and still are more attached to the Mexican tradition. We were all bilingual, and I kind of grew up thinking I was a Mexican."

Later he graduated from Notre Dame University, worked for a couple of newspapers, and joined the marines in 1954. At the end of his tour, his stepfather tracked him down to help him cross tens of thousands of cattle from Chihuahua. For a while they partnered, then Joe went on his own, buying and crossing horses and cattle, breaking horses, and buying rodeo cattle for an American company. His experiences in Mexico became the basis of his first book, Jim Kane.

He also spent one summer helping catch 3,800 mavericks on Art Linkletter's 1,300-section ranch at Lida, Nevada, an experience that became his book, The Outfit.

"We gathered 1,600-1,700 pound steers, some as old as 16 years old, "he says. "By December the weather turned bad, and those cattle just scattered and went underground, The country wasn't rocky, so we'd take our bobtail trucks into the flats, go way up in the high country and bring those cattle down to portable corrals. It was more fun than a cowboy ever had."

Joe Brown never intended to write books. "I did not want to write, "he says, "I wanted to cowboy and be an artist at that." But, while in Mexico, he came down with hepatitis. Recuperating at his grandmother's house in Nogales, he started to write the stories that would eventually become Jim Kane in an effort to make some kind of living. He got hooked and stayed with it even though it was six years before Jim Kane was published. He already had a ranch and a farm at Chihuahita, Mexico, but he took his money from the book and bought the Thomas Ranch near Snowflake.

"I made a mistake," he admits now. "It was droughty and too little to make a living on. I thought I was going to write there, but all the sudden cowboys fell out of favor (with the New York Publishers). At the same time, I had 2,600 cattle to cross at the Mexican line when the Mexican government shut it down. I had to turn them around and ended up losing 20 percent of them to drought. I was pretty sick of Mexico. "

He wound up losing the ranch, but over the years, he has continued to write, The World in Pancho's Eye is his first book to be published in several years. Based on his own childhood, it is the story of Mikey Summers, born into a family of cattlemen on the southern Arizona border at the beginning of the Great Depression. His father is the descendant of a long line of prominent cowmen and top cowboys, but he has wasted his legacy on whiskey. Mikey grows up withe the heartache of broken promises, divorced parents, indifferent step-parents, and being shipped off to boarding school at a young age. In the end he learns that he must fight his own battles if he is to have a future in the world he loves--cowboying and ranching.

The first in a continuing series, Pancho is a heartfelt protrayal of the life of working cowboys and the love they and their families have for their job.

"I don't cowboy so much anymore," Brown says, "but as a cowboy, I often knew the privilege of being way out alone in great country doing work that took risk, instinct and courage, and I wished everybody could know more about that aspect of a cowboy's life. Now I write more than ever about the Cowboy Way."

If you love the real world of ranching and cowboying, this is one book you should not miss.