Fred Barton and the Warlords' Horses of China: How an American Cowboy Brought the Old West to the Far East

In the years before World War I, Montana cowboy Fred Barton was employed by Czar Nicholas II to help establish a horse ranch--the largest in the world--in Siberia to supply the Russian military. Barton later assembled a group of American rodeo stars and drove horses across Mongolia for the war-lords of northern China, creating a 250,000 acre ranch in Shanxi Province.

Along the way, Barton became part of an unofficial U.S. intelligence network in the Far East, bred a new type of horse from ...