Will James was born Joseph-ErnestNephati Dufault in St. Nazaire de Acton, Quebec, on June 6, 1892, to a French-Canadian family. Soon after James was born, his family moved to Montreal. From an early age, James showed both a talent for drawing and a fascination with reading about cowboy life. As a child, he told his father that his dream was to be a cowboy, and he seems never to have wavered from that youthful ambition. In 1907, at the age of fifteen, he left home to go to the American West and become a cowboy.

James gives quite a different account of his first fifteen years in his autobiography, Lone Cowboy: My Life Story. He asserts that he was born in a tent in Montana while his parents were moving from one cowboy job to the next. He says that his mother died in his first year...