This photograph, a hand-colored lithobrome print that has been varnished, shows a cowboy on horseback leading another horse trailside within Yosemite Valley in the U.S. state of California. At center left in background may show the granite monolith El Capitan, cropped. Without an exact date for this scene, it’s known the artist was taking photographs in Yosemite in the mid to late 1920’s, although it could be from a later visit.

Sigismund Blumann did several variations of this scene, with the following distinctions catalogued by the artists grandson Thomas High: (1) A single cowboy riding a horse, sometimes printed in its entirety and sometimes cropped, alternatively titled “The Cowboys are a Gay Shirted Lot,” “At Dawn Comes the Mauve Shirted Cowboy,” or “At Dawn the Yosemite Cowboy Comes”.