A.P. Hays Collection featuring Will James | April 11th, 2026

A. P. Hays

(9/8/1930 – 1/22/2025)

First arriving in Arizona as a child by way of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, A.P. Hays immediately fell in love with the American West. By his teen years in the 1940s, he was already collecting Western art and objects. In 1976, after a successful career in public relations, Hays moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where he started Arizona West Galleries. The collector and art dealer, known by many as Abe, became a fixture at shows, auctions and events around the West, and quickly developed a reputation for a great eye when it came to Old West artifacts and paintings. When Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West opened its doors in 2015, visitors were greeted by the Abe Hays Family Spirit of the West Collection, the museum’s first permanent exhibition, which consists of 1,400 objects that includes historic Western saddles, rifles and revolvers, badges, gauntlets and horse gear.

Over 60 years collecting art, Hays owned thousands of pieces of history, including 17 works by Will James and 10 pieces by Carl Oscar Borg in this sale. There will be more of Abe’s collection in future auctions to come.

He shared this knowledge, and passion, with everyone he encountered. “I’m still a little boy, collecting little-boy things,” Hays told a reporter in 2015. “It’s just been a passion of mine that’s stayed my whole life.” A.P. “Abe” Hays died on January 22, 2025, in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Will Roderick James

(1892 – 1942)

Born Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault near Montreal, Canada, Will James began drawing at an early age and dreamed of becoming a cowboy. At 15 he left home, eventually arriving in the United States in 1910, by which time he had changed his name to Will James and began working for large and small cow outfits in the West. Nearly killed when a horse he was breaking kicked him in the jaw, he endured six months of recuperative dentistry in Los Angeles. Turning bad luck to good, James joined several movie companies in Hollywood, performing as a daring stuntman on horseback and as a bit player in Westerns.

He attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, where he met Maynard Dixon and Harold Von Schmidt, through whom he received his first important appearance in print in a 1920 issue of Sunset Magazine. That year, James met and married Mary Conradt, and joined the art colony in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Short stories and illustrations for Scribner’s Monthly led to his first book, Cowboys North and South, a collection of short stories, and then, in 1926, his first novel, Smoky the Cowhorse. During the 1930s, James’ books ranked in sales, at times ahead of those of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

James settled in Montana in 1927, where he continued writing and drawing for Scribner’s and developing script outlines of his books for film studios. In 1942, he completed emotionally exhaustive work on The American Cowboy, which received mixed reviews. His physical deterioration soon caused liver and kidney failure, from which he died at age 50. In his final book Will James chose to capitalize his last written words: “THE COWBOY WILL NEVER DIE.” If true, his own body of work will have much to do with assuring that mortality.

— A.P. Hays