The Cowboy Way

An Exploration of History and Culture

Paul H Carlson

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780752440323
• eBook ISBN: 9780752496474
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The lives of American cowboys have been both real and mythic. This work explores cowboy music dress, humour, films and literature in sixteen essays and a bibliography. These essays demonstrate that the American cowboy is a knight of the road who, with a large hat, tall boots and a big gun, rode into legend and into the history books.

1

MYTH AND THE MODERN COWBOY

Paul H. Carlson

In July 1879, thirteen-year-old W.H. Childers and his nine-year-old brother mounted their horses near Sivells Bend in North Texas and headed southwest to the family’s cattle range some twenty miles away. Their father had directed the boys to ride along the fence line, to inspect and repair it, to turn back drifting cattle if that was necessary, and to check the water holes. For the next several months the young cowhands, following their daddy’s instructions, worked alone on the empty grasslands of western Cooke County, mending fences on the thirty-six-section spread, watching some three thousand longhorn cattle, and living in a tiny line shack. The Childers brothers were “cowboys” indeed, real nineteenth-century cowboys.¹

Modern-day cowboys come in a variety of guises. In part because of low wages and long hours, two-thirds of them are recent immigrants, underpaid—like the Childers brothers—overworked, and often unemployed in the winter. A few are summertime ranch hands on break from school who, when working, wear t-shirts and tennis shoes more often than they wear the traditional cowboy garb of boots and large hats. A few more are permanent ranch hands, many of whom are caught up in myths about the Old West, and, partly as a result, dress in Wrangler jeans tucked inside tall boots, long-sleeved shirts with vests, and large Stetson-style hats.²

Then, too, there are urban, rhinestone cowboys. This group frequents honky-tonks like Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth—places where they can be found dancing in pointy-toed boots and wearing tight-fitting jeans, western-cut shirts, fancy broad-brimmed hats with a feather in the band, and belt buckles the size of two-pound coffee can covers. Although probably few of them have ridden horseback seemingly endless miles to mend fences in cold and snow or to look for lost calves in wind and rain, the handsome young men there dress like the imagined cowboys of old, and by doing so make the cowboy myth a participation sport.

Clearly, it seems, there is something amiss about our modern-day perceptions of nineteenth-century cowboys. Prior to the twentieth century, cowboys—that is, real ranch hands—when they could afford it, wore dancing shoes and not boots to dances. At old-time western dances in the nineteenth century many cowboys tied bandanas around their arms to signal that they would dance the female part. The modern-day, costumed cowboys one sees at honky-tonks, at local restaurants, or in college classrooms hardly resemble real cowboys of the Old West, who removed their hats when they entered the parlor, when they sat at the dining room table, or when they went dancing. Western music singer-songwriter Mac Davis, in one of his sad pieces, complains about the modern, rhinestone cowboys and laments that he “would rather be a rodeo clown.”

Who, then, are these pretenders, these modern-day cowboy wannabes who show up at western dance halls decked out in some Hollywoodesque uniform the likes of which never existed in the Old West? Even today, many working cowboys do not dress like the modern dance hall variety. Summertime cowboys working cattle on a large Nebraska ranch a few years ago, for example, wore t-shirts from the local high school athletic department, baseball caps turned backwards on their heads, and dirty white, high-top basketball shoes with the laces untied. Where were their boots and hats and long-sleeved shirts with vests?

So, what happened to the real cowboy? How is it that the modern rhinestone cowboy became the ideal? How is it, in other words, that the myth became the reality, that the imagined cowboy became the real cowboy? Pictures dating from as early as 1918, for example, already show cowboys dancing in fancy hats and tall boots and wearing huge belt buckles. Obviously, after the close of the cowboy’s classical period the transformation came both early and quick.

The age of the classical cowboy—the western open-range cowhand—was brief, lasting just over two decades. Cowboys of the classical period, about 1865–1890 or so, were young, their average age about twenty-four. They remained cowboys on average about seven years. They seldom became prominent citizens or local pillars of society.³ They wore ill-fitting and diverse garments—“California trousers,” some were called. They wore no exaggerated belt buckles and no feather in their hats. Classical cowboys of the Old West bear little resemblance to today’s honky-tonk version or, it seems, even modern-day working cowboys influenced by the mythic cowboy of our imaginations.⁴

Real cowboys were dirty, overworked laborers who, writes William Forbis, “fried their brains under a hot prairie sun.”⁵ Often unemployed in winter, many went to town, where they took odd jobs, like painting. John Clay, who lived among them, writes: cowboys were “a devil-may-care, roistering, gambling, immoral, revolver-heeled, brazen, light-fingered lot, who usually came to no-good end.”⁶

Clay’s version reflects a contemporary, nineteenth-century view of cowboys. J. Frank Dobie, among the first scholars to study early American cowboys, wrote that many of the first cowboys were young cattle thieves.⁷ Until the mid-1880s the term cowboy in the West often meant “drunkard,” “outlaw,” “cattle thief,” or something similar. Accordingly, in the mid-1880s President of the United States Chester A. Arthur classified cowboys with cattle thieves: “The cattle were stolen,” he wrote, “by a party of outlaws, cowboys, and Indians.” Few contemporaries wanted to be cowboys. Indeed, they were “horsemen” more than they were “cowboys.”

If he worked cattle in the West, a person wanted to be known as a “waddy” or “cowhand” or simply “hand,” or in some cases “herder.” Some employees were “cowpunchers,” or in South Texas “vaqueros.” A few were called “buckaroos.” Some, mostly the youngest, were “hoss stinks.”⁸

Thus, during much of the classical period, respectable ranch hands were not cowboys. Consider Murdo Mackenzie. Recognized by the Food and Fiber National Institute of Achievement as making greater contributions to the western cattle industry than any other individual, Mackenzie managed the large Matador Land and Cattle Company for some thirty years.⁹ As manager, he sent monthly reports to the company officers in Scotland. He also wrote letters, sent memos, and requested directions. During the first twenty years that he directed the great ranch, about 1890 to 1910, Mackenzie did not call his men “cowboys”—not once. Not once in twenty years of correspondence, as far as his biographers can find, did he refer to his employees as cowboys. He wrote of his “hands,” or of his “men,” or less frequently of his “cowhands.”

From Mackenzie’s perspective cowboys were young, inexperienced, and often new to the cattle industry. They were boys—thus, “cowboys.” Cowboys were poorly paid, itinerant workers who went on trail drives. They were often kids, sixteen to twenty years old on the average. Ellis Petty, for example, noted that he made his “first cattle drive when only twelve years old.” H.P. Cook said: “I went ‘up the trail’ when I was only ten years old.”¹⁰ Here were the “cowboys.” Many trail hands, that is, more than one in three, were African American or Hispanic. Some scholars argue that forty percent of those who went “up the trail” to Kansas or elsewhere were black or Hispanic or Indian or Chinese.¹¹ The ranch hands were too valuable to send up the trail, or they refused to go. Besides, most of the cattle-trailing was done by contractors, not by ranchers. Few cowboys went “up the trail” more than once or twice.¹²

The term cowboy is an old one. In America in its earliest use, according to James Wagner, who has studied its etymology, it referred to cattle thieves, to Tories who fought with the British in the American Revolution, to other people held in low esteem. According to Wagner, the first reference to “cow-boy” (as it was then spelled) in an American dictionary defined the word simply as “a boy who tends cattle.”¹³

Cowboy in its modern sense, its mythic sense, developed in the late 1880s. By 1887, the open-range cattle frontier was dead, killed by overextension, overgrazing, severe weather, and, when the bottom dropped out of the market, low prices. After 1887, cattlemen, as opposed to cowboys, took over the industry and changed what had been a wild adventure to a settled, stable business.

The concept of cowboys also changed. Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Exhibition, which had begun in 1883, was partly responsible. It included young men herding cattle, and Cody referred to them as cowboys. Beginning in 1884, he advertised one of the men, Buck Taylor, as “King of the Cowboys.” Young, white, and virile, Taylor became a popular and featured attraction of the traveling exhibition and a hero to boys everywhere the show appeared.¹⁴

Then in 1887 Prentis Ingraham, a hack writer, produced a dime novel about Buffalo Bill’s star. Without much originality, he entitled the story Buck Taylor King of the Cowboys. The western yarn, published in Beadle’s Half Dime Library, was very popular, and the cheap little book sold well and widely. Almost overnight the cowboy image was transformed.

What Buffalo Bill and Prentis Ingraham started, Charlie Russell’s paintings, Owen Wister’s famous novel The Virginian, Western films, pulp novels, and radio shows continued until the cowboy changed from a rogue to a hero. We have, it seems, sort of corrupted him in reverse. We have made him better than he was. Cowboys were not cattlemen; they were laborers, itinerant workers, seasonal employees. They stole cattle from their employers, and some of them took off at the first sign of trouble. The real cowboy was a common, nineteenth-century working stiff who was often illiterate, often unemployed, and often on the lowest rung of the community’s socioeconomic hierarchy.¹⁵

Nonetheless, there is something about the cowboy (that is the mythic, imagined cowboy) that attracts us to him and his lifestyle—however distorted and stereotyped they have become. The mountain man hero, although there are modern rendezvous we can visit, does not claim the attention that the cowboy does. The western soldier, although there are forts to tour and Fourth Cavalry musters to attend, does not warrant such imitation. Pioneer farmers, French fur traders, Catholic missionaries, founding fathers, and even Davy Crockett-type scouts have, when compared to cowboys, little appeal to our collective sense. World War II heroes, as reflected in the G.I. Joe myth, were popular only until the Vietnam War.

But the mythic cowboy continues to appeal to us. Even people who never lived on a ranch; never rode a horse to rope a cow; never subsisted months at a time by choice on cornbread, beans, and bacon; never slept in a two-room, half dugout house—even these people make a hero out of the cowboy, the lowly cowpuncher, underpaid, poorly fed, and overworked. In part, the answer, as Lawrence Clayton has written, lies in our subconscious need for myths, including our imagined version of the cowboy.¹⁶

Also, there is a mystic and elusive vision of the cowboy as a medieval knight-errant. In the Middle Ages only the wealthy or the nobility rode horses. Miguel Cervantes’s fictional Don Quixote, with his small, round companion Sancho Panza, dreamed of dressing in armor, being mounted on horseback, and riding in combat to right the world’s wrongs. There may be a lot of Don Quixote in modern cowboys. Moreover, if you please, the horse is something of a subconscious sexual symbol—an extension of one’s body, a power between one’s legs. Mounted on horseback, the relatively small rider controls a large, beautiful, and majestic steed.

For another thing, we tend to confuse the cowboy and the cattleman of the Old West. The cowboy was a worker, a laborer. And if cattle raising was an industry, he was an industrial worker. In fact, he formed associations and went on strikes.¹⁷ (Here is a modern-day irony that apparently bothers few of us. Today most cowboy wannabes are opposed to labor unions.) How do we reconcile the cowboy of old who was a union boss with the modern-day cowboy who writes poetry and supports right-to-work laws? The cowboy was a landless wage earner. If he had the chance, he would have voted a Socialist ticket.

The cattleman was the rancher. He usually lived in a big house on the ranch, but he was often gone on business ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Myth and the Modern Cowboy
• 2 Cowboy: Origin and Early Use of the Term
• 3 Vaqueros in the Western Cattle Industry
• 4 Black Cowboy: Daniel Webster “8o John” Wallace
• 5 Indian Cowboys of the Northern Plains
• 6 English Cowboy: The Earl of Aylesford in the American West
• 7 The Cowboy Strike of 1883
• 8 Work Clothes of American Cowboys: The Pictorial Record
• 9 Cowboys and Sheepherders
• 10 Stockyards Cowboys
• 11 Cowboy Humor
• 12 Cowboy Songs and Nature in the Late Nineteenth Century
• 13 Rodeo Cowboy: “Booger Red” Privett and the Origins of Rodeo
• 14 French Cowboys: The Gardians of the Camargue and Buffalo Bill
• 15 Reel Cowboys: Cowhands and Western Movies
• 16 Today’s Cowboy: Coping with a Myth
• A Cowboy Bibliography
• About the Authors