Double Legacy

By J.D. Reed

COWBOY CULTURE by David Dary Knopf; 384 pages; $17.95

Images of the cowboy are never difficult to find in America. Though Hollywood has virtually stopped manufacturing oaters--and counteroaters like Hud--young producers and directors labor on their outer-space operas shod in $1,000 hand-made cowboy boots. Factory hands outfit pickup trucks as high-ridin', gas-guzzlin' quarter horses: shotguns are displayed in the rear windows, and western music yips through the air conditioning. Whether the collars be blue or button-down, frontier chic is a perennial fashion. Our conviction that the cowboy was an enviable individualist in denim persists like a psychic saddlesore.

In this comprehensive and entertaining study, Kansas Journalism Professor David Dary deflates the mythic machismo of the bunkhouse and the open range. His real cowpoke is hardly an existential drifter on the Plains. Rather, he is a common laborer beset by the pressures of a hard life and slim wages.

That the cowboy has a past at all comes as something of a revelation. He was not born in the saddle on the banks of the Red River but in Old Mexico. The grandees who first brought cattle and horses to the New World in the 1500s considered livestock tending beneath their dignity. However, the powerful padres of the Mexican mission system found the first cowboys in their congregations: Indians and Negroes. Barefoot and illiterate, these early vaqueros were often not allowed even to own the horses they rode. North of the border, cowboys were hardly better off; slaves riding mules sometimes tended Louisiana herds. In California, though Franciscans taught Indians to herd steers from the saddle, their problem was that the braves favored the taste of horseflesh over beef. Many sermons were no doubt devoted to God's love of horses as transportation, and his preference for cattle at dinner.

These Spanish beginnings persisted in the speech and methods of the American cowpoke. The Texas style of capturing wild mustangs, for instance, was pure Mexican gone loco. A human dummy was lashed to the back of a roped horse. Set free, the terrified galloping animal would attract as many as 1,000 other mustangs, which then could easily be corralled.

The mythic cattle drives from Texas to the new railheads in Kansas in the 1800s, trailing herds of 3,000 longhorns across rushing rivers and hostile Indian territory, were hardly the stuff of dreams. But many young Easterners, nostalgic for the good life they had known before the horrors of the Civil War, were seduced to join up for what would prove banal, backbreaking labor. The pay for three months: $75 and all the beans one could swallow. On the drive, there were few shootouts with warpath tribes. Most drovers were happy to pay the 50-c--per-head surcharge demanded by the Choctaw tribal council for crossing their land.

Even the chuck wagon was a late invention. Such elaborate facilities were not usually needed: many trail bosses paid ranch wives along the way to bake bread, and there was always beef. The biggest excitement was a rattlesnake biting a horse, or a cowboy contracting tuberculosis from sleeping on the ground. But a false romanticism had filtered into the empurpled reports of Eastern journalists. By 1890 the cowboy was a legend. When some old range hands went on strike in north Texas, so many starry-eyed youths volunteered that cattle ranchers dismissed most of the malcontents without negotiations.

By 1900 cowboys were as avid readers of pulp western fiction as the homesteaders settling the range. Some cowpunchers appreciated the false depictions. Their outfits became more bizarre than practical, and many began to tote six-guns for the first time. A few even tried to speak as elegantly and cleanly as their fictional counterparts. At the turn of the century, a salty Texan escorted a young lady on a ranch tour. The woman had been given the gentlest and slowest horse, called Old Guts by the hands. When the visitor asked her mount's name, the cowboy wildly exceeded his frontier vocabulary and said that he believed the animal was called Old Bowels. Cowboy Culture is full of such wry anecdotes about the real West. Dary understands its double legacy, of hard fact and rich myth, and he savors it--like the Harvard-educated chronicler Owen Wister, who wrote the line, "When you call me that, smile!"

--By J.D. Reed

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