My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys

     Back when I was 5 or 6 I was convinced that “cowboy” was the job description that fit me better than the “T” in Texas, podner.  I had the hat, the red bandana, the stick pony named - you guessed it - Trigger, the cowboy boots with the pointed toes, the swagger when I walked, the twin six guns - one on each hip - and the genuine simulated leather holsters with tie downs and rhinestones and special places on the belt to hold extra rolls of caps. All my friends were cowboys too, and my little brother was going to get his six guns on his next birthday and was coming right along with his stick horse-riding skills and adding to his outfit one birthday at a time.  Roy Rogers was our hero, and nobody better ever talk bad about our pal or Dale in our presence.  We rode the range, rounded up little dogies (cows for you tenderfeet) and fought Injuns by the score, had shootouts with bank robbers and saved wagon trains all over the range in our front yard.  We rarely missed a Saturday down at the local theater where the cartoons were always followed by a cowboy serial featuring - usually - Roy and his pals or the Lone Ranger.  I think Mama bought the tickets and the popcorn if my Aunt Alice took me and my brother.  The cinematography and script writing were probably not up to present day standards, and we knew Roy would save the day at the end, but the build-up to the chase and the exciting ending made it worth the predictability. We were especially impressed that neither Roy nor Dale ever missed a shot, and that Trigger and Buttermilk were always smarter than the bad guys that planned to rob the bank. I admit to being mystified as to how they could all shoot 20 or 30 times and never reload until I figured out they probably had cap guns, too.

     Later on in life, I discovered that Paladin and John Wayne and Audie Murphy and Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood were all just slightly different models cut from similar western cloth, and still believed that even with their slightly tarnished edges they were the good guys that would take out the bad guys in the end and that the cowboys they portrayed were portraits of genuine American heroes that could no doubt outshoot, out rope, outride and outsmart evil and wrongdoing wherever they found it. I was convinced my cowboy heroes were the personification of The Code of the West.

     I was oh so wrong.

     First of all, it seems practically all of the cowboys in the movies were white guys. That’s not even close to the reality of the old west. About 30% were Mexican vaqueros (Vaca is Spanish for cow), about 25% were blacks that came west after the Civil War, and a significant number were Native Americans. Many were former Confederate soldiers desperate for a job and unwilling or unable to work for the carpetbaggers that were in charge in the South.  Before the railroads and barbed wire fencing combined to end the long-distance cattle drives around the turn of the century, it was, for the 50 years or so it lasted, difficult but available work for those that were willing. It took about 8-12 cowboys, a cook and 2 or 3 wranglers to move 3,000 cattle over the trails, and while they had to be expert riders, ropers and were fully armed with pistols, rifles, knives and shotguns, they spent much more time tending the herd than they ever did fighting Indians. 

     Ever wonder why it was important to move cows over long distances? It was a result of the Civil War.  No, really.  While there were some drives organized as early as 1850 to feed miners in California, they covered extremely long distances and were more than a little dangerous because of the Rocky Mountains and unpredictable weather.  With so many men fighting in the war, the cattle were left on their own and they did what cattle do best. They multiplied. These herds also included cows descended from those brought in by Spanish settlers. By the time the Civil War ended in 1865, millions of cattle roaming Texas could be driven to railheads leading north and east and sold for $35-$45 a head in those markets.  The US government also had a need for cattle to help feed the Native Americans they had placed on reservations.  The Goodnight Trail was blazed to deliver cattle to Fort Sumter New Mexico for just that reason.

     Estimates are that between 10,000 and 30,000 settlers on their way west in wagon trains and on their own died of disease, drowning, wild animals, dehydration, weather and accidents, but only 300-400 were killed by Indians. In spite of what we’ve seen on TV, wagon trains rarely traveled in single file on the trail, and would spread out in a wide front when possible to avoid the massive clouds of dust the wagons, horses and cattle created.  At night they probably did form a large circle, but not for protection from Indian attacks.  They herded their livestock into the center of the wagons so they wouldn’t have to spend hours the next day rounding them up before they could travel. Historians also estimated that settlers were responsible for about 300-400 Indian deaths, but the US Army and Cavalry introduced wholesale massacres and just about every deadly disease you can think of to the Indians in the Wild West. That meant that Wagon Train, one of my favorite western TV shows featuring Ward Bond, was purposefully deceptive.  That hurts.

     Let’s look at bank robberies.  Almost every cowboy film has at least one attempted bank robbery, and the implication is that western banks were flimsy pushovers and were robbed so often that it’s a wonder people ever kept their money anywhere except in their mattress.  Here’s the reality - there were 8 true bank robberies over a 40-year period in the old west.  What?? How can that be? Well, here’s why; western towns were gathered around a relatively small town center with one main street and maybe a couple of side streets. The saloon, bank, sheriff’s office, gunsmith, hardware, dry goods, dance hall and every other store were all next to each other and lined either side of the main drag and separated by wooden walls with a front and back door only. The whole town was smaller, at least at first, than a good-sized neighborhood now, sort of like an uncovered mall. A group of would-be robbers unknown to the townspeople grouped together and stopping in front of the bank would be noticed.

     Stagecoaches, however, were a different matter because they could be ambushed at deserted locations with only the driver, the shotgun rider and maybe a passenger or two shooting back. They rarely carried payrolls or chests of gold or silver, but the passengers often carried a larger than usual amount of money or jewelry when traveling because there were no such things as American Express cards or branch banks. Trains were also easy to stop by removing a section or two of rail or even piling tree trunks or large rocks on the track in a deserted location.  Their relatively slow speed of 20-25 mph didn’t give them the power to push through too many large obstacles, and stopping, at least for the engineers, was better than being knocked off the tracks.  Here again, the passengers’ belongings, money and jewelry were the objective, and it would take a posse several days to even find out about the robbery much less begin to chase the robbers.

     A lot of the cowboys we saw in the movies, especially the heroes, were clean cut, shaven and always looked like they just came out of the barber’s chair.  The reality was that real cowboys didn’t bathe for days on end, and the dust from the herd covered them, their clothes, their horses, their food and everything else.  There was no escape unless you counted an occasional bath in a river or stream. Flies, mosquitos, ticks, lice and varmints of every type and description also followed the cows and the cowboys. While they were expert ropers, riders and were well armed, they were also dirty, smelly and undoubtedly scratched a lot. They wore the same clothes they slept in for days and were limited in the extras they carried with them, so not a lot of clothing changes were available. They all had leather chaps to protect their legs from thorns, brush and branches while riding, and their boots had tall uppers for the same reason.  The boot toes were pointed so they could slip in and out of the stirrups easily in case they fell or were knocked off their horses.

     They earned between $25 and $40 a month, ate bad food, primarily beef, bacon, bread and beans, in the morning and in the evening cooked in communal pots and pans from the chuck wagon and never far from the sights and sounds and dust and smells of the herd. One of their biggest fears was a stampede by the herd, and they learned to be experts at herd mentality and cow psychology. The herd could take off for almost any reason; snakes, thunder, lightning, coyotes, gunshots - you name it.  The cowboys knew if the herd ran their job was to ride as quickly as possible to the front of the herd and shoot the leaders so the others would stop running.  They also had to stay out of the path of the herd as it ran and hope their horse didn’t stumble or fall and leave them on foot in front of a charging herd. Cowboys were physically tough but often ruined their health and significantly decreased their personal longevity from constant riding, working in alternating 4-hour shifts in all types of weather, and suffering crippling injuries, broken bones and early arthritis from being thrown from their horses and riding as much as 12 hours a day over terrain of every type. 

     If cattle drives were tough on cowboys, they were equally difficult on their horses.  Every cowboy had at least one and sometimes two or three extra horses in the remuda, a pool of extra horses.  Rotation of the horses gave the ponies time to rest and recover from their physically demanding job of keeping the cattle moving in the same direction and not allowing them to stray into brush, ravines, rivers or unescorted into the territory of wild animals like coyotes, wolves or mountain lions.  Cowboys generally took better care of their horses than they did of themselves, mostly because a walking cowboy couldn’t herd cattle and wouldn’t last long on the trail of what was essentially a country devoid of people for many, many miles.

     Cowboys were always armed, and many carried a 6 shooter in a pommel holster on their saddle for easy access when riding rather than on their hip. Rifles and shotguns were standard, along with at least one all-purpose knife for skinning, self-defense, eating, whittling and the occasional fight.  There were few men that took the time and effort to become genuine gunslingers, and most would rather shoot at robbers, varmints or each other from a distance with a rifle rather than stand a few feet apart with a pistol and try not to be the one that dies. If you’ve ever tried target practice with a large caliber pistol you already know that hitting a small target with a handgun is no easy task, even if there’s no one shooting back at you.  There were exceptions, and Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickock and Doc Holliday were real people with exceptional six-gun skills that most other cowboys avoided tangling with as much as possible, and the Hollywood version of gunslingers for hire were more fiction than fact. Most cowboys didn’t have much formal education but knew enough not to want to face off against those with reputations and end up as just another notch on a gun and a marker on the local version of Boot Hill. The deadly combination of gambling, bad liquor and pride did, however, contribute to more than a few unfortunate incidents.

     Most western towns had stricter gun laws than we would have expected, and, partly because of the prevalence of weapons of all types, were harsher in their penalties and their enforcement. As a result of those laws, derringers, shoulder holsters and pocket holsters that helped keep guns hidden became more and more prevalent than the open carry we often see in movies.  While there is something noble and primal and dramatic about a one-on-one face-off between gunfighters in the streets of Loredo or Tombstone, they were largely a Hollywood cinematic creation. One famous exception however, was the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Wyatt, Doc and their buds went to arrest the Clanton gang for ignoring the town ordinance against open carry, and the fight erupted when the Clantons refused to comply. 

     I think my biggest disappointment from all this information about cowboys is that most guys my age truly believed cowboys were a uniquely American occurrence and an historic part of westward expansionism and a personification of the theory of Manifest Destiny and the growth of America from 13 small colonies ultimately advancing from sea to sea. We were convinced that these slightly flawed but ultimately heroic characters loved their women, their horses and truth and portrayed the triumph of goodness over evil even if it cost them everything, but alas, no.  Even that turned out to be something less than what movies created.  The first actual cowboys were from Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico and first appeared managing and moving herds of cattle in the New World around 1519.  Their riding, roping, branding and herding skills were the forerunners of their American counterparts 350 years later, and even the size of their ranches and herds dwarfed those of the American experience. Our cowboys learned the necessary skills from the descendants of these original vaqueros, and we even managed to borrow part of their peculiar vocabulary and apply their terms of stampede, lariat, remuda and bronco - and many others - to our own cowboys. 

     After some serious consideration, it may be that my initial disappointment at learning the truth about cowboys and the Old West not being a uniquely American creation might be better viewed from a different perspective. Perhaps the cinematic casting of the movie cowboys’ role model is exactly what our country needs in this era of blurred distinctions between so many things that for so long many of us took for granted; the differences in men and women, for example, were clearly defined and delineated. Macho was not a dirty word but a descriptor for those that understood the necessary distinctions between the two roles for the continuation of the species.  There was also a clear distinction between good and evil and right and wrong and standing up for what you know is the right thing, and while the lines between the two might be blurred for the first part of the movie they always come into focus in the end.  Like John Wayne said - “I have tried to live my life so my family would love me and my friends respect me. The others can do whatever the hell they please.”

And those things, Pilgrim, are things worth remembering.