(Disclaimer: if you like cowboys, you might want to skip this discussion of the cowboy way. It won’t be pretty. Or, alternately, stick around and learn some history.)
It was, perhaps, the most worthless hour of my life. I was a college professor, and the motivational speaker at our inservice gathering was about to educate us about the cowboy way. By the end, my neck was sore from all the head shaking. (My colleagues, it seems, agreed. I think she was the last motivational speaker brought in to speak to faculty during my professorial tenure.)
Nonetheless, for an hour I discovered the hidden greatness and glory of cowboys that somehow escaped me during my decade of study on the history of the American West. I don’t remember as much because I stopped paying attention after, maybe, five or ten minutes, but she may have based her talk from the Gene Autry Cowboy Code as laid down in the 1940s.
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Why the Cowboy Way?
I’m always amazed that cowboys became a cultural symbol with such staying power. Whether I should blame Autry, beer and cigarette commercials, country music, or something else, I find it ridiculous. You probably know many of the myths about cowboys. We glorify them for their manly independence, the rough aggressiveness, for toughness, and for winning the West. When modern Americans wear the boots, large hats, and twenty-pound belt buckles associated with cowboys, they declare their allegiance, abstract or otherwise, to these principles. Somewhere along the line, other traits like honesty, honor, and fair play have joined the mythology.
My problem is that nearly all these ideas have little basis in historical reality. Cowboys were not independent. They were employees. Low-paid employees, many of whom rode from ranch to ranch in search of seasonal work. Furthermore, historical cowboys held a reputation as among the most dissolute, drunken, brawling, and profane groups in society. Real people of the 1800s tended to shun their company accordingly.
But didn’t cowboys and the cowboy way win the West? Well, that’s rather a stretch as well, seasoned with a heavy dose of racism. The “winning” of the West for ranching and wheat farms meant the dispossession of Native Americans. Most of it was accomplished by the US Cavalry and the destruction of the bison, anyway, not by cowboys.
The classic image of the cowboy as a rough yet manly and handsome white dude obscures other important realities. Namely, cowboys were a diverse lot. A number of African Americans were cowboys, as were many Hispanic people. The Native Americans of the Great Plains rank among the most accomplished horsemen in world history. In a competition between them and the average cowboy, I know what side I’d bet on.
How are Cowboys Still a Thing?
Eh, you know the reasons as well as I do. Symbols die hard. Especially when the symbols reinforce what people want to believe about themselves. People want to feel manly, heroic, and adventuresome. (It’s similar to buying large trucks only to drive them on freeways in one’s daily commute.) Add in the marketing of the clothing industry, TV commercials, and the whiny twang of country music, and it seems the cowboy way may never die. So, the cowboy way lives on, beckoning emasculated men into its embrace with its image of virility and ruggedness.
The cowboy way lives on unless you, the reader, help this post go viral.
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