Camp Cook’s Troubles. Charley Russell
Today, Saturday, July 23, is National Day of the Cowboy. I don’t know what that entails, exactly, but it certainly offers up a fine excuse to grill a steak and listen to Ian Tyson and Tom Russell and Dave Stamey.
The cowboy remains the symbol of the American West. And, like most symbols, his “meaning” is contested over. For many, the American Cowboy represents self-reliance, loyalty, a strong work ethic — all kinds of noble virtues. For others, especially on the political left, the Cowboy represents everything that is “wrong with America.” To call someone a “cowboy” in their parlance is to depict a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality of recklessness and heedlessness.
(For the record, the cowboys I’ve known tend to fall in the first category. The Cowboy Ethic is a real thing).
It’s a bit of a puzzle as to how the cowboy came to carry such a heavy symbolic weight. For a cowboy is simply a working man who makes his (sparse) living working cattle from horseback. It’s not easy work and it doesn’t hold out a lot of career advancement opportunities and perks, but it’s honest labor conducted usually in some pretty spectacular country.
My friend Craig Rullman spent a portion of his youth as a buckaroo in Nevada, which is as real-deal as it gets in that trade. He’s a horseman to this day. He can call himself a cowboy if he wants to. I cannot. I’ve never worked cattle from horseback. I am, most assuredly, a man of the West, but I am not cowboy. In fact, it’s been several years since I’ve forked a horse.
“Frontiersman” and “cowboy” are not interchangeable designations. Cowboys in the heyday were certainly frontiersmen, but most frontiersmen were not cowboys. The trades I’d associate most with frontiersmen are: Hunter/trapper and miner/prospector. Of course, a lot of folks did a little bit of anything and everything to put beans in the pot.
Some of the men I would designate as Frontier Partisans were cowboys — mostly for a short period of time. Especially in the days of the trail drives, it was work for (very) young men. Scout and stock detective Tom Horn was a highly skilled cowboy — skilled enough to excel in the infant sport of rodeo. Charles Goodnight was more cattleman than cowboy — an owner — but he sure as hell was one badass Frontier Partisan.
I haven’t really studied the cowboy all that much, but I’ve read a few good memoirs. Hands down, my favorite is “We Pointed Them North,” by Teddy Blue Abbott. If you want to read just one cowboy book, that’s the one. It inspired a fantastic Ian Tyson/Tom Russell collaboration, “The Banks of the Musselshell,” and served as key source material for Larry McMurty’s “Lonesome Dove.”
Pick up the guitar, play a cowboy song, grill a steak, kick up your bootheels. It is, after all, a day worth celebrating.
••••••
The Kickstarter for “Warriors of the Wild Lands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans” continues. Hit the goal on Wednesday, but we’re still rolling. Thanks for the support. Please continue to spread the word, and if you haven’t jumped in yet — get your moccasins on and hit the trail!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/809441675/warriors-of-the-wildlands-frontier-partisans-book
Breaker Morant says
I chase cows on ATV’s does that count-LOL. For the record, they are my cows (I have 40) and I have some pasture land that topographically would be more at home in eastern Montana (the best part of the state) than it is in Minnesota.
Congrats on making the Kickstarter goal. I helped with your “Stretch” goals when we got home from California last night.
Death Valley-120 degrees, obviously hot.
I really liked the Kernville area in the southern Sierra Nevadas. As a farmer, I also enjoyed seeing part of the heavily agricultural Central Valley. I just kept thinking that (politically) it would suck to live there and be completely dominated by the coastal cities.
Traffic, traffic, traffic-we stayed at an uncle’s in Huntington Beach. We were in 5 hours of traffic jams getting there on Friday from Bakersfield. There was an accident between Bakersfield and the 405, so that was a disaster in itself.
It has to do something to your psyche when you have don’t live in “Mile-a-Minute” country and every decision has to factor in traffic.
Went to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. Absolutely gorgeous country-as was Corona where another relative visit took place.
Oddly enough, that cousin graduated from Compton High in 1956 and she said it was an beautiful area and still had open space at that time.
That family has several businesses and she recently asked a couple of their African-American truck drivers if they would take her there to see her old school and so forth. They told her “No way in hell would we take you there. It would not be safe.”
JimC says
It counts if the spirit is right!
Welcome back to camp, Breaker. As a California native son, I can appreciate what you describe. A LOT of the L.A. area was semi-rural until relatively recently. An old employer used to go bird hunting in the San Fernanado Valley in places that are now concrete-covered suburbs.
Victor Davis Hanson has a lot to say about the interior of California being dominated by the coastal elites. The Late Great Golden State is a mess — and a harbinger of the future, I fear. I ain’t never join’ back.
Davide Mana says
I missed the Cowboy Day, but I’ll have to put some music on my blog today – to celebrate the cowboys I grew up with, in films, comics, and dreams.
Because if you can’t be Bogart in Casablanca, you can always try and be Gary Cooper in High Noon 😉
JimC says
Right on. That’s the spirit.