Cowboys: Lassoed into Modernity

By J.L. Mackey for Double Dealer

To say “things aren’t like they used to be” is almost so obvious as to be stupid. It matters little when the topic is fashion or politics or single family home architecture, but it’s worth noticing when it’s a pillar of the American Mythos: the Cowboy.

Here, I am using “cowboy” as a catch-all for the archetype of the American Frontiersman, pushing, chopping, wading, and sailing across parts unknown. Explorers like Lewis, Clark, Long, and Pike. Trappers, hunters, those blazing the Oregon, Missouri, and Santa Fe trails, followed still by more men in covered wagons, wife and children in tow, and the railroad magnates, all looking for any number of things: adventure, gold, glory, opportunity, space. Pushing ever farther into a region many considered largely uninhabitable. Men who coalesced into horseback figures, collars turned up against the wind, one eye always on the horizon. Cowboys. Self-reliant men accustomed to six-round violence, abstracted away from East Coast notions of civility, law, or refinement. 

One can argue until they’re blue in the face about when westward expansion finally came to a close, but it certainly did, and at best scarcely a hundred years after it began. The “Cattle Empire” as Webb calls it in his book “The Great Plains”: “The cattle kingdom was a world within itself, with a culture all its own, which, though of brief duration, was complete and self-satisfying...formulated its own law…the best single bit of evidence that there in the West were the basis and the promise of a new civilization unlike anything previously known to the Anglo-European-American experience.” This empire came to an end when cattlemen began to realize long cattle drives made less financial sense than stockyards, railroads, and private ranches. In the 1870s, there were perhaps up to fifty thousand cowboys in America working cattle, compared to New York City’s million person population around the same time. Now, after 150 years of corporatism, privatization, and technological advancement, there are perhaps a few thousand cowboys left - with more riding broncos and wrangling steers for sport than for a weekly paycheck. To be clear, I am appreciative of keeping a dying way of life alive in sport and dress. I own a Stetson and nice cowboy boots, but I spend most of my time sitting in an office. Northerners frequently have something to say about such behavior, but their history has been largely of Progress and Innovation, which isn’t any kind of heritage.