THE HORSEMAN HAS PASSED BY: WAR ON THE RANCHER AND COWBOY
Bernard Pyron
The cowboy and rancher of reality in the late 19th century and early 20th century is interesting because his personality traits contrast more and more with those of people in the U.S. after about 1950 and especially after about 1970, and even more so in 2016. Many of the traits of the cowboy were just the opposite of those of many Americans now. He was too much of an individualist and too self-sufficient to be tolerated in the America of 2016.
In the formula range war Western novel, there is always an insider banker, big crooked rancher or big businessman who deceptively tries to take over the land belonging to a small rancher. The insider-respectable villain usually has a gang of more Yahoo-type outlaws who work for him. This formula was perfected by Ernest Haycox and many other Western novelists. There were real range wars in Texas and in the Western states of the Great Planes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Since the ecology and Leftist environmental movements got going and influenced American politics and government in the latter part of the 20th century, the federal government, often through its Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service, has been reenacting the range war scenario in driving ranchers off their lands in the West of the Great Planes. In Nevada about eighty percent of the land is owned by the federal government and in other states of the West it owns large but lesser percentages of the land. The issue over states rights regarding lands and federal ownership of lands within the Western states is complex. But before the War of 1861-1865 the federal government tended to follow a policy of restraint on federal land ownership based upon the limited powers the Constitution specifically grants to the federal government. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments spelled out the principle of limited government.
In addition to the ecology and Leftist environmental movements demanding that land owned by the Bureau of Land Management used by cowboy-ranchers be taken over for "recreational" use, there is also now a hostility by the Establishment powers toward the independence and self-reliance of the cowboy-ranchers.
The American Cowboy Culture began in that land of thickets known as the Brasada, the brush country. It started back in the days of the Republic of Texas. There was an early California adaptation of the large scale Mexican ranching culture by the Americans there. And in the 19th century there were Vaqueros in California as in South Texas. But it was the South Texas cowboy culture which spread west, north, and northwest into the Great Planes. The Texas Trail drivers spread the cowboy culture north into Oklahoma and Kansas, and other Texas cattle drives spread it west and northwest. The Californian Gringo version of the Hispanic Vaquero did not make the many cattle drives into the states of the Great Planes as did the Texans in the late 19th century, in spreading their version of the cowboy culture.
The Anglo American settlers to Texas were able to work small herds of cattle on foot. Initially, upon their arrival in Texas they did not know how to handle large numbers of cattle, especially the Mexican Longhorn cattle, on huge tracts of land. That could not be done on foot because a cow, especially the wild Longhorns, could easily outrun a man on foot. In Mexico, which included the state of Tejas, converted to Texas by the American colonists, the horse was necessary for working large numbers of Longhorns on the large open range.
The Americans in the Texas of 1821-1850 had to learn the ranching and cattle working techniques developed in Mexico. They had to have trained cattle horses and learn to ride them in the thick brush lands of South Texas, called the Brasada. They also had to learn to rope with the Mexican lariat and use the Mexican style saddle with its saddle horn designed to be strong enough to hold a roped Longhorn. To protect themselves from the thorns of the thick brush they had to adapt use of leggins or chaps, which were leather pants worn over the guy's usual pants. They also began wearing a version of the Mexican sombrero to protect them from the sun and the thorns of the thickets.
That bow-legged man in the big hat and high-heel boots cast a long shadow on American culture and entertainment. But that shadow is a hundred years old now. The shadow of the cowboy-rancher is now politically incorrect. Although the mythic cowboy has for several decades been receding into the past, there are many eye-witness accounts of his personality traits during his epic period of about 1866 to 1930 or 1940. And some people still alive can remember working cowboys. I remember as a boy the jingle of their spurs when they came to town on a Saturday and went to the Will Kenney store in town.
Irving Dodge in 1882 wrote that "For fidelity to duty, for promptness, and vigor of action, for resources in difficulty,and unshaken courage in danger, the cowboy has no superior among men." Quoted in William W. Savage Jr, 1975, Cowboy Life: Reconstructing an American Myth.
Then, Joseph Nimmo Jr. says the majority of Texas cowboys "...were true and trusty men," and they developed "generous and heroic traits of character (Joseph Nimmo, Jr, 1886, The American Cowboy, Harper's Monthly, November, 1886, pp 880-884.
In 1981 John R. Erickson said the cowboy with the weathered face is "...a common laborer with heroic tendencies and a sense of humor." (Erickson, The Modern Cowboy.1981, University of Nebraska Press, p.6.
The cowboy's life on the lonely open range made him "sensitive to restraint, " says W. S. James 1898, Cowboy Life In Texas: Or, Twenty Seven Years A Maverick, M.A. Donohue, pp. 70-100. Walter Prescott Webb claimed that the great distances and sparse population of the West encouraged self-reliance. (The Great Planes, 1931, Grosset and Dunlap, p. 246.)
Webb also said of the settler and cowboy on the great planes that "When he made that perfect adaptation he departed farther and farther from the conventional pattern of men, and as he diverged from the conventional pattern he became more and more unusual: He made a better copy for news-writers, artist and cartoonist" (The Great Planes, 1931, p. 245).
The man in the big boots and hat who liked to sit around campfires at night and tell leg-pulling stores was an eccentric driver of longhorn cattle. When I was about four or five, in August, during the peanut harvest in our part of South Bexar county, young men from farther west would come to work in threshing peanuts, most of whom were cowboys or looked and acted like cowboys. Some of them would camp near our house at night and build up camp fires. I went to sit at their camp fires to listen to their stories.
The early heroes of the rodeo were working cowboys, like Will Rogers or Clay McGonigill. Both had many of the personality traits of the cowboy. Will Rogers, especially had the skill many cowboys had in the use of language in unusual and creative ways. Will Rogers was probably brighter than most cowboys and so his use of language was even more creative and unusual in its wit and social commentary - which brought him his fame. But Will Rogers was not a Hollywood celebrity cowboy. He was an authentic ol cowhand from Oklahoma.
In Elmer Kelton's The Good Old Boys of 1978, Hewey Calloway, Snort Yarnell and Clay McGonagill have a lot of cowboy exuberance and get into trouble with the more conventional and rigid settlers in the West Texas of the very early 20th century. Clay McGonagill was a real historical Texas cowboy hero of the early rodeo who shows his wild cowboy mentality when he approves of the roping pf a 1906 car by his friends Hewey Calloway and Snort Yarnell. Western novelists sometimes put real cowboys into their novels.
In spite of their bad grammar, many cowboys had a good command of English, and could hit the nail on the head with a good comment. They often used colorful speech and were able to use metaphor effectively. Andy Adams in Cattle Brands: A Collection of Western Camp-Fire Stories, 1906, Mifflin, says the cowboy was a story teller. I remember that in the late thirties my father took me into the lobby of the Menger Hotel in San Antonio, near the Alamo, where old trail drivers sat around telling each other stories of times on the trail fifty or more years earlier.
The rancher and cowboy culture of the West in the late 19th century - into the early 20th century - was a big part of the independent, self-reliant and creative American culture Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb wrote about so much. In the late thirties, a cowboy culture lingered in West and South Texas and in South Bexar county, in part because the Horse Age had continued in the Great Depression, even though many had Model A cars and trucks. I can remember people coming to town from the Black Jacks on Somerset Road by our house in the late thirties in wagons pulled by horses to do their shopping at the local stores.
J. Frank Dobie wrote that "They" - the men of the earth - are utterly at ease on the planet and express the flavor of the earth to which they belong..." "They" - the people of the land or wilderness - "have lingered with the grass, the rocks, and the thorned shrubs...
"
Though the cowboy was sometimes wild and exuberant, there was also a lonely and sad side of his personality. The lonely quality of the vast open plains can be heard in some cowboy music, especially harmonica music. In Waylon Jennings song of 1976, "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys," the cowboy is a drifter and loner. "Sadly in search of, one step in back of, myself, and my slow-moving dream." In Ed Bruce's "Mommas Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys," the cowboy is always alone even when he is with someone he loves.
The cowboy is a lone wolf, "El Lobo Solitario," "El brasadero en exilio."
In many states on the Great Planes now, the independent rancher who grows range fed beef and his cowboy laborers are being phased out by a society and government hostile to their independent and self-reliant and sometimes eccentric ways. Corporate owned pen feeding of cattle for consumption is the replacement for the organic range fed beef of the independent rancher and cowboy.
"Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by." "Under Ben Bulben" by William Butler Yeats
Below: Blake Pyron, 1889-1964, Father in about 1915
Bernard Pyron
The cowboy and rancher of reality in the late 19th century and early 20th century is interesting because his personality traits contrast more and more with those of people in the U.S. after about 1950 and especially after about 1970, and even more so in 2016. Many of the traits of the cowboy were just the opposite of those of many Americans now. He was too much of an individualist and too self-sufficient to be tolerated in the America of 2016.
In the formula range war Western novel, there is always an insider banker, big crooked rancher or big businessman who deceptively tries to take over the land belonging to a small rancher. The insider-respectable villain usually has a gang of more Yahoo-type outlaws who work for him. This formula was perfected by Ernest Haycox and many other Western novelists. There were real range wars in Texas and in the Western states of the Great Planes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Since the ecology and Leftist environmental movements got going and influenced American politics and government in the latter part of the 20th century, the federal government, often through its Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service, has been reenacting the range war scenario in driving ranchers off their lands in the West of the Great Planes. In Nevada about eighty percent of the land is owned by the federal government and in other states of the West it owns large but lesser percentages of the land. The issue over states rights regarding lands and federal ownership of lands within the Western states is complex. But before the War of 1861-1865 the federal government tended to follow a policy of restraint on federal land ownership based upon the limited powers the Constitution specifically grants to the federal government. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments spelled out the principle of limited government.
In addition to the ecology and Leftist environmental movements demanding that land owned by the Bureau of Land Management used by cowboy-ranchers be taken over for "recreational" use, there is also now a hostility by the Establishment powers toward the independence and self-reliance of the cowboy-ranchers.
The American Cowboy Culture began in that land of thickets known as the Brasada, the brush country. It started back in the days of the Republic of Texas. There was an early California adaptation of the large scale Mexican ranching culture by the Americans there. And in the 19th century there were Vaqueros in California as in South Texas. But it was the South Texas cowboy culture which spread west, north, and northwest into the Great Planes. The Texas Trail drivers spread the cowboy culture north into Oklahoma and Kansas, and other Texas cattle drives spread it west and northwest. The Californian Gringo version of the Hispanic Vaquero did not make the many cattle drives into the states of the Great Planes as did the Texans in the late 19th century, in spreading their version of the cowboy culture.
The Anglo American settlers to Texas were able to work small herds of cattle on foot. Initially, upon their arrival in Texas they did not know how to handle large numbers of cattle, especially the Mexican Longhorn cattle, on huge tracts of land. That could not be done on foot because a cow, especially the wild Longhorns, could easily outrun a man on foot. In Mexico, which included the state of Tejas, converted to Texas by the American colonists, the horse was necessary for working large numbers of Longhorns on the large open range.
The Americans in the Texas of 1821-1850 had to learn the ranching and cattle working techniques developed in Mexico. They had to have trained cattle horses and learn to ride them in the thick brush lands of South Texas, called the Brasada. They also had to learn to rope with the Mexican lariat and use the Mexican style saddle with its saddle horn designed to be strong enough to hold a roped Longhorn. To protect themselves from the thorns of the thick brush they had to adapt use of leggins or chaps, which were leather pants worn over the guy's usual pants. They also began wearing a version of the Mexican sombrero to protect them from the sun and the thorns of the thickets.
That bow-legged man in the big hat and high-heel boots cast a long shadow on American culture and entertainment. But that shadow is a hundred years old now. The shadow of the cowboy-rancher is now politically incorrect. Although the mythic cowboy has for several decades been receding into the past, there are many eye-witness accounts of his personality traits during his epic period of about 1866 to 1930 or 1940. And some people still alive can remember working cowboys. I remember as a boy the jingle of their spurs when they came to town on a Saturday and went to the Will Kenney store in town.
Irving Dodge in 1882 wrote that "For fidelity to duty, for promptness, and vigor of action, for resources in difficulty,and unshaken courage in danger, the cowboy has no superior among men." Quoted in William W. Savage Jr, 1975, Cowboy Life: Reconstructing an American Myth.
Then, Joseph Nimmo Jr. says the majority of Texas cowboys "...were true and trusty men," and they developed "generous and heroic traits of character (Joseph Nimmo, Jr, 1886, The American Cowboy, Harper's Monthly, November, 1886, pp 880-884.
In 1981 John R. Erickson said the cowboy with the weathered face is "...a common laborer with heroic tendencies and a sense of humor." (Erickson, The Modern Cowboy.1981, University of Nebraska Press, p.6.
The cowboy's life on the lonely open range made him "sensitive to restraint, " says W. S. James 1898, Cowboy Life In Texas: Or, Twenty Seven Years A Maverick, M.A. Donohue, pp. 70-100. Walter Prescott Webb claimed that the great distances and sparse population of the West encouraged self-reliance. (The Great Planes, 1931, Grosset and Dunlap, p. 246.)
Webb also said of the settler and cowboy on the great planes that "When he made that perfect adaptation he departed farther and farther from the conventional pattern of men, and as he diverged from the conventional pattern he became more and more unusual: He made a better copy for news-writers, artist and cartoonist" (The Great Planes, 1931, p. 245).
The man in the big boots and hat who liked to sit around campfires at night and tell leg-pulling stores was an eccentric driver of longhorn cattle. When I was about four or five, in August, during the peanut harvest in our part of South Bexar county, young men from farther west would come to work in threshing peanuts, most of whom were cowboys or looked and acted like cowboys. Some of them would camp near our house at night and build up camp fires. I went to sit at their camp fires to listen to their stories.
The early heroes of the rodeo were working cowboys, like Will Rogers or Clay McGonigill. Both had many of the personality traits of the cowboy. Will Rogers, especially had the skill many cowboys had in the use of language in unusual and creative ways. Will Rogers was probably brighter than most cowboys and so his use of language was even more creative and unusual in its wit and social commentary - which brought him his fame. But Will Rogers was not a Hollywood celebrity cowboy. He was an authentic ol cowhand from Oklahoma.
In Elmer Kelton's The Good Old Boys of 1978, Hewey Calloway, Snort Yarnell and Clay McGonagill have a lot of cowboy exuberance and get into trouble with the more conventional and rigid settlers in the West Texas of the very early 20th century. Clay McGonagill was a real historical Texas cowboy hero of the early rodeo who shows his wild cowboy mentality when he approves of the roping pf a 1906 car by his friends Hewey Calloway and Snort Yarnell. Western novelists sometimes put real cowboys into their novels.
In spite of their bad grammar, many cowboys had a good command of English, and could hit the nail on the head with a good comment. They often used colorful speech and were able to use metaphor effectively. Andy Adams in Cattle Brands: A Collection of Western Camp-Fire Stories, 1906, Mifflin, says the cowboy was a story teller. I remember that in the late thirties my father took me into the lobby of the Menger Hotel in San Antonio, near the Alamo, where old trail drivers sat around telling each other stories of times on the trail fifty or more years earlier.
The rancher and cowboy culture of the West in the late 19th century - into the early 20th century - was a big part of the independent, self-reliant and creative American culture Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb wrote about so much. In the late thirties, a cowboy culture lingered in West and South Texas and in South Bexar county, in part because the Horse Age had continued in the Great Depression, even though many had Model A cars and trucks. I can remember people coming to town from the Black Jacks on Somerset Road by our house in the late thirties in wagons pulled by horses to do their shopping at the local stores.
J. Frank Dobie wrote that "They" - the men of the earth - are utterly at ease on the planet and express the flavor of the earth to which they belong..." "They" - the people of the land or wilderness - "have lingered with the grass, the rocks, and the thorned shrubs...
"
Though the cowboy was sometimes wild and exuberant, there was also a lonely and sad side of his personality. The lonely quality of the vast open plains can be heard in some cowboy music, especially harmonica music. In Waylon Jennings song of 1976, "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys," the cowboy is a drifter and loner. "Sadly in search of, one step in back of, myself, and my slow-moving dream." In Ed Bruce's "Mommas Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys," the cowboy is always alone even when he is with someone he loves.
The cowboy is a lone wolf, "El Lobo Solitario," "El brasadero en exilio."
In many states on the Great Planes now, the independent rancher who grows range fed beef and his cowboy laborers are being phased out by a society and government hostile to their independent and self-reliant and sometimes eccentric ways. Corporate owned pen feeding of cattle for consumption is the replacement for the organic range fed beef of the independent rancher and cowboy.
"Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by." "Under Ben Bulben" by William Butler Yeats
Below: Blake Pyron, 1889-1964, Father in about 1915
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