CONVERSATION The American Cowboy

Conversation
The American Cowboy

Whether fact, fiction, or a little of both, the cowboy is a complex figure in American history and popular culture. Few know of the cowboy’s origins in the vaquero tradition of Mexico that was brought to California in the seventeenth century, or the role of African American cowboys after the Civil War. When they think of a cowboy, many people picture a gunslinger of the Wild West, a loner, an adventurer, and often a rebel. Yet the reality is that most cowboys were hired by ranchers to manage, protect, and drive cattle herds. The “range wars” of the late 1870s and 1880s contributed to the view of cowboys as the gunslingers of the American West. Land ownership was not as clear-cut in that period, leading many ranchers to fight over control of open range. Perhaps the cowboy is best known to us through movies: the Western is the quintessential American genre, starting in 1903 with The Great Train Robbery and continuing up to the present day in the interpretations of directors like Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers. Film stars such as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are synonymous with the Western. Cowboys in film and literature have influenced our definition of manhood, and the battles between “cowboys and Indians” in cinema and print are responsible, many would argue, for damaging stereotypes that persist.

The written and visual texts you’ll explore in this Conversation, ranging from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century, may challenge your perspective or enlarge it and, ideally, will lead you to consider who the cowboy was or is and why it matters to our national identity. Your investigations might even explain why contemporary Western singers Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson advise, “Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.”

Sources

Joseph Nimmo Jr., from The American Cowboy (1886)

Frederic S. Remington, A Dash for the Timber (1889)

Frederick Jackson Turner, from The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893)

Buffalo Bill Cody, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (program, 1893)

Owen Wister, from The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902)

E. E. Cummings, Buffalo Bill’s (1920)

Leonard McCombe, Marlboro Man (1949)

Gretel Ehrlich, About Men (1984)

Sherman Alexie, My Heroes Have Never Been Cowboys (1993)

Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (2000)

Benjamin Percy, The Virginian Teaches the Merit of a Man (2007)