Historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” defines the “frontier” as a place of westward expansion with new opportunities, heroism, triumph and progress mainly by brave white men. While he writes that the “closing of the frontier” occurred with the extinction of the Western frontier and cowboy’s character, Americans have found a way to glamorize the image of the cowboy in the west during the 1800’s. It is important to emphasize the distinction that historians make between the pop-culture romantic image of the cowboy and the actual lives of cowboys who worked the ranches in a quiet and solitary manner.
Contemporary accounts of so-called cowboys offer many different images. John Clay, an old rancher who actually lived and worked among these men described them as a “devil may care, immoral, revolver-heeled, brazen, light fingered lot who usually came to no good end” (Carlson 3).
Until the late 1880’s, the term “cowboy” was synonymous with “drunkard,” “outlaw,” and “cattle thief” (Carlson 5).
Adding to the confusion surrounding the cowboy is that historians are inundated by a lack of documentation concerning cowboys. Most cowboys themselves were illiterate, and few intellectuals of the day had much interest in them. As a result, “no class of men were ever so unfaithfully represented and in consequence so misunderstood and unfairly judged by people generally as the old time cowboy has been” (Rainey 4).
The Term Paper on History according to the Male Historian
Gender plays a very important role in the definition of history. Male historians are often presented as scientific thinkers. But the truth is that they merely perpetuate religious, ethnocentric or class-based versions of the past under the guise of neutrality. Female historians, on the other hand, are usually dismissed as propagators of amateur or irrelevant historical accounts. This observation ...
Another source of information on the romanticized cowboy comes from “professional writers, journalists, and filmmakers who are often located outside the West itself or in that peculiar corner of it, Hollywood” (White 614).
These are the versions we see throughout the mass media including books, magazines, and movies. Until the late 1880’s, the term “cowboy” was synonymous with “drunkard,” “outlaw,” and “cattle thief” (Carlson 5).
The first recorded, positive use of the word cowboy appeared in 1883. In Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Extravaganza, he called his young star Buck Taylor the King of the Cowboys. Buffalo Bill Cody “succeeded in convincing a people that the West, and the cowboys who set the tone and the pace, were heroic” (Fishwick 86).
Eventually, the image of this cowboy spread not only all over the nation, but Buffalo Bill Cody took it to Europe, where it became an instant success.
In contrast, it is crucial to get a clear representation of not only the demographics, but the factual history of the western range-cattle industry between 1865 and 1900. There were African American cowboys participating in this industry and “there were Mexican and Indian cowboys as well. We know this because photographs occasionally reveal their presence” (Savage 6).
The cowboy, who worked, owned, and sometimes managed the cows created the cattle industry in south and southwest Texas after the Civil War. Some of the conditions which led to the cattle industry were “a supply of cattle, skilled cowboy labor, and established procedures of trade, but capital and free ranges accessible by railroad were the new ingredients that determined the rise of the industry” (Weston 3).
Charles Siringo, an expert cowboy who emerged from Texas wrote a book-length account of cowboy life and said there were three stages of cowboys: “the “trail cowboys,” mostly Texans, but many from other Southern states, the cowboys of the new cattle ranges on the northern Plains who were taught by Texas trail cowboys who stayed north, and the cowboys of the Wild West shows and the movies” (Weston 7).
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Analysis of the competitiveness of the pork industry in Denmark By: Gianluca Selva Food and Resource Economics Institute, KVL Denmark Abstract Now days in the pig industry as well as in other agro food sectors is the competitiveness that declare the success or failure on the global market. In the case of the pig industry, to be competitive it means to be able to offer a product of higher quality ...
Even though these distinctions were made, cowboys were united by their Texas origin. They were unique among frontier workers in being almost completely native-born including Anglo, African American, and Mexican. Finally, cattle ranchers always provided their own bed, saddle blanket, saddle, bridle, and spurs.
Cowboys had a distinct way of dressing, working, and handling themselves as well. Accounts of activities show their activities to be more suited for farmers than what we think of as cowboys. For example, they would “listen to the music of fiddle, mouth organ, or banjo (seldom guitar, which was Mexican), music played by one of their number or the cook” (Weston 13).
Cowboys had particularly painful work, especially in the early days of cow hunts: “In the broadest view, an open-range cowboy worked with slaughter or stocker cows, ideally one man for every 700 to 1,000 head on the range, two or three for that many on the trail” (Weston 41).
They had a great deal of skill for the extremely hazardous and arduous work that they put in showing how they were practically exploited, however historians argue that “they endured their exploitation…because they were proud of their skills, their craft, their tough and manly reputation, and their buddies in the outfit” (Weston 42).
Despite their pride, cowboys had to endure many hardships.
For example, during the cowboy era on the Great Plains, cowboys were all unmarried and lived alone in a line camp or together around chuck wagons in small groups of other unmarried men. Also cowboys had to “control drifting herds of cattle during a dust storm, sometimes for so long that they would temporarily go blind from inflamed eyes” (Weston 44).
The weather conditions that cowboys endured didn’t help their situation either: “With relatively light rainfall, high summer temperatures, violent winters, and fine-grained soils, the Great Plains constitute a region in which a few inches of rainfall can make the difference between a demiparadise and a dustbowl” (Fishwick 79-80).
The Essay on Cowboys
Cowboys How they started Cattle ranchers began to move out onto the Great Plains in the mid 1800’s In the late 1800’s cowboys became popular in the cattle industry. The American cowboys owe their knowledge of how to tame the cattle to vaquerars (the Mexican cowboys). The animals originally were from the ranches in southern Texas formerly operated by Spaniards and Mexicans. The cowboys often called ...
All these factors demonstrate the solitary and dangerous lives of these workers that compares to the romanticized version of the cowboy that has been broadcasted throughout history.
Unlike the “guitar-strumming, holier-than-thou movie set outdoorsman” or the “pale imitation of the cowboy who was once content to ride the range” that America envisioned as it romanticized the image of the cowboy, their lives were much more violent. (Fishwick 81).
Violence often resulted from competition between livestock raisers in two principal categories: “conflicts between cattle raisers and sheepherders and conflicts between large and small ranchers” (White 344).
These conflicts often had racial, religious, and ethnic overtones. For example, in New Mexico, cattlemen “attacked all shepherds who threatened their range, most sheep owners were Mexican Americans, whereas most cattlemen were Anglo Americans” (White 345).
Another important issue that was a source of conflict for the cattlemen was the fence-cutting. Large ranchers could fence off large sections of the public domain while small ranchers “cut the fences to provide their cattle with access to the public lands” (White 345).
In central Texas, the result was the Fence-Cutters’ War of 1883-84 which resulted in much violence and an eventual passage of a state law making fence cutting a felony in 1884 finally ending the fighting. Although cowboys indeed were wild and violent, there is plenty of evidence that, contrary to their reputation, “they were quite socially respectable in their protectiveness of women, or family distress, and in their touching yearning to be loved, honored, or at least remembered” (Weston 26).
They were not essentially different in social virtues from the other main groups of frontier workers.
Historian Carl Becker noted that Americans are prone to cling to what he called “useful myths” (Rainey 6).
These are stories and characters that, no matter how untrue, people hold onto in order to justify their patriotism. These myths give people a glimpse into their collective history. The cowboy is one such character. While historians stress the harsh lifestyle of cattle ranchers in the West, American images of the cowboy have been a noticeably romanticized part of pop-culture from the early 1800’s onwards. During times in history when the general consensus is that there are no real heroes to look to for guidance, “audiences sustained many of their ‘faiths’ by identifying with such admirable and powerful symbols of straight-forward righteous” (Rainey 6).
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Every individual has a perspective on things in life and their personal idea of the truth. These are universal concepts and are widely seen in ted Hughes poems “birthday Letters”. Birthday letters is a set of poems, said to have been written by Hughes for six years prior to his death, on his ex wife’s birthday each year this the selection of poems being called birthday letters. The selection on ...
To this day, many Americans continue to look towards cowboys as such a symbol.
