It's a Cowboy's Life

Next to the cattle, the most important element in a successful ranch were the cowboys.  Contrary to Hollywood movies and dime novels, the legend of the Wild West, always ready to defend the female and round up the bad guys was not entirely accurate.  Most cowboys existed as casual laborers, earning money from their abilities to ride and lasso. 

Their bosses gave the orders, often petty restrictions such as limiting cards games within the ranch acreage.  Cussing, liquor and gambling were all at the discretion of the owner's whim and many did not allow any of them.  Cowboys lived in the saddle for weeks at a time, through blizzards and heat waves, risked their lived at rounds up and cattle drives - and made $30 a month for 18 hour days, t
heir pay and work hours also set by the ranch owner.

There was, however, a romance to a cowboy's life - living on horseback in a wide open country.  American farm boys, Englishmen, Scots, German, Frenchmen, Black and Mexicans, were all attracted to the cowboy way of life.  Blacks and Mexicans, unlike those in films, made up a third of all cowboys.   In the 1870s and 1880s it was fashionable to run away from home to become a cowboy (also to join the circus!). 

The romance of the cowboy life brought many young men west but there was something more than kept them there. It was a male society, where courage was required to handle many dangers - rustlers, stampedes, rattlesnakes, droughts and blizzards.  These dangers developed a unique comradeship among those who rode.  There emerged a recognizable type of man who was a cowboy, described by Theodore Roosevelt...

"All cowboys have a certain curious similarity, existence in the west seems to put the same stamp upon each.  Sinewy, hardy, self-reliant.  Their life forces them to be both daring and adventurous, and the passing over their heads of a few years leaves printed on their faces certain lines which tell of dangers quietly fronted and hardships uncomplainingly endured." 

Next time...The Age of the Cattle Baron
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Today in Pioneer History: "On August 2, 1876,  Wild Bill Hickok was playing cards with his back to the saloon door. At 4:15 in the afternoon, a young gunslinger named Jack McCall walked into the saloon, approached Hickok from behind, and shot him in the back of the head. Hickok died immediately. McCall tried to shoot others in the crowd, but amazingly, all of the remaining cartridges in his pistol were duds. McCall was later tried, convicted, and hanged.

Exaggerated Mayhem

When a cowboy came into Abilene, Dodge City or Wichita after months on the trail, he wanted booze, music, merriment and women.  The townspeople were eager to cater to them within reason, but unwilling to turn the entire town over to these cowboys.  The merchants, in their zeal to keep order, were known to hire the wrong people to uphold the law.

Case in point - during the panic of 1873 when thousands of unsold cattle and restless cowboys flooded the town of Ellsworth, the town hired an illiterate, loud-mouthed guy with a trigger-finger always ready for action named "Happy Jack" Morco.  Morco alienated the Texans so much that the cattlemen threatened to burn down the town and take their business elsewhere.  At that, the local merchants dismissed Morco,  who refused to disarm and was shot dead by one of his own policemen.

Transition from law enforcement to law breaking was not uncommon.  Marshal Henry Brown of Caldwell, a former gunfighter, held up a bank in the nearby town of Medicine Lodge, after two years on the police force.  He killed two people.  The town's outraged citizens promptly shot the marshal and lynched his three henchmen proving that vigilante justice has it own justice.

Generally, though law enforcement was pretty lenient and effective.  From 1870-1885 the homicide rate for the five major cattle towns was just 45.  Some of the incidents, such as the shooting of a woman by her drunken husband had no connection to the cattle industry.  Few were the famous gunfights of novels and movies.

Cowboy were required by law to check their guns at the sheriff's office while in town.  As Granville Stuart writes in 1925:  "The first place cowboys went for in a town was the livery stable where they saw to it that their horses were properly cared for, then the barber shop.  The noisy fellow in exaggerated costume that rode up and down the street whooping and shooting in the air was never a cowpuncher from any outfit.  He was usually a would-be bad man from the East decked out in paraphernalia from Montgomery Ward's in Chicago." 

Cattle towns were indeed raw and colorful, but such goes our legends of the shoot-em-up Wild West...just a legend made up to sell novels, newspaper and the movies.

Next time...The Expanding Range
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Today in Pioneer History: "On July 16, 1779, American Brigadier General Anthony Wayne launches a coup de main against British fortifications at Stony Point, New York, on the orders of General George Washington. He earns the moniker “Mad” Anthony Wayne for the ensuing maneuver.  Wayne was victorious at the Battle of Fallen Timbers near what is now Toledo, Ohio, and gained much of what would become Ohio and Indiana for the U.S. in the Treaty of Greenville.

The Cowboy Persona

The conduct of those early cowboys was to have its effect on Kansas when in the late 1870's with the Methodist counter revolution in temperance and morality, but the regional folklore had already made it mark on America.

The cowboy persona and way of life reached far beyond Kansas to Montana and Wyoming.  What we know of those early cowboys characters in gun-toting, gamblers with a loyalty streak, regional clanness, wild main streets, riding horseback into taverns, free spending and free wheeling - all have their roots on the Chisholm, Old Shawnee and Red River Trails of the early cattle drives.

The cowboy remains  one of the longest folk heroes in all American history, out living the Indian Scout, the Baseball player and the aviator.  Even to the point of identifying with their need to "let loose" in the saloons of the early cow towns.

Next ...where's the beef??