Cowboys were ‘scruffy, horse-riding migrants’

Press, 22 September 1983, Page 21

Cowboys were ‘scruffy, horse-riding migrants’

From

MICHAEL HUGHES,

Reuter, in New York

The real American cowboy seldom carried a gun, was often black or brown and occasionally Indian, was scruffy and malnourished, and had ceased to exist years before John Wayne was even born, according to a new book. “The American Cowboy” ' says that the horse-riding migrant labourers who gave rise to the legend were part of a system of ranching that lasted only for about 30 years, from 1865 to 1895. During these years of the cattle boom there were probably not more than 50,000 cowboys in the United States. They usually worked as cowboys from March to September, and during the winter months many washed dishes or tended bars.

The men who inspired a multimillion dollar entertainment industry usually earned about 30 dollars a week for up to 14 hours work a day in heat and dust, cold and wet. They lived on a monotonous and vitamin-deficient diet of beef, bacon, biscuits, and beans — the latter wistfully known as “prairie strawberries.”

Authors. Lonn Taylor and Ingrid Maar include in- their lavishly

illustrated book several pictures of cowboys in trail camps taken around 1890.

These show grimy-looking groups of men wearing an assortment of work clothes. There are no guns in sight. The only concession to the legend is that all are wearing the wide-brimmed hats created by the eponymous John B. Stetson. The book, published by Harper and Row at SUSSO, says the cowboy myth began to grow through dime novels published in the 1870 s. Wild west shows and frontier melodramas on stage spread the legend of the cowboy as, in the authors’ words: “A romantic, a refugee from industrial civilisation.” Buffalo Bill’s wild west show toured America and Europe, including four years in Paris where “L’ouest Sauvage” was a big hit. Owen Wister’s best-selling 1902 novel “The Virginian” created the romantic cowboy. The was brave and honourable, tough but

soft-spoken, and was later portrayed by Gary Cooper. Almost all western heroes, then and now, are impeccably AngloSaxon. In fact, “The American Cowboy” points out, about onethird of all trail hands were black or Mexican, and a few were American Indians.

One black cowboy who became famous was Bill Pickett, who toured England and South America with a wild west show and was billed as “the dusky demon of Oklahoma.”

This intrepid son of former slaves was the inventor of ‘‘bulldogging,” a method of throwing and holding steers by biting into their lower lip in the manner of a bulldog.

When he retired from performing at the age of 50, he estimated he had bulldogged 5000 steers. He. was killed by a horse when he wasf 62.

By the time the infant United States film industry took up the cowboy theme in 1903 with “The Great Train Robbery,” the myth was doing far better than the substance.

The spread of the railway to the west, a fall in beef prices, and the fencing off of much of the open range, made the cowboy largely redundant, reducing him to a farm hand.

His glamourised successors included the acrobatic Bronco Billy Anderson and Tom Mix, the strong and silent Randolph Scott, Gary Cooper, and John Wayne, and the singing Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, who was born Leonard Slye in Duck Run, Ohio. Lonn Taylor writes: “The future may hold the punk cowboy, the computer cowboy, the Third World cowboy, and the astral cowboy. “None of these could be further from reality than the series of mythical cowboys we have already created, yet all will be equally important as reflections of ourselves and our aspirations — which is, after all, the function of a myth.”