The myth of the cowboy is the myth of John Wayne standing tall in the saddle--the big, handsome, rugged, taciturn Anglo- Saxon, more recently popular in our political culture with President, (or as I prefer to call him) "Cousin" Ronald Reagan. But that was not the reality of the cowboy. John Wayne

Copyright 1997 State Historical Society of Wisconsin

Cowboy realities: The total number of men who worked a range as cowboys was about 35,000 people. The cowboys had their heyday roughly between the end of the Civil War and the mid 1880s, a period of about twenty years is all. Of those 35,000 men who from time to time worked in the occupation of "cowboy," about 25% were black. About another 12% were Mexican. Black cowhands were particularly numerous in Texas, along the Gulf Coast, and in the Indian country. In many areas of Texas, a number of cattle ranches were worked exclusively or nearly exclusively by black cowboys. It would be naive to think that those black cowhands were treated with the same full equality as their white counterparts, but nonetheless they enjoyed a camaraderie with their fellow workers that was rather rare in most parts of post Civil War America.

But again, it's not the black or Mexican cowhand that has emerged in our folklore. It's the tall, white, Anglo-Saxon, the hard drinking, sort of "noble savage" who tamed the west, who saved the girl, who probably never kissed her; he, if he kissed anyone, kissed his favorite creature in the world--his horse--and then he climbed in the saddle and rolled off into the sunset to save another town from the vicious monopolists or evil gamblers and prostitutes. In point of fact, even the white cowboys were, for the most part, short, stumpy human beings. They lacked teeth, they had skin the quality of tanned leather, they were, as one newspaper account put it, describing a Wyoming roundup at 1875: "rough men with shaggy hair and wild staring eyes in butternut trousers stuffed into great rough boots."

Many of the cattle towns that have lived on in our lore and legend as the places of gunfights and wild unsocialized activities were also part of our myth. Towns like Dodge City, Kansas, Abilene, Kansas, were not centers of brothels and bar rooms. They had dance halls, they had a few brothels. But in their heyday in the 1870s and down into the 1880s, most of these communities were strictly governed, strictly ordered, strictly regulated. It was not just the you can't carry-your six guns in town today Charlie, but police roaming the streets, keeping law and order. The shootout that's dear to Hollywood seldom, if ever, occurred in these cattle towns. And yet at least one element of the western saga is true: the great cattle drive and the rise of the cattle kingdom.

Cattle Drives
In the post Civil War years, a number of men in Texas began to recognize that great fortunes were waiting to be made if cattle could only be driven from Texas up to the developing railheads in Kansas. In 1865 one head of cattle was selling for three to four dollars. In the East Coast market, that same cow would sell for ten times that amount. And so there began, in the immediate post Civil War years, the legend (the reality that turned into the legend) of the great cattle drive: beginning in Texas, cattle driven by the thousands up the old Chisholm Trail from Southern Texas up through Oklahoma Territory eventually up to the railheads of Abilene, or of Dodge City.

Between 1865 and the mid 1870s, about 1 1/2 million cattle were driven from Texas up to those developing railheads in Kansas. By the mid 1880s, nearly 5 million head of cattle had come up the Chisholm Trail, the Dodge City Trail and others. From the late 1870s and into the early 1880s on, another great source of cattle drives was the Far West--cattle drives from Oregon, through Wyoming and Montana and Northern Colorado, to either the railheads in Kansas or eventually to the meat packing plants and railheads in the growing and bustling city of Chicago.

Was the cowboy who participated in these cattle drives the rugged, self reliant individual that our lore and legend tells us? Obviously even raising the question implies the answer. The answer is "no." As an employee, hired by the cattle baron to work at this occupation, the cowboy was not a rugged, free, self-reliant individual. He worked in very close cooperation with his compatriots. He worked under a rigid system of regulations and laws--range law that was far more cumbersome and far more burdensome than would have been the law if he sold shoes in a store in Sedalia, Missouri. The cowboys realized this. And while, I, of course, hate to disturb the myths and legends that you may have grown up with, a very significant number of the cowhands joined themselves together in labor unions to go on strikes, to seek better wages, to seek better working conditions.

The first major national union (which we will be discussing in a later lecture) was the Knights of Labor, and it was the Knights of Labor that a good number of Texas and Kansas and even Oregon, Montana, and Wyoming cowhands joined. One of the last great cattle drives occurred in 1884. But it almost did not take place. Just a matter of days before the cattle were to hit the Chisholm Trail, when they'd been rounded up by the thousands in pens in Southwest Texas, the cattlemen faced a strike on the parts of those cowboys who were members of the Knights of Labor. They walked off the job, they climbed out of the saddles, they marched around pens with picket signs demanding higher wages, better working conditions, claiming that they would not perform their occupation unless they got their demands satisfied. Management and labor sat down at the bargaining tables. They finally worked out a compromise. The great cattle drive of 1884 got off as scheduled. But it was clearly the beginning of the end. The railroads had penetrated further into the West.

Here we have an instance, then, of the lack of self-reliant, rugged individualism in the very character who in our lore and our legend stands supreme as the symbol of the democratic, self-reliant, rugged man who pulled himself up by his own boot straps. Moreover, the cowboy's counterpart--his employer, the cattlemen--was not, as you might have seen on reruns of Bonanza with the father and his four sons, running this great cattle empire. He was not the rugged, self-reliant individualist either. The cattle baron was not a law unto himself, and he realized that. He joined with other cattle ranch owners, in Cattlemen's Associations, to protect themselves, to protect their profit, and to deal with their unionized workers. What I'm suggesting to you by this example is that frontier individualism, if it had ever existed, very quickly gave way to economic and social necessity. This has nothing to do with the amount of open or closed space existing in the Old West. Joining together in labor unions as the cowboys did, joining together in Cattlemen's Associations and bureaucracies as the cattle owners themselves did, show the growing complexity, the growing interconnections in American society of the late nineteenth century.

And so the myth of the Old West was just that: a myth. A nostalgic longing by contemporaries for yesterday that seem forever gone, a yesterday that perhaps never was there in the first place. It certainly was not there as myth and legend would have it. And yet out of this Old West, with all of the success stories--success stories of the cowboy entering as the hero in our culture of the self-reliant individual, the success story of the great cattle barons, the success story of the great mining empire, there was also a victim, or to be more precise, a set of victims. Because of the expansion of the agricultural frontier, the expansion of the mining frontier, the expansion of the cattlemen's empire, the invasion of the railroads into the Great Plains, all of this brought white Americans into a final and a tragic confrontation with the original occupants of the land: the Native Americans, the Indians. We need to turn our attention for a few minutes to these "victims" of civilization, these "victims" of progress.

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