The cowboy is the predominant figure in American mythology. More than the explorer, trapper, soldier, or homesteader, the cowboy represents America’s westering experience to the popular mind, and his image is everywhere. Accounts of his activities, fictional and historical, comprise substantial portions of publishers’ lists. His virtues—and lately his vices—have become standard fare in motion-picture theaters and on television. The National Cowboy Hall of Fame commemorates his exploits, and his mystique is evoked by advertising, popular music, and amateur and professional sports. His latter-day cousin, the rodeo performer, though popular in his own right, has acquired a certain...

The herd is brought upon its herd ground and carefully watched during the day, but allowed to scatter out over sufficient territory to feed. At nightfall it is gathered to a spot selected near the tent, and there rounded up and held during the night. One or more cowboys are on duty all the while, being relieved at regular hours by relays fresh aroused from slumber, and mounted on rested ponies, and for a given number of hours they ride slowly and quietly around the herd, which, soon as it is dusk, lies down to rest and ruminate. About midnight...

Years ago, while yet a cherished portion of Mexico, Texas was famous for its cattle. Individuals owned thousands, even tens of thousands, which roamed almost at will, over the vast and fertile plains. The care of these was left to a few men and a crowd of Mexican boys from eight to twenty years of age; for not much money could be paid in wages, when the finest cow or fattest ox was worth but two or three dollars.

After the annexation of Texas to the United States the earlier drives of great herds of cattle were accompanied by such...

Terms used in the cattle business are not generally known East and abroad, and I will therefore give their definition, as I shall have to use them repeatedly in the following chapters.

The owners of cattle in the Western stock-raising states are required by law to brand their stock with initials, figures, etc., chosen by themselves. The iron brands are attached to long handles, and pressed, when red-hot, upon one or the other side, or both sides, on especially selected parts of the animal, and thereby are written unmistakable and everlasting marks.

By law every brand must be registered in...

I put in the following winter branding Mavricks, skinning cattle and making regular trips to Matagorda; I still remained in partnership with Horace Yeamans in the skinning business. I made considerable money that winter as I sold a greater number of Mavricks than ever before. But the money did me no good as I spent it freely.

That coming spring, it being 1874, I hired to Leander Ward of Jackson county to help gather a herd of steers for the Muckleroy Bros., who were going to drive them to Kansas. I had also made a contract with Muckleroy’s boss, Tom...

During the last fifteen years the American cow-boy has occupied a place sufficiently important to entitle him to a considerable share of public attention. His occupation is unique. In the exercise of his function he is always a man on horseback. His duty as a worker in the cattle business is at times to ride over the range in order to see that straying cattle do not rove too far from the assigned limits of the herd of which he has charge; at times to drive the herd from one locality to another; and at times to “round up” the...

The task of the drover and his assistant cow-boys in getting the herds from the Southern ranches to the Northern shipping points was one involving both skill and daring. Only a man of unflinching courage and quick movement could succeed in handling animals whose characteristics were rather those of the wild beast than of the creature bred for the sustenance of man. The Texas steer is no respecter of persons. For the man on horseback he has a wholesome fear; he seems to have something of the savage’s conceit that the combination is irresistible. Separately, neither man nor horse has...

The coming of the barb-wire fence and the railroad killed the cowboy as a picturesque element of recklessness and lawlessness in south-west Texas. It suppressed him and localized him and limited him to his own range, and made his revolver merely an ornament. Before the barb-wire fence appeared, the cattle wandered from one range to another, and the man of fifteen thousand acres would overstock, knowing that when his cattle could not find enough pasturage on his range they would move over to the range of his more prosperous neighbor. Consequently, when the men who could afford it began to...

In writing on the subject of “Life on a Texas Ranch,” I don’t wish it understood that there is any cast-iron rule by which one shall judge of the manners and customs of the cow-man, for custom changes on the range as it does in any other section. The methods of work and customs differ as widely in different localities as do the dress of women, and if this is not giving a sufficiently wide range I don’t know how to express it. The ranches in southern Colorado and western New Mexico, as well as the “Panhandle of Texas,” were...

On the morning of April 11, a supreme moment for us, we started up the trail to Cheyenne, Wyoming. To gather the cattle in the pasture into one great herd took up the forenoon. In the afternoon we made only about five miles, bedding our cattle that night just south of Victoria, near the Guadalupe River. On the following morning we forded the river, which was low.

When we were passing through the streets of Victoria, a lady, fearful that the cattle would break down her fence and ruin her roses, ran out to the pickets and, waving her bonnet...

While the farms in their westward pushing do not diminish the cattle, they reduce the cattleman and pinch off much that is romantic and picturesque. Between the farm and the wire fence, the cowboy, as once he flourished, has been modified, subdued, and made partially to disappear. In the good old days of the Jones and Plummer trail there were no wire fences, and the sullen farmer had not yet arrived. Your cowboy at that time was a person of thrill and consequence. He wore a broad-brimmed Stetson hat, and all about it a rattlesnake skin by way of band,...

One of the groups of temporary “statuary” with which the great Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis in 1904 was embellished represented four yelling cowboys mounted on galloping “cow-horses” and firing their revolvers in the air—“shooting up the town.” No doubt a large majority of the visitors to that incomparable exposition who saw this group regarded it as being truly typical in its representation of the cowboy of the old cattle-trails and of the bygone days of the open range.

It would seem that no class of men ever was so unfaithfully represented, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and in...

These old cronies from boyhood sparred along in give-and-take repartee for some time, finally drifting back to boyhood days, while the harshness that pervaded their conversation before became mild and genial.

“Have you ever been back in old San Saba since we left?” inquired Edwards after a long meditative silence.

“Oh, yes, I spent a winter back there two years ago, though it was hard lines to enjoy yourself. I managed to romance about for two or three months, sowing turnip seed and teaching dancing-school. The girls that you and I knew are nearly all married.”

“What ever became of...

Since I had been working more with horses than with cattle on the Noonan ranch, I looked forward to the trail trip with John T. Lytle and his cousin, Tom McDaniel, to the Red Cloud Indian Agency at Fort Robinson on the Niobrara River in northwestern Nebraska. I respected Lytle and knew him well and believed he would treat me right. This trip would give me just the opportunity I wanted to see the country, and it spelled adventure. This too would suit me fine, as I was in my nineteenth year. I would be paid sixty dollars a month...

Cowboy Lifewas intentionally revisionist only in its call for improved western fictions; but in 1975 reviewers were less interested in that sort of thing than in finding something upon which to hang a general announcement of debunkery. The book was blamed in some quarters, just as it was praised in others, for “revealing” that nineteenth-century cowboys were exploited laborers whose jobs were hard, dirty, and boring. Notes to the Introduction, no less than the readings themselves, clearly indicated that the particulars of cowboy employment constituted no news at all; but it was a measure of the cowboy’s cultural prominence...