The Real American Cowboy

The Real American Cowboy

by Jack Weston (Schocken: $19.95; 267 pp.)

The villains of this “expose” of the American cowboy of myth and symbol are not rustlers or nesters, sheepmen or greedy, bullying, cattle barons. They are the absentee corporate capitalists of the cattle business in the post-Civil War years out West.

And the heroes, proletarian cowboys who look suspiciously like Wobblies on horseback, gallop to the rescue of Populist farmers and Knights of Labor manning barricades in some mythical box canyon. (If you look closely, you might even spy a hirsute “Dutchman” among the riders, Cal Marx.)

Ostensibly a scholarly re-appraisal of the public’s image of the cowboy, complete with the pockmarks of scholarship (footnotes), although without bibliography or index, this is actually a personal and emotional tract by a Massachusets English professor. After telling us that he is not out to debunk the real American cowboy, he quite properly, does debunk the preposterous picture of cowpokes offered us by Hollywood and Cinecitta.

Unfortunately, he then turns on historians as well as novelists and scenario writers to elatedly inform us--as a revisionist historian--of a long-secret Marxist class struggle on the plains and its supposed cover-up by a conspiracy of historians and popularizers over the years.

Weston insists on calling the cattle business an industry because of corporate investment in the 1880s and, in his lexicon, employment for wages equals exploitation. Ranch owners are sometimes characterized, incredibly (and in the liberal as well as the figurative sense of that word), as bosses “with their foppish tents, and servants and Havana cigars.”

By considering such unusual incidents as range wars and strikes by cowboys as the norm, the author tries to document a class struggle and a pervading climate of hate on the ranges during the last decades of the 19th Century. To pull this off, he has to disregard or denigrate a century of contrary commentary by the very cowmen and historians whose words he carefully--selectively--paraphrases, quotes or re-interprets in order to make his case.

Some of these “Establishment” authorities are labeled reactionary, racist, sexist and imperialist to hurry the process. Quotes are sandwiched between interjections of opinion, stereotyping, half-truths, sweeping generalizations and (it must be conceded) grains of truth.

Thus, J. Frank Dobie’s work is prejudiced, Tom Lea’s is distorted. Owen Wister is an Eastern snob as well as a racist like T. R. and Fred Remington. Andy Adams, a traitor to his (proletarian) class, is a middle-class apologist for the ruthless, capitalist owners lolling in Morris chairs of corporate headquarters or men’s clubs far from their ranch houses. Novelists Bud Guthrie and Elmer Kelton admire cattlemen (i.e., owners) more than real cowboys, the hired hands.

In his academic axe-grinding, the author intrudes upon the text with “One wonders” and “We suspect that . . .,” and constantly offers opinion and feats of mind-reading as fact--that friendships between blacks, Mexican vaqueros and white cowhands had to be shallow and tenuous; that Billy the Kid probably imitated his mass media image and only pretended to be a “social bandit” (Robin Hood); that ranch owners’ passion for land was equaled only by their imperialist hostility to its native possessors, Indians and Mexicans. Constant bleeding heart or nostra culpa editorializing--We always tend to hate or despise our victims in order to justify our victimization, and “Stealing, in itself, is not a political act, even under capitalism”--tends to grate on the reader’s nerves.

Weston likes to shoot from the hip, too, his ammo mostly such loaded words and phrases as “the dispossessed,” “scab cowboys,” “gun thugs” and “pillage.”

The net result is that what might have been a calm and reasoned, honest and objective--if iconoclastic--contrasting of cultural imagery with socio-economic reality turns into a kind of pamphleteering. We are left with a new myth, one of the revisionist author’s own making.

In it, Eugene Manlove Rhodes’ hired men on horseback are wage slaves turned “honest cowboy militants” attempting to throw off the iron control of corporate, capitalist, bosses. Actually, cowboys were the least-exploitable of all members of the 19th-Century working classes. Almost all of them were rugged individualists (often conservatives who were elitist-proud of their roles as skilled horsemen and top hands). Most were too damned independent, to boot, to form or even join a labor union.

For all of their hard, and sometimes dangerous, work, so-so food, and lousy weather and working conditions in the open, they were well off as wage earners. Cowpokes got good pay, respect and a freedom (including the right to quit, if they chose) that was just a dream to such real victims of 19th-Century Industrial Revolution tyranny and corporal punishment as common soldiers and fo’c’sle hands in the merchant marine.

The reason for the popularity of the stereotypical cowboy as a kind of symbol of America may be, as the author suggests, a psychological need for nostalgic fantasy. Trapped in an urbanized, routinized, industrialized society, we yearn for an uncrowded frontier of wide-open spaces, clean air and personal freedom. However, his splitting of the celluloid myth in two is debatable.

He differentiates traditional horse operas, in which good guys save threatened communities, from new, elitist, “Anti-Westerns” such as John Wayne’s “fascist” movies (Westen’s term) which change the myth to a celebration of the aggressive individualism which, we are told here, most distinguishes American capitalism as a central virtue.

But, enough. Save your money and check out of the library such old-timers as Philip Ashton Rollins or Douglas Branch. Or, better, plunk down your dinero for a copy of David Dary’s “Cowboy Culture,” instead. It is still available in both hardcover and paperback editions.