More than a century later, the cowboy way still beckons

The American cowboy has been in existence since before the Civil War. Created in part from the union of North Americans penetrating into Texas and encountering the older Mexican vaquero culture, the cowboy was essential to the rapid post-Civil War growth of the beef industry in the short-grass country of the Great Plains. The cowboys drove the cattle across the fenceless landscape to the expanding railheads; trains took them to the slaughterhouses of Chicago.

In 1874, the first barbed wire rolled from an American mill, and the utterly open West soon would be squared off. But the cowboys stayed on the new ranches, enduring harsh weather and wildly swinging economic conditions to become for the whole world a symbol of this new man, the American. He and his all-terrain vehicle, the horse, grew and grew in the popular imagination and popular culture until reality could not encompass them.

We still have a beef industry; we still have cowboys. Their vehicle of necessity is likely to be a mechanical ATV, being cheaper and easier to maintain than a horse or two. But ATV or horse, we still have embedded in the public consciousness the notion, apparently ineradicable, that the cowboy is the romantic American man.

It is a vision that enchanted Tom Groneberg, a college graduate from the Chicago suburbs. In “The Secret Life of Cowboys,” he writes of his admiration for cowboys and their way of life and the parts he has played in that life for the last 10 years. Groneberg does not examine why he felt his pull to the West; simply accepts it as a given.

Sometimes his acceptance is embarrassing: “I’ve come to understand that the ranchers and cowboys I’ve met, even the tough but breakable boys growing up on the ranches of Montana, most of them are better men than I.” Still, his humility lets him get inside his subjects.

He begins his work in the West on a large dude ranch in Colorado. Then, with girlfriend Jennifer, he moves to a working ranch in northwestern Montana. Life is hard. They are poor. The idea of proving himself gets to him. So with the financial help of his parents, he and Jennifer buy a cattle ranch of nearly 10,000 acres in wind-swept eastern Montana near Miles City. He does rancher things: He buys cattle to raise; he romantically, to his mind, shoots a deer; he and Jennifer fight grass fires; he, absurdly, goes to rodeo school, competing with boys who will do just about anything to climb out of the grinding chute that life seems already to have assigned them.

He does creditably in rodeo school, whatever that really means; but as a rancher he becomes one in a long, long line of failures in the history of the West. It turns out that the winter was terrible; his cattle were dying of cold and hunger, and they weren’t very good to begin with; he got so depressed he could barely work. So he finds a psychologist, who gives him Paxil. It relaxes him. He can think again, without stress. They auction off the ranch and its contents.

They move to northwestern Montana again, where he gets work, part time, on someone else’s ranch. They have a little boy. They are happy. He takes up writing magazine articles. Now, his publisher says, they have new twin boys. They are raising them to be cowboys.

It is a pretty candid story Groneberg tells in this, his first book. He is frank, although without reflection on his own attraction to the hard and most unordinary cowboy life. He indirectly acknowledges the unbridgeable gulf between him and the other cowboys and ranchers he writes about: He can leave, and they can’t.