Written words would make a bigger difference in the world if people actually read them.
A frail attempt, by the author of “Not my First Rodeo,”
to create a clever saying that people would want to quote—
if they were to read it.
Both sides had some right and some wrong. If we’d all been willin’ to talk to each other, maybe we could’ve got around it. But the strong people always grab hold of things and holler instead of listen. I’ve never understood why it’s always easier to fight than to talk.
The words of the cowboy “Hitch” Hitchcock
in Elmer Kelton’s The Day the Cowboys Quit (1971)
The Revisionist Historian Places Herself
Between The Cowboy and a Tedious Stereotype
In an act of daring never before attempted by a public intellectual (or a private intellectual, for that matter), I am about to perform a doubled act of rescue: I am going to rescue cowboys from their entrapment in an inaccurate stereotype, and I am going to rescue revisionist history from a bad reputation.
And that’s not all.
I am also going to offer, to our troubled society, a fresh way of thinking about white men of the past who held insufferable attitudes toward Indians, Mexicans, and African Americans, and who died before we could sign them up for workshops on systemic racism.
With these adventures laid out before us, I will move on with the assumption that you are willing to head up this trail with me.
Yippie-ti-yi-yo, git along, little dogies; it’s your misfortune, and none of my own. . .
Oh, I do beg your pardon! It is a widely understood rule of literature that no author should ever refer to her readers as “dogies.” It is now clear that I am showing the effects of my recent immersion in the books that appear on the banner above.
Here’s what I meant to say.
Come along, fellow Westerners, as well as people living elsewhere who care about the West. And this all adds up to my good fortune as well as your own.
First, in an option unavailable to the cowpunchers taking part in the Long Drive in the nineteenth century, we’ll take an aerial view of the treacherous cultural landscape where we are headed.
By the terms of a widely embraced stereotype, the word “cowboy” is shorthand for “a person who doesn’t think much, who takes a carefree and casual stance toward the problems he encounters and sometimes creates, and often acts impulsively and sometimes violently.”
That stereotype does an equal disservice to real-life cowboys and to the cowboys of fiction and cinema.
By the terms of another widely embraced stereotype, the phrase “revisionist history” is
shorthand for “the method used by left-wing academics to reveal all the white men of the past to be villains and miscreants.”
At this point, it would be best for me to acknowledge that I would like to have revisionist history set free of this stereotype
Even though they both fall dramatically short of accuracy, both of these coded references exercise great power, as you will have learned if you have ever tried to separate either of those simple stereotypes from the complications of reality. If you try to perform this separation and let up on your efforts for a moment, the stereotypes will seize that opportunity to leap over the distance and reassert their power over reality.
But this time is going to be different. This is the first project ever that set out to combine the correction of the misrepresentation of cowboys with the correction of the misrepresentation of revisionist history! This time, revisionist history is going to be put to work to reject one-dimensional characterizations of white men in history, and to embrace the reality that their lives offer people today an interwoven set of inspirational tales and cautionary tales.
When it comes to the reasons why I am putting equal effort into rescuing revisionist history from the mischaracterizations that cling to it like barnacles, it is important to say that I have often been referred to as a revisionist historian. When that term has been applied to me, its implications have not always been flattering.
Rather than a catalogue of examples, I’ll recount one incident that took place only a couple of years after I had arrived at CU. In 1987 a Regent of the University of Colorado found himself so personally agitated by my writings in Western American history that he told a reporter that I was prejudiced against white men. To repurpose a well-worn cliché, at the time of his remark, some of my best friends were white men, a state of affairs that persists to the present moment.
If we take a minute to think about what “revision” means in other fields of inquiry and study, we discover good reason to call every credible historian a “revisionist.”
Let’s say a chemistry professor conducts an experiment that delivers findings that challenge assumptions that chemists once took for granted. If further experimentation continues to support those findings, this is called a discovery. It is not called revisionist chemistry.
In recent times, innovations in biochemistry have given the world Covid-19 vaccines. I try to keep up on the news of these innovations, but I have never once seen them referred to as “revisionist biochemistry.”
In fact, since our world keeps changing, everyone has to act as a “revisionist person” to get through life.
Historians keep discovering new sources, and, just as important, they keep rereading, reviewing, and rethinking sources that they once thought they had fully understood.
And that’s exactly what has been going on for years between me and two essential primary sources in the history of cowboys in the West.
Two books that came into being in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have had a lasting impact on the understanding of cowboys in the region’s past: Charlie Siriingo’s Texas Cowboy: Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony and Owen Wister’s The Virginian. I initially formed an opinion of those books when I read them fifty years ago in graduate school. In the years since then, I have reread them several times. With each rereading, they have presented themselves to me as new books, full of meanings I missed the first (and second and third and fourth) time.
And now I am about to mobilize my standing as a revisionist historian to rescue the cowboy—both the historical cowboy and the fictional cowboy—from stereotype, presenting several stories that offer a stiff challenge to the idea, stated above, that “cowboy” is shorthand for “a person who doesn’t think much, who takes a carefree and casual stance toward the problems he encounters and sometimes creates, and often acts impulsively and sometimes violently.”
Here are my operating assumptions:
- Selective attention, constrained by the determination to confirm preexisting assumptions, gives stereotypes their power.
- If we discard those preexisting assumptions and look at what the sources actually say, we encounter human beings from the past who give those assumptions a deservedly rough ride.
Things Go Splendid and Lovely in a Hard And Precarious Life:
Charlie Siringo
Charlie Siringo’s book, A Texas Cowboy, was and is a touchstone for the presentation of the lives of cowboys to a wide audience.
And anyone who turns the pages of this book, reading without a filter of expectation and preexisting assumptions, will be hard put to answer the question, “How on earth did the lives of late nineteenth century Western cowboys ever get turned into tales of romantic and carefree adventure?”
Siringo’s childhood was saturated in sorrow. Here are the dimensions of his early life: his father’s early death, his widowed mother’s struggles to raise him and his sister, the intense unhappiness brought into his world by the arrival of an utterly irresponsible and untrustworthy stepfather, a departure from life in his familiar home in south Texas to a time of wandering (sometimes with his mother and sister and sometimes entirely on his own) in the Midwest, where he worked on the sharpest edge of “child labor,” undergoing illness and physical injury without anything in the category of safety net.
Returning to Texas and working as a cowboy did nothing to reduce the precariousness of Siringo’s life. With a constant risk of injury, the job of tending cattle on the open was a worst-case scenario for what we would now call “problems with workplace safety.”
In multiple readings of the book, I have always been brought to a halt by a habit of word choice that Siringo made often enough to constitute a “signature” stance. “I got along splendid,” he would say, or “Everything went along lovely.” In my first reading of A Texas Cowboy, I couldn’t begin to guess why a person encountering such misery in life could possibly have used and reused those cheerful words.
But if you read Siringo’s book in the precarious times of 2021, and if you contemplate the extraordinary precariousness of his life over his first decades on the planet, the door opens to a viable guess.
Siringo appears to have kept his footing with the bedrock recognition that he was still alive after innumerable encounters when he faced death.
And the subject of mortality brings us to his attitudes on race.
As a child in Texas when the Civil War broke out, Siringo’s affiliation was entirely with the Confederacy, and he went through life with attitudes toward African Americans that are rightfully disturbing to his readers today.
Here is the intense paradox presented by Siringo’s racial prejudices and biases, when we consider them in the context of the precariousness of his life and the miracle of his survival of dire situations.
On at least two occasions, African American cowboys saved his life.
Particularly as a new hand, Siringo had accidents that could easily have killed him. Here is his description of one accident:
I roped a large animal and got my horse jerked over backwards on top of me and in the horse getting up he got me all wound up in the rope, so that I couldn’t free myself. . . . It was a ticklish predicament that time; the pony was wild and I hung fast to his side with my head down while the steer, which was still fastened to the rope, was making every effort to gore us.
Why wasn’t Siringo killed or disabled for life?
He was rescued “by ‘Jack’ a negro man who was near at hand.”
Did Siringo thank Jack? Did he take a moment to reconsider his belief in the inferiority of Black people? Did he think about the fact that when a man is pulled back from the cliff-edge of death, he has been given a chance to recognize the superficiality—and even the danger—of dividing humanity by skin color?
Who knows?
But here is the fact beyond question: all of us who appreciate the existence of Siringo’s book A Texas Cowboy owe a big debt to Jack.
No Jack, no Siringo.
No Jack, and no opportunity for Charlie Siringo to leave a written record of the low opinion in which he held Black people.
The moral to this story is so self-evident that only an overly dedicated public intellectual would feel obligated to say it outright.
For all the efforts made to separate the history of white Americans from the history of Black Americans, those histories are tied together as tightly as Charlie Siringo had been tied to a fatal calamity—until the intertwined history of Blacks and Whites made it possible for Jack to rescue him.
A Very Tough Schoolmarm Saves the Life of a Weakened Cowboy
(And, yes, like that fabled headline, “Man Bites Dog,” this subtitle may initially look like a mistyping in need of correction.)
Historic cowboys turn out to be a complicated group of people whose stories leave nothing standing in that tired old stereotype, which I will quote once again to make it seem even more exhausted: the word “cowboy” can serve as shorthand for “a person who doesn’t think much, who takes a carefree and casual stance toward the problems he encounters and sometimes creates, and often acts impulsively and sometimes violently.”
Cowboys in fiction, as well as in synonym, can also shred that stereotype beyond restoration.
In 1902, Owen Wister published a novel called The Virginian. This book is widely recognized as a founding text—maybe the founding text—for the literary celebration of the mythical cowboy. Indeed, the Virginian (who never has a name, and who, in an odd twist for an archetypal Western hero, is stuck with the name of an Eastern state) is classically tough, skilled, independent, and self-reliant.
But in Chapter Twenty-Seven, the Virginian is badly wounded and on the edge of death.
The novelist, Owen Wister, saves the Virginian by sending the schoolmarm to rescue him.
This is quite a scene. Molly Wood (who, unlike the Virginian, has the good luck to have an actual name!) comes upon the Virginian, who has collapsed from his wounds and cannot possibly save himself. She brings his horse Monte to him, helps him to mount, and then leads him to safety. This demands considerable physical exertion, but the psychological exertion is far more strenuous: the mind of the Virginian has become disordered, and Molly must use every imaginable strategy to keep him from giving up.
Consider these passages from their dialogue and the description of their actions and, as you read them, keep in mind that tired old stereotype of the cowboy that is not going to survive this blog post!
“I ain’t worth trying to keep. Look at me!”
“Are you giving up?” she inquired, trying to put scorn in her tone. . . .
He tried to sit up.
“Lie down!” she ordered!
He sank obediently . . . .
“We must hold it together. You must get on your horse.”
“Yu’ must not squander your pity,”
“You must not squander your strength,” she said.
“Oh, I could put up a really good fight now!” But he tottered in showing her how strong he was, and she told him that he was, after all, a child still.
She marched on with him, talking, bidding him note the steps accomplished. For the next half-mile they went thus, the silent man clinched on the horse, and by his side the girl walking and cheering him forward, when suddenly he began to speak:–
“I will say goodbye to you now, ma’am.” . . . .
And at this point, Owen Wister really went to town in making a mockery of the stereotype of the tough Western man protecting the weak lady.
Growing increasingly weak, the Virginian has entirely lost his bearings. He thinks he must return to some battle he believes demands his presence. But Molly has to keep him moving toward refuge and survival.
What to do?
The answer is obvious: she must manipulate his belief in masculine toughness and of feminine weakness.
Every step they have taken has, of course, completely demonstrated the inaccuracy of that belief, but Molly—or, actually, the author Owen Wister who called these characters into being!—realizes that this utterly disproven belief is still available to be put to good use.
“’You must take me home,” she said with inspiration. “I am afraid . . . A gentleman does not invite a lady to go out riding and leave her.”
The Virginian cannot possibly resist this play on his outmoded assumptions. He is quick to respond:
“I cert’nly will take you home. . .”
With his eyes watching imaginary objects, he rode and rambled, and it was now the girl who was silent . . . As he grew more fluent she hastened still more, . . . skillfully inventing questions to engage him, . . . [using] whatever makeshifts she could summon to her mind.
And yes, dear reader, she saved him. And then married him.
Although he had not the slightest intention of taking up a new life as an ardent feminist and forceful critic of myths of Western masculinity, Owen Wister conjured up a scene that actually connects very directly to a pattern in the reality of the Western cowboy.
In many novels and films, and in innumerable households, women have rescued cowboys more often than you might have expected.
(The very insightful literary historian Melody Graulich rescued me from the failure to pay attention to this story, which offers inarguable support for the rewards of refusing selectivity, challenging preexisting assumptions, and not reading so fast that you race right past the most important parts.)
A Showdown of Sorts:
A Latter-Day Encounter between a Cowboy and a Schoolmarm
Forty years ago, the possibility for a productive conversation between a Western American revisionist historian and a dramatically more successful popularizer of cowboys went for a test run.
In 1980, on a radio talk show, I was paired with author Louis L’Amour.
This was not what you’d call an equal match.
Louis L’Amour had sold millions of books, and he had been on thousands of talk shows.
I had a dissertation that hadn’t yet been revised into a book, and this was my maiden run on a talk show with a big audience.
At first, Mr. L’Amour did not seem to know what to do about my presence at the microphone next to his. But in no time, we were sparring (remember, he had been a boxer) energetically and amiably, manifesting a lot more amusement than agreement in our differing views of the Western past.
During the first commercial break, Mr. L’Amour turned to me and said, “Keep this up.”
So I did—for decades, right down to now.
How I Am Keeping the Conversation Going in 2021
On January 30, 2021, at High Noon (this was irresistible!) Mountain Time, I have the great privilege of giving the Keynote Address for the 37th Annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. In ordinary times, I would soon be on my way to Elko, Nevada, to give that speech. In this extraordinary year, I will be on a screen.
That presents one big advantage: If you would like to hear the speech, “Philosophers on Horseback: Cowboys as Pacesetters in Western American Thought,” you can use this link.
And maybe you would also like to acquire a book about an inspirational and innovative organization of ranchers in the State of Colorado?
The Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust (CCALT) celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2020. Hot off the press, Twenty-Five Years of Keeping Working Lands in Working Hands edited by CSU Professor Richard Knight and published by Fulcrum Press, presents the spirit-lifting history of CCALT.
I had the honor of writing the Introduction to that volume. Here, in a summary very purposely intended to arouse your interest in—and acquisitive desire for—the book, is a list of the divides and divisions that this organization has bridged and united, replacing the word “or” with the word “and.” You can find this list fleshed out in my Introduction:
Production of Resources and Consumption of Resources
The Myth of the West and the Reality of the West
The Old West and the New West
Rural and Urban
Caution and Daring
Seeking the Best for Humans and the Best for Nature
Tradition and Innovation
Casting subtlety to the wind, I will declare that, in a time of such intense national division, you will probably want to move fast to contact Jayne Thompson at CCALT (jayne@ccalt.org) to get a copy of this book.
The Punchline
What does it mean to be a Western American cowboy?
What does it mean to be a Western American public intellectual?
Since I am the only person who would ever think of putting those two questions together, I am also the only person authorized to proclaim this punchline.
Asking those two questions together is the only way to answer either of them.
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