HISTORY of the AMERICAN COWBOY

Don't forget to leave your mark!

View My Guestbook
Sign My Guestbook

This is a short article on the American Cowboy. Now, Webster's Dictionary defines a Cowboy as "a hired hand, especially in the Western United States, who tends cattle and performs many duties on horse back". If your lucky enough to know a real cowboy you know words could never describe him. His passion for life and living it to its fullest come from the heart. Its more than Wranglers, boots and hats that make a cowboy. It's a way of life that comes from inside and it can't be learned, it won't be extinguished, and it will never be duplicated!

Fables from the Old West have for years conjured up many different impressions of the Cowboy. He has been represented by everything from a white hat wearing hero to a gunslinging cowpoke, but the one thing the Cowboy has always done is to remind us of our past. Even though the Cowboy's reign in the Wild West was relatively short (about 30 years), no image in American History has ever invoked as many different emotions or been the center of so much folklore.

When the Civil War ended, many of the soldiers had no home to return to and started drifting to the West. The territories were open and untamed and many of these men only owned what they could carry on horseback. Ranchers hired these hard working men on as ranch hands. The hands tended to the herd and did work around the ranch. When the time came to sell the beef, the hands would round-up the herd from the open prairie and drive the cattle miles to market.

With the invention of barbed wire, increased availability of R/R's and taming of the west, the Cowboy's rule started coming to an end. The popularity and intrigue with these trail hardened men was at an all time high back in the East. Many country/western songs during this time tried to capture the true cowboy spirit. This fascination with "Old West" had authors and artists alike rushing westward to record as much as they could about the Cowboy. Many articles were published about the West and soon came the books. The bigger the fiction the better the sales. These money hungry writers were the cause of the bad reputation the Cowboy carried for many years.

When the moving picture came about, the Cowboy's image was again changed. Now, he was the great white knight that loved his horse more than the beautiful ladies he rescued. While the Cowboy of the "Old West" spent more time with his horse then the ladies, this era's image was not entirely true either. After a few years this exploitation of the Cowboy started to diminish due to America's fascination with movies about gangsters and then World War II, but Country/Western music kept him alive in the emerging honky-tonks.

Then, in the 50's, Hollywood began producing spaghetti westerns and TV shows that started the "Cowboy Craze." This lasted until the late 60's, when the American fascination shifted to the moon and space travel. But the hero wouldn't go away, he just got on a different horse. This time he came back as an "Urban Cowboy." While this was just a passing fad, it made modern Country/Western fashion, music and dance the commercial rage.