By Patrick Allitt, Emory University
Many Western movies tell the story of the competition between the farmers on the one hand—the sodbusters—and the cowboys on the other, because both groups had an interest in this land. To some extent, that’s based on a real historical development. Let’s learn more.
Cattle Trails
The great cattle trails leading north out of Texas led to the early railheads, places like Abilene, Kansas. One of the first of these trails was the Chisholm Trail, and it led from Texas up to Abilene.
The reason it went there was because that was as far as the Kansas Pacific Railroad had reached by 1867.
Joseph McCoy and Cattle Trading
An entrepreneur named Joseph McCoy recognized the possibilities. He knew that back East, there was a rapidly growing population, the new industrial working class, which needed access to good, cheap supplies of food, and he thought it might be possible for him to feed them with Texas beef.
The idea was that the cattle would be walked from Texas up to Abilene, shipped from the stockyards in Abilene to Chicago to the slaughterhouses, killed, and then the meat would be shipped back East from there.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Being a Cowboy Was Not Easy
Cowboys have a reputation for being wild, lawless, gun-toting men, but the reality of a cowboy’s life was very different. To get the cattle safely from Texas to Abilene, several hundred miles, was an extremely painstaking job.
First of all, several weeks would be spent in rounding them up from the open range, and then each owner would brand his own cattle and the calves from that year. The herdsmen, then, had to gradually lead the herd northward, and the way to do it was as slowly and patiently as possible.
Ideally, the cows had to walk at about one mile per hour all the way up to Abilene. If they stampeded, first of all it was very dangerous, and one could be trampled and killed in a stampede, and, of course, then the animals would be dispersed, and would have to be rounded up again. Moreover, in the event of a stampede, they’d lose a lot of weight, and since they were sold by weight, by the pound, the idea was to get them as heavy as possible when they reached the market point.
The Melancholic Songs of Cowboys
Every day, the trail leader would have to go ahead and look for a place where there was sufficient pasture and usually a stream, a water supply, where the herd could rest that night, and the cowboys would bring up the herd gradually, cutting out difficult animals, very often killing them for use as food for the other cowboys, and sometimes singing to the animals to calm them.
The origins of cowboys’ slow and melancholy songs comes from singing to the cattle to soothe them on the trail.
Boisterous Cowboys: A Stereotype?
It was only when the trail finally ended and the cowboys were paid off, that they’d be able to have a shave and a shower and get drunk, and go dancing, and get wild.
Early on, the cowboys got a reputation for wildness, but that’s because the journalists who wrote about it only saw them when the trail had finished. Here’s a quotation from a New Mexico newspaper from 1881:
It is possible that there is not a wilder or more lawless set of men in any country that pretends to be civilized than the gangs of semi-nomads that live in some of our frontier states and territories, and are referred to our dispatches as “cowboys.” Many of them have emigrated from our states in order to escape the penalty of their crimes, and it is extremely doubtful whether there is one in their number who is not guilty of a penitentiary offense, while most of them merit the gallows. They’re supposed to be herdsmen employed to watch vast herds of cattle, but they might well properly be known under any name that means ‘desperate criminal.’ They roam about in sparsely settled villages with revolvers, pistols, and knives in their belts, attacking every peaceable citizen they meet with. Now and then they take part in a dance, the sound of the music frequently deadened by the crack of their pistols, and the hoe-down only being interrupted long enough to drag out the dead and wounded.
However, this is a wildly exaggerated account of what cowboys are like and what they do, but it is true that already before 1900, the stereotype that was to remain popular in cowboy movies and Louis Lamour’s novels right up to the present, was established.
First Novel on Cowboys
The first great cowboy novel, incidentally, was published in 1902. It’s called The Virginian by Owen Wister, who was one of Theodore Roosevelt’s friends. It created many of the classic stereotypes that have been used so often in all the cowboy films since then.
The Virginian himself is a sort of half-wild man, but he’s basically got a good heart. He’s very tough on the range, and he can take the law into his own hands when he needs to. He fights one of the first great showdown gun battles in the street, and meanwhile, he’s fallen in love with the local schoolmarm who’s come out from back East to try to civilize the community; it’s all set in Wyoming. Eventually they get married, and the idea at the end is that she’s civilized him and brought him back into the civilized community.
Common Questions about Stereotypical Versus Real Life of Cowboys in the Great Plains
Joseph McCoy recognized the possibilities of cattle trading. He knew that back East, there was a rapidly growing population, the new industrial working class, which needed access to good, cheap supplies of food, and he thought it might be possible for him to feed them with Texas beef.
The first great cowboy novel was published in 1902. It’s called The Virginian by Owen Wister.
The origins of cowboys’ slow and melancholy songs comes from singing to the cattle to soothe them on the trail.
