Cow Boys and Cattle Men: Class and Masculinities on the Texas Frontier, 1865–1900 (review)

Among the surfeit of books on late nineteenth-century stock raising, this one stands alone. It bridges an enormous academic gap in blending the ranching culture and the emerging field of masculinity studies. The author, a professor of history at Austin College, sets out to determine whether cattlemen or cowboys were considered more manly and why. Apparently, for a large number of post-Civil War Americans it was a matter of men and boys.

Moore takes up this daunting challenge with gusto. Her research exhausts published contemporary accounts; taps the rich, often overlooked, vein of WPA Life Histories; and more than four thousand miles on her odometer represent time well spent in county courthouses and numerous other Texas repositories. This commendable effort undergirds six lengthy chapters, three of which examine masculinity through the lens of day-to-day work and three devoted to its reflection in leisure activities. An epilogue outlines the creation of the mythical cowboy. A recurrent theme contends that Gilded Age orthodoxy equated manliness with marketplace success and thus favored ranchers. Conversely, hired hands had their own criteria—job performance and loyalty to each other—that paid no heed to economic gain. Sure to provoke reaction is the sound chapter on “Men and Women,” which emphasizes attitudes toward women and touches upon bunkhouse cross-dressing. It also includes the often-published 1900 photograph of a stag dance (on John B. Slaughter’s U Lazy S Ranch) at which some men took the “heifer brand” (153), but is most valuable for its assessment of the cowboy view of marriage. Accepting responsibility for a family meant that adolescent behavior, like drinking, fighting, and gambling, had been left behind and real manhood achieved. By 1900, strict municipal regulations had largely confined cowboy rowdiness to rodeos and Wild West-oriented celebrations. Ironically, the triumph of respectability in industrializing, urbanizing America accompanied a robust frontier nostalgia, nurtured by Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Frederick Remington, and William S. Hart, which has yet to run its course.

This study grows from scholarly neglect of “the universal acceptance of the cowboy as a masculine icon” (11). In meeting this need, the author not only proposes to employ masculinity in shedding light on late nineteenth-century cattle raising, but to reveal the differing views of cattlemen and cowboys (African American, Anglo, and Tejano) toward manhood and how those contrasting notions determined their social standing. Toward this end, ranching methods and work patterns are dealt with effectively, at the expense of the manhood issue, which is frequently lost from sight. Attitudes toward manliness are made clear, but their influence on social status requires further explanation. Cattlemen, for instance, fell into different categories, such as range-hardened types like Charles Goodnight and imported corporate managers like Murdo Mackenzie. A few factual slips (“Big Springs, Texas,” “Brady County,” “the Concho River around Midland/Odessa”) do not mar the overall worth of a reasoned, trail-blazing approach to a topic replete with opportunity for gender studies specialists.