The Modern Cowboy: Second Edition

2. What He Looks Like, What He Wears

9 Chapter Two What He Looks Like, What He Wears The cowboys I have known were pretty much average-sized fellows, rarely very tall, very short, or very heavy. Perhaps this physical description fits a national average and would be the same in other professions and trades, but I suspect there is more to it than that. If you observe people in a public place, such as an airport or a bus station, you will notice that there are a lot of tall and short men in this world. If you observe physical shapes in a restaurant, you will note that many of our countrymen are chunky. Yet, on a roundup crew composed of fulltime cowboys, you don’t see these extremes of physical types, which makes me think that there is something in the nature of the work that repels the very short, the very tall, and the overweight. Maybe fat men lack the endurance for heavy physical work or the ability to perform in extreme heat. There is also the possibility that, under the rigors of the profession, fat men tend to become unfat, and to remain that way. The typical cowboy, as I have observed him, may have a paunch and little weatherboarding around his middle, but he isn’t fat, and more often than not, he is thin, wiry, and trim around the waist. He has quick reflexes, good endurance, and strong hands, arms and shoulders. Upper body strength is important in this business, since many of the routine jobs on a ranch demand it: digging postholes, pulling the rods 10 — The Modern Cowboy out of a windmill, lifting bales of hay and sacks of feed, holding calves down in a branding pen, and wrestling with iron-jawed horses. The cowboy may not have the build of a weight lifter or a football player, but what flesh he carries is hard and tough. Like the jackrabbit, he wouldn’t be fit to eat. A cowboy’s hands tell the story of his work. You rarely see one with delicate hands. Most often the fingers are thickened by constant use, the palms rough enough to snag on delicate fabrics, the top side scarred and scabbed, and the nails bearing evidence of abuse. His face will often have a weathered look by the time he turns forty. Cowboys are exposed to wind and the constant glare of the sun, and to protect their eyes they squint. Over a period of years their eyes begin to narrow, and creases form in the corners. If cowboys survive long enough as a group to test the laws of natural selection, they may eventually come to resemble Eskimos. This brings us to the subject of cowboy apparel. At the time I wrote the first edition of this book, there were two distinct cultural groups that had evolved out of the livestock business: the cowboy culture of the Great Plains region, to which I belonged, and the buckaroo culture of Mountain region and West Coast, about which my comrades and I knew very little. You could write at great length about the differences Sam White, Parsell Ranch, Canadian, Texas. (2001) What He Looks Like, What He Wears — 11 between these two groups, but for the sake of brevity let us sketch out a rough comparison. Cowboys of the Great Plains evolved out of a blending of ethnic groups that included English, Scotch, Irish, German, Mexican, and AfroAmerican , with a sprinkling of Jewish, Italian, and other national groups. Buckaroos, on the other hand, owed large cultural debts to the influence of Spain, Mexico, and the Basques. We might say that the cowboy approach to life, work, and personal appearance tended to reflect a stubborn Anglo-Saxon practicality, while the buckaroo tradition placed a higher value on style and embellishment. In their dress and appearance, cowboys tended to be drab, and we might even say self-righteously drab. Plain-dressing was regarded as a virtue, and the cowboys with whom I worked in the seventies and eighties had nothing good to say about the garish taste of the buckaroos. Buckaroos wore shop-made boots with gaudy tops, and tucked their jeans into the boot tops to show them off. They wore a kind of knee-length chap called chinks, often decorated with conchas of brass or silver and fringed on the bottom. Buckaroos wore flamboyant hats, shirts, and spurs, and colorful silk “wild...