Cowboy Life: Reconstructing an American Myth

Afterword

Afterword to the New Edition Cowboy Lifewas intentionally revisionist only in itscall for improved western fictions; but in 1975 reviewers were less interested in that sort of thing than in finding something upon which to hang a general announcement ofdebunkery. The book was blamed in some quarters, just as it was praised inothers,for"revealing"that nineteenth-century cowboys were exploited laborers whose jobs were hard, dirty, and boring. Notes to the Introduction, no less than the readings themselves , clearly indicated that the particulars of cowboy employment constituted no news at all; but itwasameasure ofthe cowboy's cultural prominence that journalistscould make hay byannouncing that some PhD. said he was bogusl Perhapsthat process as muchas anythingelse led metowrite The Cowboy Hero: His Image in AmericanHistory and Culture, published in 1979 by the University of Oklahoma Press. Despite my earlier plea for a return to the sources of cowboy history, 1 concluded that those sources were not really very good; that we know (and would likely ever know) next to nothing about the historical cowboy beyond the details of his job and the equipment he used to do it; and that his historical anonymity was what allowed him to achieve heroic status for the simple reason that the more you know about somebody, the fewerchancesthat personwill have tobecome anysortofcultural icon. When it came to the cowboy, 1wrote, we had more image than history, so we ought to spend our time on the history of the image. This I believed to be true revisionism, in the context ofother writing about cowboys; but journalists largely ignored the book, missing what I took to be a splendid opportunity to arouse the public. At the very least, I expected scathing condemnation for having demonstrated that the number of black cowboys in the nineteenth-century West was prob2 °9 COWBQYLlFE ably much smaller than then-current estimates; but evidently the statistics stifled debate.2 There were plenty ofother books about cowboys appearing after 1975, but none seemed particularly illuminating. There were spectacular (and spectacularly priced) coffee-table volumes - eyewash, in publishers' jargon.s The Library of Congress assembled a cowboy exhibit, issued a high-dollar"catalogue"ofthe items, and arranged for acommercial publisherto releaseahard-coveredition at the spectacular coffee-table price4 Withal, such things were probably more substantial than the array of academic and pseudo-academic treatises, which ranged from the polemical to the merely tedious to the downright misleadingsTheworst ofthem raced the eyewash to the remainder bins, a contest between the unreadable and the overpriced to see what the public would go for, at thirty cents on the dollar. And then, from Academe, with all the fanfare its practitioners could generate, came something called "the new Western history," appearing in the late 1980s, about a century after the old one had gotten started. Here was revisionism on the hoof, thundering up the trail in a great rhetorical stampede to scatter America's westering myths in a coarse cloud ofmulticultural dust.6 Left behind, lying battered amongst the road apples, was the cowboy, an unfit icon on accountofall he represented. Actually,few ofthe"new"Westernists ever even mentioned the cowboy. He was, after all, the personification of everything they deplored: a white man intruding upon indigenous cultures, whacking the tar out of same, and ignoring gender issues altogether, except when he wanted a littleyou-know-what. According to these folks, white creation myths having to do with the frontier, the Wild West, or whatever, were thenceforth deemed to be politically incorrect because oftheir destructive impact upon other people's cultural baggage? Perhaps the "new Western history" was only predictable outgrowth of post-Vietnam critiques of American societyB or an overreaction to the two-term presidency of a former cowboy actor noted for his insensitivity to issues ofgender and ethnicity. But in any event,onlygraduate studentsand otherwannabes were fully inclined to call it scholarship.9 The "new" Westernists miscalculated more things than one, but foremost among theirerrors was the notion that Americans somehow cared about literal truth in regard to their expansionist history. That 210 AfTERWORD TO THE NEW EDITION was never the case(towhich several short tons ofpopularculture bear emphatic witness), nor was it reasonable to conclude that anything happening in the recession-plagued 1980s would change the situation .lO Just as economic troubles in the 1930s had boosted the popularity of Western entertainments as escapist fare (and had thereby promoted the proliferation of...