Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Reflections on Being a Cowboy

1987; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1987.0182

1948-7142

Don D. Walker,

American Environmental and Regional History

DON D. WALKER Holden) Utah Reflections on Being a Cowboy What does it mean to be a cowboy? The question is simple and the answer seemingly easy. But let us wait. Let us hold the question for a time in the deceiving desert air. I ask the question in the present tense for an important reason. The question what did it mean to be a cowboy implies a question asked about the historical cowboy. However, such a question is unanswerable. The question what does it mean to be a cowboy implies the possibility of a present discoverable condition of being. Such a question is thus answerable. It is of course possible that the answer here will also answer the historical question, but we cannot be certain. As historians we had best maintain OUr doubt. We had best say that the answer cannot be pushed back into the past without the risk that its meaning will remain wholly in the present. \'\1e should begin with what may seem to be the obvious answers. In fact they may be so obviom that one may perhaps wonder why we even need to ask the question. Everyone, it might be argued, knows what it means to he a cowboy. To be a cowboy means to be a man, probably a young man, who works with cows, who herds, drives, brands, feeds, doctors caws as his principal occupation and who hays, fences, and fixes in an assortment of cow-related jobs. To be a cowboy may mean to be a rodeo performer using the skills of riding and roping, and wrestling skills that had their less colorful beginnings in the history of the cattle ranges. To be a :owhoy may also mean to be a western dude, rural or urban, dressed up 1Il Stetson, jeans, belt-buckle and boots, and having no proximity to cows, unless perhaps the mechanical bull trying to toss the boys onto the barroom floor. To be a cowboy may have still other common meanings, but we need not gather them all up here. No complete roundup of cowboy usage will reveal a central secret of cowboy being. 292 Western American Literature Let us illuminate the problem by focusing closely on the first of thes cowboy meanings. Authorities, historical and literary, have long argued that the true meaning of the cowboy is revealed in his work with Thus an analysis in terms of cowboy work will place our study within we might call the tradition of range scholarship. And since other Lll'Whm,' ,,;;,j meanings are associate meanings, the analysis of work may suggest paradigm for dealing with these related meanings. W'hen we say that to he a cowboy means to work with cows, we saying that working is being, that all the actions involved in roping, brand_ ing, driving constitute a way of being. But surely this is too simple: it is to equate the surface with the center, to suppose that action itself is being. Action is of course related to being. It is a function of being. Yet we must be careful here. We must not entrap ourselves within the seeming finnness of our words. If there seems to be a something that acts, that ropes and brands, we must not suppose that we can discover a spirit or ghost beneath the skin beneath the chaps, Being, in the context of this essay, is not a thing, not an object. \<\'e cannot say that it is, as when we say that grass is grama grass. Rather it is a state of existence, a state so fluid, so open, that we ean understand it, as we shall later see, only within the larger state of becoming. To the objection that this analysis Illakes the simple cowboy unduly complex, one answers that there is no reason why we should regard the cowboy as simple. If we perceive him to be a human being, or put another way, if we perceive his being human and do not reduce him to a mere bundle of actions, then the analysis is as appropriate for him as it would be for a poet or for the philosopher himself. This indeed should serve as the rationale for this essay-if rationale is needed. For more than three-quarters of a century the cowboy has been an unusually appealing figure, not just in this country but around the world as well. To most observers and admirers he has seemed a simple figure uncomplicated by any anthropological questions . Indeed for many his appeal has been this seeming simplicity. Yet if we take him seriously as a human being, if we see him as a person embodying significant human values, then even his simplicity evokes anthropological questions. Is this figure a person of lived reality, or is this figure a mythic figure, a figure suggested by a lived reality but invested with transcendence by structures having little or nothing to do with cows and cow work? This double-pointed question has seemed to demand an answer or answers whenever thoughtful men have met to argue about the cowboy. Whatever the appeal of the mythic cowboy, I cannot believe that it is his mythic features alone to which we attach our sense of cowboy being. Don D. Walker 293 Do we truly have the need to see ourselves as sun gods, supreme in our courage and frontier prowess? Surely this need, if indeed there is a deep and general need, is rooted in infantile insecurities, its dream fulfillment at best a pubertal fantasy. Do we then have an attachment to the lived reality of the cowboy in his cowboy work? Do we identify with cowboy being in its meaning of cowboy work? Is it his skill in roping, branding, and driving that we value as our own way of being? Surely the answer here is negative too. As much as we admire skills-witness our enthusiasm for rodeo performances -we do not invest these skills with special human value. In this age of advanced technology, it is entirely possible that a robotics engineer can design a robot roper capable of setting a new standard of performance in roping events. We may of course recognize that when a robot rider fastens itself onto the back of a bull we lose interest. A machine, whatever its technological refinements, is still a machine. It is the man against the bull that matters. And yet it is a limited manhopd that the successful rider proves. Suppose the bull, not the man, is mechanical. Suppose further that technology has endowed the bull with a special mechanical fierceness, a complex pattern of twists and heaves unmatched by any natural bull. Do we thus find our human admiration and identification heightened? Is here manifest an ultimate cowboy being? Our sense of that being must surely lie elsewhere. We must look further. To explore the experience of it, let us tryout a further range of situations in which it may possibly be discovered. And let us include here the historical situation, even though our evidence may be inadmissible in the writing of history. A defining feature of that situation, revealed for our faith by a multitude of scriptures, was freedom. Stewart Edward White summed up the central dogma: "The basic reason for the difference between the cowboy and other men rests finally on an individual liberty, a freedom from restraint either of society or convention, a lawlessness, an accepting of his own standard alone." Thus to be a cowboy meant to be free. And given the ideological value Americans have long put upon freedom , no wonder that the cowboy has long seemed an ideal embodiment of a lived freedom. However, while we have many high claims of freedom, we have little experienced evidence of it. What did it mean to be free? Freedom defined a~ individual liberty, the absence of restraint from society or convention, a lawlessness, an accepting of one's own standard alone remains a cluster of abstractions. We have in these eloquent words no sense of the concrete lived reality of freedom. What we thus need to illuminate the valued concept of 294 Western American Literature cowboy freedom is a phenomenology of that freedom. But a phenomen_ ology of cowboy freedom will at once bracket the factor of historical time' in the epistemology by which we know this freedom meanings are thu~ ahistorical. As historians we are left with an unsatisfactory pair of possibilities : cowboy freedom may be an ideological fiction imposed upon the historical cowboy because we need him to be free in our treasured past, or cowboy freedom may be a lived historical reality which we cannot know historically. It is the latter possibility and its historical problem that we should first of all investigate. The cowboy's freedom seems to become more concrete if we describe it using a favorite simile: the cowboy was "like a bird of the wilderness, accustomed to freedom." But the concreteness here does nothing to illuminate the human freedom. It is a bad simile; the terms figuratively joined do not meaningfully join. The freedom of birds cannot be the freedom of men. Even if we could determine that birds do move freeIv " that is, carry out their actions without restraint, we could not suppose that their bird-action has anything about it that is significantly related to human action. From my study I watch a red-tailed hawk circling. As she turns from one direction to another, she does seem to be flying freely, yet I haven't the faintest certainty that she is experiencing what we humans call freedom. Does she choose to fly east instead of west or/does she merely submit to the changing currents of wind? And beyond these seemingly random movements is there freedom in the seasonal patterns which seem to shape her way of living? Can she decide not to go south? Can she decide to spend the winter in the same grove of cottonwoods where she has made her nest the past summer? To speak of the cowboy's freedom as like the freedom of a wilderness bird was of course to attribute a primitivistic meaning to that freedom. We have no evidence that a historical cowboy or a number of historical cowboys looked closely at the conditions of their existence and found that their being was fraught with possibilities, that their lives were open with a rich becomingness. We do not even know that a historical cowboy looked up at a soaring bird and then said to himself, "I am free like that bird." It seems unlikely that he would have made this sort of personal observation. Sitting slightly hunched in his saddle, following the dusty trail of the cattle, he was probably not looking for birds. Had he noticed one, it is highly unlikely that he would have made the wild imaginative leap of somehow recognizing in the bird's flight a figure of his own condition. Even if we locate the historical cowboy somewhat differently, even if we see him as Don D. Walker 295 he gallops across the prairie on a bright morning just for the fun of it, we have no reason to suppose that he would image his sense of freedom with the simile of a bird. We don't even know that he felt in himself a sense of freedom although such a moment of morning fun could conceivably offer him the experience of freedom. For the historian the obstacle to knowing remains. We must have not only the claim of freedom by the historical cowboy; we must have his own inner analysis to give the claim of freedom meaning. But we are not likely to find such an analysis among our historical sources. Better we search for lost gold mines among the barren unmapped hills. Thus the idea of cowboy freedom came not so much from the historical cowboy himself as from those who needed a figure to invest with a natural frontier ideal. If the cowboy had been asked if he liked the role he was given to play, he probably would have answered that he didn't mind. He believed in freedom too, and if he was told that his life was proof of frontier freedom, he could have answered, "I guess it is," but without being told he might never have thought what a philosophical excellence he carried in his saddle. He was wearing an ideological label. He should have been given a t-shirt bearing a bold inscription across its front: FREE COWBOY . Actually of course he didn't need the inscription. To travelers and journalists who saw him on his open range, the Stetson, the neckerchief, the chaps and boots, and especially the gun, all signified his freedom. In the ideology of romantic primitivism, nature was the guarantor of a maximum freedom. Civilization enchained; nature freed. Thus the wilderness was the setting of a natural freedom. But such freedom, however right and reasonable it might seem to be, was an idea, not a lived reality. It was a grand deduction, not a concrete condition of life. The logic might be persuasive, but it really had nothing to do with life. The cowboy was free not because freedom was a condition of his existence, but because as a child of nature he was free by definition. The logic of romanticism needed no concrete proof; it had no concern with the discrete experience of the individual person, no matter how high it waved its banner of individualism. As far as I know, Emerson said nothing about the cowboy, but he probably COuld have seen cowboys had he looked out of his train car window as he crossed the continent to California in 1871. Whether he saw them or not l11atters little. To the transcendentalist from Concord cowboys would have belonged to that a priori category of natural beings; like the Indian and the farmer the cowboy would have had an undulled knowledge of his independence and his freedom. If Ernerson had seen cowboys, he would have 296 Western American Literature seen nothing of their experience of freedom, assuming of course that they had that experience. His eyeball would have been blind to that experience. Whitman did see cowboys, finding them "a strangely interesting class," but he reported only what might be called the abstract poetry of their appear_ ance and movement. However eloquently he identified his self with the selves of all men, it remains true, I believe, that Whitman, like Emerson, knew nothing about the lived experience of cowboy freedom. If we change our perspective and try to locate our inquiry not in the realm of general historical attitudes but in the concrete historical experience of cowboys, what can we discover? We can discover first of all that we have no intimate and reliable access to this experience, if indeed there was such a historical experience. We are left speculating. \,ye are left imagining. Our conclusions, if we come to any, are thus of little historiographical value, except as they make clearer what we do not know but what as historians we must always wish to know. Let' us suppose then that the cowboy experienced freedom, that his being a cowboy meant a being in freedom. In the name of philosophy, if not of history, let us inquire into the nature of that experience., First of all we can say what the experience of freedom was not. If we observe that the cowboy has many choices in his daily routine, we can of course say that he has a kind of freedom. He chooses to pull on the left boot instead of the right boot. He chooses to rope the black horse instead of the bay horse. He chooses to brand the red calf instead of the black calf. He chooses to ride around the left side of a hill instead of the right side. Beyond these daily choices, there are the larger decisions. He chooses to work at the Lazy H Ranch instead of the Flying W Ranch. He chooses to be a cowboy instead of a sheepherder. But surely all of this is not what we mean when we say that the cowboy is free. And surely his occasional ecstasy of abandon in the cow town saloon and whorehouse has little to do with freedom. On the contrary, if freedom assumes an awareness of options, an openness of possibilities rather than the grip of frontier social custom, this abandon seems nothing more than a drunken escape from freedom. To understand the experience of freedom, we shall have to look more closely and deeply. We shall have to put aside all of the cliches, all of the stock notions, all of the high truths which conceal their errors. Particularly we shall have to recognize that motion is not necessarily the evidence of freedom, that to move is not necessarily to be free. Planets and spaceships and railway trains all move, but all are completely determined in their courses. But even within the atom, where particles fly about in indeter- Don D. Walker 297 mined movements, we do not have a model of human freedom. Thus the absence of restraints, so that movement and action are possible, is not the important condition of freedom. Closely examined, the cowboy probably lived with as many restraints as any other man of his time, this in spite of the apparent bigness and openness of his range world. But even if some or all of these restraints could somehow have been removed, the cowboy would stilI not thus have existed in freedom, would stilI not thus have experienced freedom as we must try to understand these words. This understanding must be an act not simply of verbal redefinition, but a disclosing of the features of experience which carry meaning to these words, however independent these words may seem to be of their primal sources of meaning. What does it mean to say hypothetically that the cowboy existed in freedom? We cannot say that a limestone pebble existed in freedom. Even if our ordered scientific universe were shaken loose by a radical application of indeterminacy, we could not say that a pebble existed in freedom, for to exist means more than to be an identifiable object. Only human beings can be said to exist in the fullest sense of this verb, a sense indicated by its etymology. To -exist is to become, to stand forth. Thus to exist in freedom means to become in freedom, and to become in freedom assumes a rich field or ground of being. Both metaphors are inadequate to suggest the openness , the inexhaustible range of ontological possibility. If our hypothetical cowboy shouts, "I am free !," from what then does this conviction issue? Issue perhaps suggests a slow emergence, like the seepage of a spring, and thus it may seem to weaken the active engendering role of the subject. Role too needs qualification since the subject is not assuming a part, not playing a type in a philosophical drama. He is himself. His experience is his own. No amount of abstracting from it can diminish its concrete uniqueness. The "I" who shouts "I am free!" has a strong sense of himself, of his self which is his lived identity, but he is not thus egoistic or egotistical. In a sense he may be egocentric, but not in the sense that he thus pulls his whole world in the force of his subjective power. That world is itself. Although he exists in it, it does not exist for him. He is not a monad. He is a person. Nevertheless, all knowledge of the world begins with the fact of himself. If he has a logic of knowing, it takes the form I exist, therefore I can begin my knowing. He does not have to account for himself. He does not have to deduce his self from an Aboriginal Self or from some other idealistic abstraction. In the context of American romantic idealism, there was a call for self-reliance, and the call became American scripture. The frontier sup- 298 Western American Literature posedly fostered such reliance. To some true believers the cowboy, in his mythic independence and freedom, must have seemed a striking instance of such romantic self-reliance. However, in critical retrospect the call seems marked more by its rhetoric than by a sense of lived reality. What was the self that was to be reliant? We know little about it except the Emersonian Truth that it had its origin in the One Self, the Aboriginal Self. How it was to be different from other selves, how it was to be motivated to be reliant we do not know. The valued word self remained empty of everything except its shell of value, and that value was endowed upon it from on high. It did not have its ground in existence. Furthermore, the call seemed a call to moral motion, as if to do would be evidence of the self's reliance. Again, to move, to do, to act would be evidence of the self's freedom. But without a more critical and concrete self-awareness, the freedom had little meaning, except as an honored ideological set of letters or a pleasant sound in the American air. What would have been more ultimately meaningful would have been a call to self-awareness, for the self could be genuinely reliant and genuinely free only if it knew what it was, only if it knew its liw;d history and its present possibilities. It is historically understandable that there was in the American context an emphasis upon reliance, but reliance is a consequence, not a condition of freedom. A heroic self-reliance perhaps assumes a condition of freedom, but the heroic reliance reveals almost nothing about that condition . Indeed, our analysis may show that the self can be free without being reliant, at least in any romantically heroic version of reliance. What we then need to do is to move our focus back to the condition of the self as a condition of freedom. As I suggested earlier, a sense of freedom involves a sense of possibilities , an awareness of both a richness of being and a state of becoming. The lived experience involves not the locked-in direction of old habits, not the feeling that the past has shut off options, but an awareness, and a concomitant exhilaration in, the way the present opens into the future. The sense of time here is centrally important. As existential and phenomenological psychologists have pointed out, in depressed states of mind there is no sense of this openness. Thus there is no sense of possibility, no feeling of freedom. But even to what we might call normal minds, the condition of unfinished openness may seem threatening. To be "thrown" into this condition may be to open the self to anxiety and dread. Thus if there is freedom, it is a "dreadful freedom." Such an analysis, however, may obscure the ongoing stability and experiential confidence of the self. To an important extent, Don D. Walker 299 the self takes its directional bearing out of its past. It cannot cancel that past. The experience in that past has established a lived identity, not a completed identity, but nevertheless a sense of self which has center and coherence. As it moves into openness it need not flounder. As it becomes, it becomes by enlarging and extending that lived identity, not by losing it. Our hypothetical cowboy rides then with a sense of who and what he is and yet with a sense of newly becoming, a sense of ever opening possibilities . It is probably true that no historical cowboy ever rode with this sort of self-conscious awareness, and yet it is possible that he rode with a sort of delight in the openness of his world, for the openness of his range horizons may have matched the openness of his inner horizons. At least we can postulate this of our hypothetical cowboy. He rides with a purpose. He rides in a direction. But this purpose does not project him like a missile, and his directional goal is not at the end of the tracks or out where the trail runs out. Even if he arrives at such a seemingly determined point, he may bear with him, along with the dust he has gathered, the exhilaration-even the excitement-of being and becoming. His arrival will not prove that he is free. As he enters the cow town, there will be no reason to shout, "I am free!" But semewhere along the trail, if he is suddenly struck with philosophical insight, he may say to himself, Hey, I exist, and look how I live every moment as I ride my way into tomorrow. Then--certainly thenhe may shout, "I am free!" Is this experience only the imagined experience of a hypothetical cowboy, or can we corroborate and share this experience in our own lives? Do we indeed validate the insights of our imaginative inquiry by remembering and recreating a personal sense of cowboy being? If we remember being cowboys, what is the experience we remember? Let us then shift our inquiry from an analysis of the imagined experience of a hypothetical cowboy to an autobiographical analysis of those experiences in which I identified myself as a cowboy. I do not here mean just those experiences which involved work with cows. As a matter of ironic fact, when I fed the steers their hay and beet pulp or when I drove the cows to pasture, I did not think of myself as a cowboy. In my own experience, being a cowboy meant much more than or something quite different from feeding and driving cows. Being a cowboy involved kinds and dimensions of experience unrelated to what we Usually think of as cowboy work. As a further extension of ironic fact, this experience usually didn't involve cows at all. 300 Western American Literature We must here introduce another aspect of cowboy being, playing cowboy. Those who may insist that playing cowboy has nothing really to do with being a cowboy are narrowing their view to what can only be called a factualistic and literalistic blindness. They are forgetting what truths the playful imaginations of children can show us. Embarrassed by their own inclinations to fantasy, they denigrate all fantasies to the level of childish dreams. And somehow they believe that to play does not involve any engagement with reality. To work, as we have seen, is another matter. But we must be clear about one point: to take seriously the cowboy playing of children does not rest on a primitivistic assumption of the uncorrupted pristine vision of children. We need not be Wordsworthian. However, we must be serious, in the sense that we must regard a child's sense of his being with the same seriousness with which we regard our adult sense of being. It may be that playing is a misleading name for what a child is doing. It may be that the term locks us too easily into an adult perspective. When we see a child loping a broom handle across the open stretches of sand and grass, we patronizingly say to him, "What are you doing?" and he obligingly answers, "Playing cowboy." He knows that is what we expect him to say. However, I believe that the statement "I am playing" is an echo of adult meaning, not a revelation of the child's being. A normal adult plays a part, a role, with the conditioning sense that he is engaging in an imaginative or fantasy life. No matter how seriously and totally he is able to identify with the character of Hamlet in a play or the role of union boss in a group discussion, he never wholly loses the sense that he is acting. Playing is thus entertaining, recreational, perhaps even useful. In this way rodeo performers may be said to play cowboys. But this play, if play it is, has little to do with the cowboy playing of children. Among my family photographs is a portrait of one of my sons as a cowboy. An itinerant photographer leading a tired Shetland pony and toting a bag of assorted hats and imitation-leather chaps came by our horne. For a couple of dollars my son was dressed and placed in the saddle. There he sits in the photograph, smiling self-consciously, supposing in some vague aura of association that he is a cowboy. Of course the photographer really knew nothing about cowboys, my son even less. Both knew that cowboys wear hats called cowboy hats and sit in saddles, but the meaning of cowboy in any emotional and ideational sense is not even hinted at in the stereotypic manner of the photograph. But suppose the experience involves more than the making of a photograph . Suppose the boy--or girl-claims the pony as his-or her-own. Don D. Walker 301 Suppose the owning responsibility involves the feeding, currying, saddling of the pony; suppose it involves certain riding tasks, for instance, the bringing of the milk cows from the pasture, the daily venture to the post office for mail, the participation in parades. Of all of this it is easy to say that the owner of the pony is playing cowboy. Yet however affectionate the relationship between pony and rider, there may be little sense of playing cowboy . Something is missing. Pony, saddle, boots, hat, even chaps are not enough. They do not of themselves generate the special pleasures of cowboy play. Let us probe a little deeper. Let us give our venturing imaginations a little more freedom to engage in what may be an illuminating reverie. In seriousness I might even call this approach a meditation in the poetics of cowboying. If this seems pretentious, trust me. I can move to an important point in my poetics by citing a passage in a relatively new western novel, William Decker's The Holdouts. FiIIing in the background of fascination with horses expressed by Lucy Howard, the rancher's wife, the novelist uses a remembrance in a letter: "My room was filled with figurines and pictures of them [horses]. For a long time I pretended that I had an imaginary horse. I even made a stall for it in our woodshed and kept hay and straw in the stall. In the afternoon when school was over I would hurry home and pretend to clean out the stall, fluffing up the straw bedding. I talked to my horse and would have slept there if my father had let me. I think I really believed that some day my fantasy horse would materialize in that stall." In this passage, it seems to me, the novelist has given Lucy a standard fantasy-and thus one which most readers expect and believe in--without taking the nature of that fantasy in full seriousness. The imaginative failure of the novelist shows in the radical change of reverie (or change out of reverie) in the final sentence. To suppose that a real horse might materialize is to change the very nature of the imag-inative experience; it is to deny the primacy and power of the reverie itself. One's attitude toward an imagined horse is never the same as that toward a material horse. My point can be further illustrated by noting the literal and realistic sense we parents and grandparents often impose upon the imaginative play of our children. When my eldest son reached a certain age (I cannot be specific and I doubt that child psychologists can be much more precise), he began to ride stick horses. I helped by cutting slender willows, but he always had his own resources. I cannot say that he played more happily with my willows than he did with other "horses," lengths of quarter round, 302 Western American Literature dr