Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

Cowboys were a big part of my life growing up, even though I never met one, at least not in person. Like many kids of the 50’s, everything I knew about cowboys came from television shows, and there were a ton of them to choose from.  According to Wikipedia, Hopalong Cassidy led the way in 1949; and, by the peak year of 1959, there were 26 prime time cowboy shows. During one week in March of 1959, 8 of the top 10 T.V. shows were Westerns.   Here are a few that I remember: “The Lone Ranger,” “Roy Rogers,” “Wyatt Earp,” “Gunsmoke,” “Maverick,” “Rawhide,” “Broken Arrow,” “Wild Bill Hickok,” “Annie Oakley,” “Wagon Train,” “Zorro,” “The Cisco Kid,”  “Bonanza,” “Bat Masterson” and “Have Gun Will Travel.”  How much T.V. did we watch???

Those cowboy shows featured memorable theme music and lots of exciting action – gunfights, runaway stage coaches, cattle stampedes and Indian raids.  The violence was mild by today’s standards, and there was never any gore (although all we had was black and white television so what did we know?) Usually the hero would shoot the gun out of a dirty, lowdown outlaw’s hand before anyone got seriously hurt.  Occasionally somebody got “winged,” which meant he showed up in the final scene with his arm in a sling.  A barroom fight often ended with a brawler being tossed out through the saloon’s swinging doors.  When a gang of bad guys wanted to humiliate some city slicker, they shot around his feet and jeered, “Dance!”  My brother Mark got in trouble the time he tried that on my sister. 

T.V. cowboys had the lifestyle we all wished for. Liver and Brussels sprouts were never dished up out of a chuck wagon and eaten off of tin plates around the campfire.  You never saw Gene Autry take a toothbrush out of his saddle bag, even though he and all the other good guys had beautiful teeth.  Cowboys never took a bath unless, during a dust-up, some sidewinder got thrown into the town horse trough.  They even had a language all their own with cool expressions like “Reach for the sky, pardner,” “You’ll never get away with this,” and “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.” 


It’s no wonder the Wild West dominated our play time.  On nice days, my

brother Mark and I were out in the backyard and the woods with our friends, re-enacting what we saw on our favorite shows.  We all had toy six shooters and holsters.  We practiced a quick draw and were good at getting off shots from behind trees and bushes.  At some point, we transitioned to cap guns – if you took the time to thread a roll of red paper caps through those babies, every pull of the trigger was rewarded with a bang and an acrid puff of smoke.  I’d know that cap gun smell anywhere.

 

In bad weather, we stayed inside and drove the stage coach.  Mark and I sat on the high back of the couch and bounced along just like John Wayne and Andy Devine.  Mark snapped the reins, made a clicking noise with his tongue and the side of his teeth and yelled “Yaw” a lot.  I rode shotgun and picked off Indians, rustlers, bushwhackers and varmints like my sister.   Often Mark’s three imaginary cowboy friends, Boss, Tom and Luke Bosom, joined us.  Mark would announce at breakfast that the guys were coming for dinner.  Mom was always up for company; and they were light eaters so she never had to make an extra trip to the grocery.

 After a hot, dusty day on the trail, we bellied up to the bar like real cowboys.  Mark was the bartender.  (Somehow, even though he was younger, he always landed the best roles.)  He couldn’t get my Dad to replace his bedroom door with swinging doors so he had to settle for putting a table across the door to his room in order to serve water or milk in shot glasses.  Of course, any game was always more fun at our grandparents’ house; when Mark played saloonkeeper there, he got to pour our favorite Barq’s root beer out of those tall, nubbly glass bottles into Grandpa A.’s  special souvenir shot glasses.

We were always ready to add to our stock of cowboy gear.  An early Christmas photo (unfortunately lost) showed me in a new Dale Evans cowgirl outfit cooking on the toy stove my dad had made for me – a variation of the “Home on the Range” theme, I guess. Because she was younger, my sister Kay was on the fringes of the cowboy action.  She did have a red cowboy hat even though everybody knew real cowboy hats were supposed to be black or white or tan. She also insisted on pinning a pink scarf to the back of her hat brim so she could swish it around and pretend she had long hair. She was just a little kid so I didn’t say anything, but I was glad Dale Evans, “Queen of the West,” wasn’t around to see that hat.  For Christmas a few years later, when kids with less imaginative parents were getting dollhouses and playhouses, Santa Claus surprised us with a cardboard cowboy jailhouse.  It was tall enough to stand up in, and it had a cell with cardboard bars on the door and windows.  It also came with play handcuffs and a big ring of jangly keys.  You can probably guess who got to be the sheriff.

I was able to “return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear” when John and David went through their cowboy phase.  They were entertained and inspired by cowboy movies, rather than television. The tension of “High Noon, the machismo of “The Magnificent Seven,” the nonchalant camaraderie of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and the absolute cowboy rightness of anything starring John Wayne affected them and their friends just as T.V. Westerns affected us. 

On our Wyoming vacations with the boys, I finally got to meet real cowboys. They worked as wranglers, taking care of the horses and leading trail rides by day and cooking and making the campfire at night.  They were polite and helpful like the Lone Ranger, rugged-looking like John Wayne and tuneful like Roy Rogers or Gene Autry.  They ate like real cowboys too, starting lunch with candy bars, sometimes skipping the main course and always skipping the fruit or vegetable courses. (They fed all the apples and carrot sticks to the horses, unless we ate them first.)  We learned that Paul could never be a cowboy because he chose walking over riding on horseback or in a covered wagon. The cowboy’s motto: Never stand when you can sit and never walk when you can ride.  Many of the cowboys we met competed in the rodeo during their free time, and most of them could have used a good physical therapist and lots of Advil. Overall they were nice, friendly people who worked hard and knew a lot about horses and about Western wildlife.  I wonder how many of them are still around.  Are there any cowboy avatars?


P.S.  If you’re the right age, you can probably identify most of these cowboys.  The dude in black is my brother, Mark.   David and John are pictured at right with Bill Cody, grandson of Buffalo Bill and above with Joe, their favorite wrangler on the Cody ranch.

Click below for the only possible ending to this post
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcYsO890YJY&feature=fvst