FIVE
The twentieth-century image of the cowboy, the most evocative of America's mythic figures, is that of a hero, a knight-errant with a horse and a gun. The gun, and his skill with it, make the cowboy a deadly antagonist, but only against rustlers, bandits, and renegades. In formulaic narratives the cowboy hero may shoot more people than all the outlaws combined, but his killings are justified and self-confidently right.
The men behind the heroic myth were less appealing figures. Journalists in western towns described cowboys as dependable and hard-working when sober but vicious menaces when drunk. Cowboys on sprees shot up towns, terrorized tender-feet, squandered their wages on gambling and whores. "Nobody then thought of them as romantic," recalled a Montana rancher's wife. "They were regarded as a wild and undesirable lot of citizens." President Chester A. Arthur, in his annual message to Congress in 1881, complained that "a band of armed desperadoes known as 'Cowboys'" was making trouble in the Arizona Territory, "committing acts of lawlessness and brutality which the local authorities have been unable to repress." "Morally, as a class," the Cheyenne Daily Leader commented the following year, "they are foulmouthed, blasphemous, drunken, lecherous, utterly corrupt."1
The more candid memoirs are equally unflattering. The rancher Bruce Siberts remembered that most of the itinerant cowhands he saw in South Dakota in 1894 "were burned out with bad whiskey and disease." During the winter about half "were pimps, living off some cheap prostitute in Pierre . . . Most of them had a dose of clap or pox and some had a double dose. All in all, most of the old-time cowhands were a scrubby bunch." Even the cowboys' celebrated freedom has been dismissed. "The cowboy in practice," observes the western writer Wallace Stegner, "was and is an overworked, underpaid hireling, almost as homeless and dispossessed as a modern crop worker, and his fabled independence was and is chiefly the privilege of quitting his job in order to go looking for another just as bad. That, or go outside the law, as some did."2
The realistic image of the cowboy as a hired hand with a borrowed horse, a mean streak, and syphilis may be at odds with the heroic myth. But it is not at odds with the argument that the age and gender characteristics of a place or group in conjunction with its social institutions and norms determine the amount of violence and disorder. The cowboys of the Great Plains were young, male, single, itinerant, irreligious, often southern-born, and lived, worked, and played in male company. In the most expansive and violent years of the range cattle industry, the late 1860s and 1870s, many cowboys were combat veterans and almost all carried firearms. The nature of their work precluded drinking on the job, but they made up for it in payday binges. Those who survived the bad liquor and shooting scrapes found themselves back in the saddle, penniless, doing a job that was almost as dangerous as the whiskey mills themselves and in which few lasted for long.
Cowboys, in short, were lower-class bachelor laborers in a risky and unhealthful line of work. They were members of a disreputable and violent subculture with its own rules for appropriate behavior. The word "subculture" is, I realize, a loaded one, connoting to some a radical rejection of all values and virtues of the dominant culture. That was not true of cowboys. Their politics were usually conventional, as were the courtesy and deference they showed to respectable women. And they certainly worked hard. But much else in the cowboy code was unconventional, and therein lies the point of the term. The unwritten rules which governed their lives and which they passed on to new hands were often at odds with the norms of the Protestant core culture. For the cowboy to become a symbol of the American experience required an act of moral surgery. The cowboy as mounted protector and risk-taker was remembered. The cowboy as dismounted drunk sleeping it off on the manure pile behind the saloon was forgotten or transmogrified into a rough-edged, heart-of-gold fellow who liked an occasional bit of fun.
Origins and Character
The American cowboy subculture, like most frontier cultures, blended elements from different ethnic groups. Its deepest roots, however, were Spanish. It was the Spanish who introduced horses and cattle into the Americas and who perfected the techniques of mounted ranching, such as lassoing cattle from horseback. And it was the Spanish who first brought cattle to Texas and Alta California, two remote provinces on their northern frontier. Americans who settled in Texas in the nineteenth century combined Carolina cattle traditions with Spanish ranching techniques, equipment, and stock and added a few innovations like the chuck wagon. After the Civil War they spread themselves and their cattle into the vast grasslands formerly occupied by the bison, whose great herds were being systematically destroyed by professional buffalo hunters. The expansion of the range cattle industry reached its peak in 1885, with perhaps 7.5 million head feeding on the Great Plains north of Texas and New Mexico. The industry thereafter rapidly declined, owing to a combination of overgrazing, harsh winters, westward expansion of farming, and barbed-wire fences. By the early twentieth century the cowboys were fast diminishing, surviving more in the realm of legend than in occupational fact.
The tasks associated with the range cattle industry—rounding up cows, branding calves, castrating bulls, breaking horses, and trail drives to railheads or northern pastures—required youth, strength, endurance, and cool courage. Texas cattle were easily spooked creatures whose impressive horns and heft could kill a man in seconds. Cowboys on the trail had to be constantly alert not only for stampedes but for human and animal predators. They made do with little sleep and indifferent food, were continually exposed to foul weather, and, like soldiers in the field, had to learn to live with discomfort and minor injuries. That, or quit. Of the roughly 35,000 men who accompanied herds up the trails from 1867 through the 1880s, only a third participated in more than one drive.3 As in gold mining, disillusionment and accidents quickly thinned their ranks. The constant attrition kept cattle herding a young man's game. The average age of cowboys in 1880 was twenty-three or twenty-four years.1
Many of the early cowboys were Texans or Texas immigrants, typically Confederate veterans ("TNT dressed in buckskin") or their sons who migrated to the state after the Civil War. The majority of cowboys were Anglos, though by some accounts a seventh were black men, mainly ex-slaves from Texas ranches. Perhaps another seventh were Mexicans. White southern, African-American, and Mexican-American cowboys had at least one thing in common, apart from mutual dislike. All came from cultures that stressed the desirability of decisive action to redress insult or injury. Texas-born cowboys were particularly notorious for their willingness to resort to guns to settle personal disputes, a trait which contributed to the high level of homicidal violence (32 per 100,000 in 1878) in the state in the decades after the Civil War.5
If cowboys were concerned with their standing in the eyes of their peers, they cared little for conventional social institutions. Few had wives or lived with their parents, unless they happened to be working on the family ranch. Their outlook was thisworldly, not so much antireligious as irreligious. "After you come in contact with nature you get all that stuff knocked out of you," explained "Teddy Blue" Abbott. "You could pray all you damn pleased, but it wouldn't get you to water where there wasn't water."6
A preacher who could "get to water," who could rope a calf or face down a bully, commanded the cowboys' respect. After Daniel Tuttle, the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Utah, thrashed a stage driver for swearing in the presence of a woman, ranchers, miners, and even an occasional sporting man traveled from miles around to have a look at the fighting clergyman. Pugilistic Christianity was fine with cowboys. They were indifferent to the more peaceable sort and regarded regular churchgoing as unequivocally in the feminine realm. Though a few professed to worship in the "outdoor church of nature" and others claimed to have "got religion," orthodox Christianity was fundamentally at odds with the cowboys' masculine self-image.7
What was in keeping with their self-image was a gun. With the exception of professional hunters, cowboys were the most heavily armed civilians anywhere in post-Civil War America. They carried repeating rifles and revolvers, typically large-bore, military-issue weapons whose .44- or .45-caliber bullets did considerable and often fatal damage. Prior to 1880 these weapons were a necessary evil, given the possibility of encountering hostile Indians, robbers, rustlers, rattlesnakes, bears, and the like. But whatever the cowboys' guns bought in the way of deterrence and emergency use was paid for by an increase in accidental death and injury. Cowboy and noncowboy alike died when guns tipped over, dropped from pockets, or fell from blankets. The Caldwell Post, a Kansas cattle-town newspaper, estimated that five cowboys were killed by accidental gun discharges for every one slain by a murderer. Those who survived accidents were often horribly injured, living out their lives with shattered knees or shot-away faces.8
The other evil associated with gun toting was the increased incidence of unpremeditated homicide. "I always carried a gun because it was the only way I knew how to fight," Abbott admitted. "That was the feeling among the cowpunchers. They didn't know how to fight with their fists. The way they looked at it, fist fighting was nigger stuff anyhow and a white man wouldn't stoop to it." Abbott, whose memoirs are unusually self-revealing, explained how his trigger-happiness led to a shooting:
I was really dangerous. A kid is more dangerous than a man because he's so sensitive about his personal courage. He's just itching to shoot somebody in order to prove himself. I did shoot a man once. I was only sixteen, and drunk. A bunch of us left town on a dead run, shooting at the gas lamps. I was in the lead and the town marshal was right in front of me with his gun in his hand calling, "Halt! Halt! Throw 'em up!" And I throwed 'em up all right, right in his face. I always had that idea in my head—"Shoot your way out." I did not go into town for a long time afterwards, but he never knew who shot him, because it was dark enough so he could not see. He was a saloon man's marshal anyway and they wanted our trade, so did not do much about it. That was how us cowboys got away with a lot of such stunts. Besides, the bullet went through his shoulder and he was only sick a few days and then back on the job. But they say he never tried to get in front of running horses again.
Here youthful irresponsibility and intoxication combined with the need to demonstrate courage to produce a violent confrontation, the standard formula for a male group disaster. Had the bullet entered a few centimeters in and down, the hapless marshal would have been killed, dead because a drunken boy was acting out a subcultural fantasy of shooting his way out of trouble.9
Cowboys used their guns to act out any number of roles, the deadliest of which was nemo me impugnit, "no one impugns me." Harry French, a Kansas railroad brakeman, witnessed a fight between cowboys riding in the caboose of his cattle train. It began during a card game when one man remarked, "I don't like to play cards with a dirty deck." A cowboy from a rival outfit misunderstood him to say "dirty neck," and when the shooting was over one man lay dead and three were badly wounded.10
This was a classic scenario for homicide. Then as now most killings arose spontaneously in a group situation involving alcohol, gambling, or some other vice in which socially marginal men suddenly turned on one another with deadly weapons in response to an insult, curse, jostle, or dispute over a small sum of money. From our vantage the disputes seem trivial, though the cowboys undoubtedly viewed them differently, as crucial if dangerous tests of their mettle. "That was one thing that got many a man," Abbott conceded, "that foolish sensitiveness about personal courage.""
Cattle-Town Sprees
This sort of hot-tempered gunplay seldom erupted when cowboys were on the trail. Drinking and rambunctious behavior were not tolerated in a situation where an impulsive act could kill or maim innocent men and destroy thousands of dollars worth of cattle. Cowboys in the saddle were sober employees who assumed large responsibilities and discharged them well.12 Journalists and writers who knew this side of their life often defended the cowboys from their detractors, publishing favorable accounts of their colorful and sometimes heroic activities— breaking broncos, turning a stampeding herd, thwarting rustlers. These stories of cowboy competence and courage, suitably embellished, formed the basis for the heroic myth.
Journalists and writers who only saw the cowboys when they came to town formed a very different impression. Like sailors in port, a simile that often occurred to them, they saw young men mad to spend their accumulated wages. This was especially true at the end of long cattle drives, around which rituals of pent-up consumption, pleasure, and status developed. First a visit to the barber to remove several months' growth of hair and beard, then a trip to the dry goods store for a new hat, clothes, and fancy boots. Then a meal featuring delicacies unavailable on the trail: oysters, celery, eggs. Then on to the saloon, gambling room, theater, dance hall, and brothel, perhaps ending the night by shooting out the street lights or "taking the town." The latter was a sure way to impress peers and earn a reputation, a large consideration for the greenest cowboys, who seem to have been more prone than the experienced hands to go wild."
Cowboy sprees had three important consequences, all undesirable from the standpoint of individual well-being and social order. They made the cowboy's life even more dangerous and unhealthful. They kept many cowboys impoverished, dependent, and unable to marry. And they attracted vice predators, who, as on the mining frontier, heightened the level of violence and disorder.
In the heroic myth cowboys are the very picture of sinewy health. The geologist David Love, who grew up in Wyoming in the early twentieth century, recalled that they were "lean, very strong, hard-muscled, taciturn bachelors," mostly in their twenties or early thirties, who worked without complaint from daylight to dark. But he also saw something else, something left out of the myth:
Most were homely, with prematurely lined faces but with lively eyes that missed little . . . Many were already stooped from chronic saddle-weariness, bowlegged, hip-sprung, with unrepaired hernias that required trusses, and spinal injuries that required a "hanging pole" in the bunkhouse. This was a horizontal bar from which the cowboys would hang by their hands for 5-10 minutes to relieve pressure on ruptured spinal disks that came from too much bronc-fighting. Some wore eight-inch-wide heavy leather belts to keep their kidneys in place during prolonged hard rides.
The damage done by bucking animals, accidents, frostbite, and lightning storms was compounded by a monotonous and inadequate diet. Cowboy grub was long on meat, flour, and beans. It was short on fresh fruit and, ironically, dairy products. In the early years the cowboys did not even have milk for coffee, which they called "blackjack" or "bellywash" and drank hot and strong. This imbalanced, calcium-deficient diet may have contributed as much to their celebrated bow-leggedness as did long hours in the saddle.14
When these rickety young men rode into town they hit the saloons, false-fronted palaces full of smoke, gamblers, tubercle bacilli, and spittoons. There they used their hard-earned wages to treat themselves and their comrades to round after round of drinks, or what they took to be drinks. Liquor dealers commonly watered whiskey to maximize profits, concealing their chicanery and restoring the kick by adding stimulants like strychnine and tobacco. Cowboys drank this stuff neat and became extravagantly intoxicated, not so much drunk as on a polypharmaceutical jag, their bodies full of several different kinds of poisons.15
The end-of-trail binges often ended in the red-light district. The name originated in Dodge City from the railroad brakemen's custom of leaving their red lanterns outside the door to avoid interruption. Cowboys were equally avid customers of cattletown prostitutes, some of whom were as young as fourteen years. Commercial prostitution was tolerated because of its profitability and because of the common belief that it provided a safety valve for working-class men who might otherwise sexually assault respectable women—which assaults were, in fact, rare.16
The social rationalizations on behalf of prostitution did nothing to alter the fact that it was a leading cause of venereal disease. Studies undertaken in the early twentieth century showed that the majority, in some instances 90 percent or more, of prostitutes harbored gonorrhea or syphilis; that prostitution was a prolific source of venereal infection; and that unmarried men were more likely to be infected than married men. The greatest venereal risk to cowboys who visited prostitutes was undoubtedly syphilis. Known to doctors as "the great imitator," the disease often returned later in life in the form of paresis, locomotor ataxia, or aortic aneurism, fatal souvenirs of their youthful encounters with whores.17
Sprees destroyed savings as well as health, reinforcing what was transparently a two-class system. A cattleman was a capitalist and employer, generally married, who lived in a ranch house built on his own land. A cowboy was an employee, unmarried, who tended cattle marked with another man's brand and who lived in a bunkhouse ("doghouse," "shack," "dump," or "ram pasture") built on another man's land.18 The bunkhouse was not destiny. Cowboys who saved their wages, a dollar or at most two a day, could eventually acquire a small ranch and herd, slender but sufficient means for starting their own families. But those who kept spending their money on liquor, gamblers, and prostitutes could not achieve the stake necessary to escape their status as hirelings. Without property of their own they were not in a financial or social position to marry, potential brides being scarce and choosy about their suitors. And the absence of a wife and family made it more likely that they would continue to spend their earnings on in-town sprees. The result was a literally vicious circle.
Among those who profited from the cowboys' recurring dissipation were the gamblers and prostitutes who flocked to the cattle towns during the shipping season, moving on during the winter or when the trade was slack. Prostitutes earned their money directly while gamblers relied on a combination of skill, house odds, and cheating to separate cowboys from their wages. One New York firm specialized in selling marked or "advantage" decks to professional gamblers for $10 a dozen or $85 a gross. Loaded ivory dice were sold in sets of nine (three high, three low, three square) for $5 apiece. Why cowboys kept coming back to the saloon gaming tables against men so equipped is puzzling, though some showed clear signs of being compulsive gamblers, easy marks for a card sharp. Other cowboys, shrewder perhaps, quit the saddle and became professional gamblers themselves.19
Few gamblers retired to a life of luxury. The money was sometimes good but they spent it every bit as fast as the cowboys they fleeced. The prostitutes, who often lived or associated with gamblers, spent just as recklessly. A few made money and quit the trade. Some married out, though it is hard to know how many, for they covered their tracks. But the prostitutes' more usual fate was a miserable existence copulating with sweaty strangers, earning less for their trouble as they aged. The almshouse was a common end, as was suicide by overdose or poison.20 Many sought solace in alcohol and other drugs, typically opiates in the 1870s and 1880s and cocaine and opiates from the 1890s on.
As on the mining frontier, arguments over women and cards could quickly turn into deadly confrontations. Abbott, who witnessed several shooting scrapes in bars and sporting houses, recalled that saloon men and tinhorn gamblers were as apt to get themselves killed as cowboys. The historian Robert Dykstra, who studied newspaper reports of homicides in five booming Kansas cattle towns, confirmed Abbott's impression. He found that precisely as many cowboys were victims of homicide as men identified as gamblers.
Dykstra also found that the average incidence of homicide in the five municipalities—Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell—was 1.5 per town per year. This may seem a small number, but so was the average population, which did not exceed 3,000. The resulting homicide rate was quite high, 50 or more per 100,000 persons per year. Someone living in (or more likely visiting) a Kansas cattle town was ten times as likely to be murdered as a person living in an eastern city or in a midwestern farming county.
Actually, more than ten times as likely. Because Dykstra did not count all homicides outside town limits or before the towns existed as municipalities (when, at least in the case of Dodge City, there were even more killings) and because the newspaper series he used had one significant gap, the true rate was undoubtedly higher. Roger McGrath, who has reexamined Dykstra's methods and data, thinks it likely that Dodge City's actual homicide rate was in the range of that of the California mining town of Bodie, 116 per 100,000. Fort Griffin, Texas, another frontier town frequented by cowboys, buffalo hunters, and soldiers, had an even higher rate, 229 per 100,000 during its boom years in the 1870s.21
Fort Griffin is the perfect illustration of what happens when the biological, demographic, cultural, and social forces conducive to violence intersect in one place and time. In the 1870s the town was in the middle of the Central Texas frontier zone, an exceptionally violent region in an unusually violent state. It had a hunting, grazing, and military economy and therefore a large surplus male population, including many southern-born men who were combat veterans, sensitive about personal honor, and deeply contemptuous of other races. Family and religious life were inchoate for the transient, lower-class men, who lived and took their recreation in male groups. That recreation involved the consumption of large amounts of liquor, often in a spree pattern, and vices that could trigger sudden conflict. The conflicts were settled with deadly weapons that the combatants routinely carried. Given these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the homicide rate was so high.
Legal Ambivalence
When differences in lethal violence are of this magnitude, homicide in Fort Griffin in the 1870s being nearly forty times as common as homicide in Boston, one is prompted to ask why the citizens put up with it. It was obvious that the spree pattern and the local vice industry were among the primary sources of violence and disorder. It was equally obvious who the culprits were. Why was the problem allowed to fester?
On this point, at least, historians are unanimous. The answer is money. A cowboy at the end of a drive had perhaps $50-$90 in his pocket, a large sum in a cash-short region. Some of his wages were bound to go to the vice parasites, but local merchants, barbers, and restaurant and hotel operators knew they would get their share, either directly from the cowboys or from the gamblers and prostitutes, who were as free-spending as their victims. Jacob Karatofsky, an immigrant dry-goods merchant who operated the Great Western Store in the heart of Abilene, understood the situation well. He sold blankets, boots, and hats to the cowboys and "fancy dress goods" to the town's prostitutes, who had expensive tastes and the wherewithal to satisfy them. When the cattle trade left Abilene Karatofsky went with it, first to Ellsworth and then to Wichita, where business was sufficiently brisk to open two stores.22
The profitability of such commerce made it inexpedient to have too much law and order. The disorderly behavior of their drunken visitors was a chronic problem, but businessmen knew that if the town marshal came down too heavily the cowboys would take their cattle and their wages elsewhere. The same logic applied to the suppression of vice. Cowboys would not come to town if they could not have a good time. To deny business to the local saloons and brothels was to deny it to the dry-goods stores and banks as well.
The best that could be done was to fashion a police and court system designed to keep the lid on. Cattle-town justice, to use the term loosely, was aimed at controlling, segregating, and profiting from cowboy vice sprees, not at discouraging them. It was intended to minimize both taxpayer expense and ancillary violence, though its inconsistencies—one is tempted to call them the cultural contradictions of capitalism—made control of violence difficult.
The task fell to some of the most legendary figures in frontier history, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, and Bat Masterson, as well as a host of less well known peace officers. The theory was to hire someone with the pluck to stand up to criminals and drunken cowboys and the lethal skill to stop them if lesser means of coercion failed. The fight-fire-with-fire approach was reasonable enough, though it sometimes failed in application, as when Wild Bill mistakenly shot and killed another Abilene policeman. And it was of no particular use during the slack season, when the saloons were empty and the gamblers and prostitutes had gone elsewhere. Marshals were then expected to serve the taxpayers in less dramatic ways, inspecting chimneys, rounding up stray swine, and, in the improbable case of Wyatt Earp, repairing the town's sidewalks.23
The marshals and local judges were also expected to raise money by taxing vice. Cattle-town judicial records are full of prosecutions for operating disorderly houses, but these were merely the means of securing revenue in the form of fines. In the town of Canada, Texas, creditable prostitutes were permitted to pay deposits on their fines and then were returned to the streets to earn the balance. In Fort Worth madams simply paid up and returned to their parlor houses, regardless of the number of previous convictions. Dodge City judges afforded equally lenient treatment to prostitutes for reasons of both municipal revenue and political expediency. We know, through the voyeuristic device of manuscript census records, that several of the prostitutes were living with prominent Dodge citizens, including the mayor, two policemen, and the vice president of the local bank.24
Gambling arrests, another source of revenue, produced their share of politically delicate moments. A sweep of gamblers in Coffeyville, Kansas, turned up a majority of the town council. Kansas saloon owners were not subject to the indignity of fines but had to pay a substantial licensing fee, which amounted to the same thing. In Wichita the saloon license fees and other vice fines produced so much revenue that in August 1873 the city treasurer announced that no further taxation would be required to support the local government.25
Cattle-town courts may not have been expected to stamp out vice, but they were expected to do something about serious personal and property crime. Yet even here commercial considerations intruded upon the exercise of justice. No cowboy or cattleman was ever executed for murder in the five towns Dykstra studied. Acquittals were common, as was a form of plea bargaining in which the offender pled guilty to a lesser offense, such as assault and battery instead of attempted murder. "Under the influence of liquor" was often offered, and sometimes accepted, as an extenuating circumstance. Business calculations were paramount. When in 1874 a group of Texas cowboys deliberately killed a black laborer in Wichita, no attempt was made to apprehend them. A newspaper editor criticized the inactivity of city and county officials only to have the wrath of the town's businessmen descend upon his head. They feared that the editor would stir up the citizens against the cowboys, provoking a retaliatory boycott. Or, as Abbott put it, "They wanted our trade. That was how us cowboys got away with a lot of such stunts."26
Vigilantism
Lax enforcement against drunken cowboys was one thing; lax enforcement against real outlaws was quite another. Cowboy sprees were dangerous but primed the local economy. Horse thieves, cattle rustlers, and highwaymen took property and lives without conferring any offsetting benefit. The official frontier justice system, inadequate and underfunded when not actually duplicitous, failed to deter such hardened criminals. They often escaped arrest or, if apprehended, the makeshift jails in which they were detained. In 1877 some five thousand men were on the wanted list in Texas alone, not a very encouraging sign of efficiency in law enforcement.27
The result was extralegal movements against outlaws. Most vigilante actions were limited in scope and controlled by elites, targeted thieves who would otherwise have escaped punishment, and symbolically affirmed the values of order and property. They were, in a word, socially constructive. But vigilante actions could and did miscarry, as when they were used to arbitrarily punish racial minorities or settle personal grudges. The latter form of abuse sometimes triggered private warfare, with friends and relatives of lynch victims seeking revenge against the vigilante faction.28
The Central Texas range country was the epicenter of vigilantism in the two decades after the Civil War. Most of these vigilante actions (known in Texas as "mob" actions) were summary executions of accused horse and cattle thieves who were hanged or simply shot down in their jail cells. Cowboys and ranchers generally played the role of executioner, but if they were caught or accused of rustling they might be executed in turn.
Vigilantism was easily abused. The "Old Law Mob," a group active in the Fort Griffin area in the early 1870s, included a rancher who was having problems with his wife. She hired an attorney to secure a divorce. The rancher warned the attorney to leave town within twenty-four hours. The attorney demurred and was found several days later with an "O.L.M." note pinned to his dangling body. No one troubled, or perhaps dared, to bury his remains, which were still visible a year later.29
Vigilantism, in short, was a dangerous substitute for professional police and regular courts. It is interesting that Canada's western provinces, which had both, experienced far less violence and lynching than the American frontier states. Canadian criminals were left to the North-West Mounted Police, an efficient and highly regarded force. The Mounties were aided in the their task by the prevailing Canadian attitude toward violence, which was condemned as an American aberration having no place in the realm of peace, order, and good government.30
Cowboy Gun Control
The Canadian frontier had something else that was initially lacking in American cattle towns: effective gun control. It was obvious to everyone that a drunken cowboy with a pistol was a good deal more dangerous than one without. Western newspaper editors and civic leaders supported laws forbidding the carrying of pistols and other deadly weapons, mainly dirks and Bowie knives. By the early 1870s most American cattle towns had nominally outlawed the practice. Cowboys were expected to "check" their guns when they entered town, typically by exchanging them for a metal token at one of the major entry points or leaving them at the livery stable before they hit the saloons.31
The gun laws were a good idea but poorly enforced, especially during the 1870s, the worst decade of killing on the cattle frontier. Cowboys persisted in wearing their pistols or took to concealing them, which was even more dangerous. Their defiance of the law was both a cause and an effect of the prevailing violence: as long as there were other armed men and outlaws about, it was hard to persuade them to surrender their weapons. Their resistance was as much emotional as rational. Guns were central to the subculture, objects of ritual significance to which the cowboys had been introduced in early youth. The idea that tin-star marshals (Yankees, no less) could take them away did not sit well.*2
The situation changed in the 1880s and 1890s. As the threat of Indians and outlaws receded and the regular police system gradually became more professional and efficient, it was harder to justify carrying personal weapons for self-defense. Responsible cattlemen like Colonel R. G. Head, the superintendent of the Prairie Land and Cattle Company, began urging their hands to forgo gun toting, which he denounced as "a pernicious and useless habit," both illegal and foolish. "If you cannot freely and finally give up your pistol," he added, "then take it off, leave it at camp or rolled up in your bedding; by doing this I am inclined to the belief that you will soon learn to appreciate the absence of such an appendage." Head's successor, Murdo McKenzie, was equally adamant against firearms, and made it a point never to carry a gun himself."
Gun control, enforced by determined employers, was probably the single most potent check on homicidal violence among cowboys, more effective than the specter of the lynch mob or even Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp. Getting hanged for shooting someone was a remote prospect, but getting the sack from an angry foreman was not. Head, McKenzie, and other cattlemen who insisted that cowboys lay aside their pistols understood that their men were not usually thinking straight when they pulled the trigger and that most shootings were either accidental or due to drunkenness, gambling, or hot-headed impulse. Better, then, that they should have no gun to reach for. It was a simple and obvious means of prevention and one that seems to have worked. By 1900 most cowboys had never seen a killing, much less participated in one. Many still owned guns— they were, after all, cowboys—but kept them out of sight, stowed in a bedroll or under the bunk.'4
The emphasis on gun control, part of the larger rationalization of the range cattle industry, was complemented by a gradual change in the composition of its employees. By the 1880s the Texans, who of all the cowboys and cattlemen were the most predisposed to use firearms and to take the law into their own hands, were gradually being replaced by easterners, midwesterners, and European immigrants. The trend was especially marked on the northern ranges, where a new class of cowboys was helping to bring greater organization and discipline to the business. The newcomers were not as inclined to use their guns promiscuously or to insist on wearing them in town."
If the South exported violence as its inhabitants moved to the frontier, what happened on the northern plains during and after the 1880s was the reverse, a northern order transplant. Once again, the level of violence was not simply a function of age and gender but was influenced by the immigrants' attitudes. Any population with a surplus of young men had a built-in tendency toward trouble. But the tendency was lessened if the surplus consisted, as in this case, of an increasing number of Europeans, easterners, and farm boys trying their hand at ranching and a decreasing number of heavily armed southern men.
Cowboy Myth
The gun-toting cowboy may have been declining in numbers and influence by the 1880s, but his career as a mythic hero was only beginning. It commenced in earnest with Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a popular rodeo and historical reenactment featuring cowboys racing horses, riding steers, and lassoing broncos. When not occupied with wild animals, Buffalo Bill's cowboys repulsed Indian attacks on wagon trains and mail coaches. Allied with scouts and soldiers, the cowboys were presented as the advance troops of white civilization, heroic "rough riders" who shot it out with the exotic but menacing Indians.
William F. Cody, the show's creator and manager, was a frontier jack-of-all-trades who had achieved fame as an actor and a pulp fiction protagonist. Alert to the commercial possibilities of the public's fascination with frontier adventures, Cody launched his Wild West as a touring show in 1883. By the time of his death in 1917 the Wild West had been seen by an estimated 50 million people in a dozen countries in North America and Europe. That is, 50 million people saw the cowboy portrayed as a trick roper and Indian-fighting hero rather than a spree-prone hireling in a shrinking industry.
Buffalo Bill's Wild West was only the most spectacular vehicle of cowboy myth-making, a flourishing business that ran the gamut from hack writers like Prentiss Ingraham and Ned Buntline to real talents like the novelist Owen Wister and the painters Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. Cody's success inspired no fewer than 116 competing shows. Most were short-lived but at least one, the Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch Wild West Show, managed to last until the Great Depression. By that time the myth-making enterprise had shifted to a new and more costefficient medium, the motion picture.36
Western themes figured in movies as far back as 1903, when Edwin S. Porter released his innovative The Great Train Robbery. By the early 1920s Hollywood had a stable of western stars, among them William S. Hart and Tom Mix, a veteran of the Miller Brothers' show. The popularity of the western declined somewhat during the 1930s when star actors like Gene Autry were confined to "B" movies, but in 1939, Hollywood's annus mirabilis, the western film began a renaissance with big-budget features like Dodge City and Union Pacific. The epic westerns of the 1940s were not simply cowboy movies. They portrayed an array of frontier characters, although cattlemen and cowboys, whose colorful clothing, horses, and guns and penchant for deeds over words made them ideally suited to the action-oriented medium, remained stock figures. In films such as American Empire (1942) and Red River (1948) they were accorded central roles.37
The western film continued its dominance through the 1950s. Between 1950 and 1961 Hollywood studios churned out more than 1,200 films about the past, over half set in the years between 1866 and 1890. This chronological imbalance—audiences must have thought American history synonymous with the late nineteenth century—was due to the mass production of westerns. Competing media were also saturated. Publishers sold an average of 35 million paperback westerns a year. The new television networks reprised countless western movies and were soon producing their own western programs. By 1959 there were thirty running in prime time, including eight of the top ten shows. The most enduringly popular of these, "Gunsmoke," had begun as a successful radio drama, making its television premiere in 1955. When it went off the air in 1975 it was the longest-running series in television history.38
"Gunsmoke" was the genre's last hurrah. Westerns declined in the 1960s and 1970s, becoming progressively fewer in number, more self-referential, and darker in tone. But they continued to have at least one thing in common with their predecessors: they apotheosized male violence and marginalized women and children. The mise-en-scene was a town, outpost, or ranch on the high-gender-ratio frontier, not a family farm in a demographically normal region. The basic plot, even if morally ambiguous and sympathetic to Indians, was still that of masculine corporate adventure. Individual men came together, fought for a common cause against a group of opposing men, and then went their separate ways, unless killed or snared by a woman in a romantic interlude. Gunfire and wedding bells were functionally equivalent in westerns. They both signaled that a man was about to be taken out of action, honorably in the one instance, prosaically in the other."
Did the mass exposure of three generations of audiences to violent male adventurers in the guise of cowboys and other gun-toting western characters influence the level of actual violence in American society? This is an important yet frustrating question. Important because there are psychological reasons to suppose that such exposure made a difference. Frustrating because effects of mass media are difficult to isolate and measure.
Experimental studies of varying scope and ingenuity have shown the viewing of violent characters to be positively correlated with aggressive behavior, although the effect is not necessarily strong, permanent, or universal. The most pronounced effect (though weak in comparison to those of variables like alcohol abuse and family disruption) has been observed in less academically talented boys who are already relatively aggressive but who become more so after viewing rough-and-tumble episodes. Media violence, in other words, appears to serve as a trigger or an exacerbating influence rather than a primary cause of violent behavior.40
It may also reach deeper into our psyches. Our personalities emerge from the interaction of our genes, which are fixed and predispose us in some ways, and our social situations, which are fluid and present many possibilities for development and change. We become ourselves in no small part by emulating positive or negative figures in our social environment, something that has already been noted in connection with the behavior of men in barracks, saloons, mining camps, and other male preserves.
In the electronic age the social environment has come to mean more than flesh-and-blood people. It includes a thousand or so media personalities, the Elvis Presleys and Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Madonnas whom most of us have never met but whose images we nevertheless carry in our heads. Communication researchers have discovered that, for many people, these celebrities are socially real. People act like them, dress like them, talk like them, talk about them, talk to them, and even make love to them in their fantasies. As Wallace Stegner puts it, "We are not so far from our models, real and fictional, as we think."41
The dominant screen model for moviegoing and televisionwatching Americans in the mid-twentieth century was the frontier action hero, often though not always the mythic cowboy. He was personified by John Wayne, a cult star familiar to every American born before 1960. Wayne symbolized, and in his political statements explicitly affirmed, the belief that lethal means are necessary and appropriate to righteous ends. The cinematic personae of Wayne and other western stars not only legitimated gun carrying and violence, they fixed in the consciousness of an increasingly urbanized nation the whole mythic apparatus of the western range in the two decades after the Civil War. Though this realm was a sometimes violent and disproportionately male world, it became in its screen reincarnation ultraviolent and hypermasculine. The cattle frontier never closed. It just came back in technicolor.42
Or possibly in Southeast Asia. In many ways the best (though also the strangest) illustration of the pervasiveness of frontier myth in postwar America was the Vietnam War. The language of Vietnam GIs, young men who were more imbued with frontier imagery than any other group of Americans before or since, brimmed with cinematic cliches and western allusions. Nineteen-year-olds ate John Wayne cookies and John Wayne crackers out of C-rations they opened with their John Waynes (P-38 can openers). A John Wayne rifle was a .45-caliber service pistol—nobody could hit anything with it, but the Duke could mow them down at 300 meters. To "John Wayne it" was to attempt any foolish act of heroism. Stock short-timer advice to a cherry: Don't pull a John Wayne on me.
In Vietnam military operations had code names like Texas Star, Cochise Green, or Crazy Horse, the last featuring the Seventh Cavalry in helicopters. The deluxe Seabee bunker at Khe Sahn was called the Alamo Hilton. To "saddle up" was to head out on patrol against "the bad guys" in "Indian country" beyond the perimeter. "Dodge City" referred variously to the military complex at Tan Son Nhut; the contested valley between Charlie Ridge and Hill 55 in I Corps; or, for Navy pilots, Hanoi. "To get out of Dodge" was, generally, to leave any hostile or dangerous area.
"Cowboy" had a multiplicity of uses, usually ironic or pejorative. "The Cowboy" was Nguyen Cao Ky, the flamboyant South Vietnamese Air Force officer who served as prime minister and later as vice president. "Cowboys," plural, referred to draft-age male Vietnamese civilians; more specifically to the hoodlums and black marketeers who roamed Saigon on motorcycles, sometimes accompanied by prostitutes ("cowgirls"); or more specifically still to members of the ARVN Special Forces (LLDB) or to a new breed of U.S. Special Forces troopers who arrived after 1968. In Laos ("across the fence") cowboys were CIA paramilitary operatives, a secret Air Force helicopter unit the "Pony Express." FACs (forward air controllers) logged twelve hours a day "in the saddle." One FAC showed up dressed entirely in black—black cowboy hat, shirt, jeans, and boots—and announced that his reason for volunteering was that Laos seemed a good place to die. This was a man who had seen too many movies.43
Whatever their social consequences may have been, movie cowboys were very different from the genuine item. The historical cowboy was not a heroic gunfighter-avenger but an unmarried lower-class laborer who led a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence. He was a hard worker on the trail, loyal to his outfit and friends, and usually open, honest, and generous. But when he was on a spree, "drunk and dressed up and don't give a damn," he was a menace to himself and those around him.44
Cattle-town marshals did their best to keep serious trouble from erupting, though they were handicapped by the moral contradiction at the heart of the economic system. Open vice was profitable to their towns but attracted criminal elements along with thirsty young cowboys eager to shoot their pistols and blow their wages. The price of separating them from their money was a relatively high level of violence and disorder. Everyone in the real Dodge City understood this trade-off, which the location of the jail made explicit. It was on Front Street immediately opposite the cowboy saloons.45