October 21, 2025
The Cowboy Way
Timothy Birdnow
This author misses the whole point of our love affair with cowboys.
Why are you seeing cowboys everywhere?
Of course she writes for CNN so that is not a surprise.
Her argument is essentially that we love a fiction that never was, that cowboying is a dirty and thankless business. And technically she's correct. In fact the Old West cowboys were almost all kids, in their early teens. I once saw a claim the average age was fourteen for the average cowboy. There were reasons for that; often parents on hardscrabble farms couldn't feed all their kids when times grew hard and had to send the ones who were just coming of age away. Cowboying paid poorly but they would be well fed on the trail. And the kids? ANYTHING beat being stuck in a one-horse town and working sun to sun in the fields! It's the same reason most outlaws/criminals came from the farms in the old days. Boredom is a powerful motivator.
And yes, it was dirty work, and you rarely bathed except when on the rae occasions you got into town. Once in town you probably squandered your pay in the saloon, or gambling, and a bunch of drunk teenagers did what teenagers do; had sex and got into fights. That is why the cowtowns were so dangerous and rowdy; they were full of a bunch of unsupervised teenagers drinking and carousing.And gambling; in those days there was no t.v. and nothing else to do but drink and gamble. Oh, and everyone was armed, drunk, and if they are losing at cards they might decide someone wasn't playing fair...
But the woman misses the point of the cowboy legend. It's not about the reality of the range but about a morality play. The cowboy is a morally upright man who does what is right even when it is inconvenient or dangerous or uncomfortable. He's a hero, even if a reluctant one. And he represents the frontier and the frontier spirit that built America.
There is something in historical circles called the Turner Thesis. Turner postulated his theory at the very closing of the frontier, and he argued there would be profouond psychological changes in the American People as a result of that. He understood that the frontier always offered an escape hatch to the masses back east; if times got hard they could always flee to the wilderness and start over. It gave people hope when they were in despair; nothing was ever truly over as long as there was a frontier to offer refuge. Criminals or those outcast by polite society could always go West. And the cowboy was the symbol of that lost frontier in a large degree; he was the man who wandered the wilderness, braving bad weather, wild animals, hostile natives, and evil men who had escaped the constraints of the law back east. Law and order were things made by cowboys; sheriffs and marshalls only operated in towns, by and large, and had limited jurisdictions and furthermore usually didn't care. It was up to the cowboy to mete out justice in a lawless environment.
That is why Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show was so popular; it didn't portray the gritty and dirty nature of the cow trails but the moral clarity and heroism and skill of the old West. It was wildly popular in America because it touched the very heart of what Americans WANTED to be. It was our morality play.
Any nation, any cultue, has to have a morality tale. The British had King Arthur, for example. The Greeks had their tales of Ulysses, and of Hercules, and the like. There was Gilgamesh. We had Wyatt Eart, Bat Masterson, James "Wild Bill" Hickok, etc. Even villains from the era - William Bonnie aka Billy the Kid and Jesse James - were imbued with a heroism and honor that we sought to emulate. Cowboys were about truth, justice, and the American way, and Superman just borrowed his moral code from the Old West ideal. Superman was nothing but a cowboy with godlike powers.
(BTW I met Buffalo Bill's grandson in Cody, Wyoming, when I was a kid. He was a friend of my mother's cousin, who was a rancher there and whom we had come to visit - it was a great trip for a little kid! I got bucked off a pony, and saw a rodeo.)
Modern cowboys aren't all that different from the Old West variety. As Yellowstone shows, many are ex-cons or those cast out from society. They do a thankless, dirty job. But they do have a code of honor and want that code there because it is something greater than themselves and they feel a sense of belonging if they follow it.
At any rate the cowboy ethos is deeply imbedded in the American psychology; it is an archetype in our souls. This woman writing this in CNN misses the whole point.
The Left has long waged war on the cowboy myth and has done so because they understand that this is indeed a core thing in the American culture and in our spirit, and they want to fundamentally remake America. To do that the old myths and legends, the things we hold dear, must disappear. So throught he seventies no cowboy movies were being made, for instance. The Western was largely revived by Silverado and Lonesome Dove, and the latter was not made by an American so much as an immigrant from Montserrat (Susanna DePasse, who worked for Motown and discovered the Jackson Five, as it turns out.) The Left, always seeking to change established order, sought to change the Western too. They added women cowgirls. They added black cowboys (blacks dared not go out West after the Civil War for fear of being shot in the back by ex Confederates so there were no black cowboys until pretty much the end of the cowboy era.) They painted the cowboys as the villains and flipped the script, making the Indians the good guys. They did everything they could to water down the legend of the cowboy and the Old West. But it hasn't worked because the West is our American narrative, what we want America to be.
And with the big push by the Progressive/Left to "remake America" as Barack Obama promised the American spirit has come out of it's hiding and we are now proud to be cowboys again. Where the Left used to use "cowboy" as a slur we are now standing proudlin in our boots and wearing our stetson hats. The cowboy IS the quintessential American. He embodies our spirit, our drive, our grit, our morality, and our hope. The Left can only offer hedonism and petulant rebellion.
This author just doesn't understand that the cowboy is our modern moral compass. He's our King Arthur.
And that is a good thing. People need role models, even if the legend does not really comport with the reality. George Washington really didn't chop down the cherry tree and fess up; but we believe he did because he SHOULD have done so. All cultures have their myths and legends and we need ours.
The Left prefers to create their own. "Hands up! Don't shoot!" is one such created by the Left which does not comport with reality. Ditto Geprge Floyd. Martin Luther King has been immortalized as a larger than life saint, a hero, when in fact he had many skeletons in his closet. The Labor movement has been granted this mythical status. So have the suffragettes. So too most leftist radicals. The Left wants to replace the cowboy, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and all of our heroes with their own. They want to eliminate Columbus, and Magellan. They want us to forget Stephen Decatur with Malcolm X. They want us to put Barack Obama where James Madison now stands. In short they want America to die, and to be replaced by a new America, one more in tune with their desires for a socialist utopia.
That's why the cowboy has to die. It horrifies them that this throwback to a simpler time that they deem racist and evil has returned.
The cowboy image may be factually inaccurate but it's who we want to be. The literature of the cowboy, the legend, is our ideal, a great ideal to strive toward.
I am mindful the the movie starring Robert Duvall and Michael Cain and Halley Joel Osmond called Secondhand Lions. Duvall was a former French Foreign Legionaire and he used to tell his new recruits "what every boy needs to know to be a good man". In it he argues for believing in what is good and right even if it isn't technically true. While I do not favor stupidity or belief without fact or reason to back it up (something the Left does all the time) I do think that something like the cowboy legend has great merit not as an historical treatise so much as a guide to a better moral and spiritual code of conduct. We should believe in the Cowboy, even if the reality was quite different from the legend. The legend matters more in this case...
We can accept that dichotomy. Facts are facts and we must accept them and legend is legend and it has a different purpose and roll. Our legend is a good one, and it is uniquely American. Nobody else has anything quite like it. Others have legends but ours is uniquely our own and it touches at the heart of who we are and what we want to believe.
It's why Country Music grew so big; it was our unique cultural soundtrack to our Cowboy heritage.
I love this from the essay:
Why is a female professor at a university in BRITISH COLUMBIA commenting on Cowboy ideals? Her culture gave us the lumberjack, Snidely Whiplash, and the Mounties. She should stick to analyzing those. And how s Trump "centering power in a dominant president"? In case she missed it the Bureaucracy, which Mr. Trump is downsizing, WORKS FOR HIM as he is the leader of the Executive Branch of government which the bureaucracies serve under. And what of this "international organizations" business? They didn't exist before WWII and things outlive their purpose all the time. The end of the Cold War should have seen the dismantling of NATO and these other organizations which were created to contain the Warsaw Pact Communist empire. I would point out the Republic of Texas served to stop Mexico from invading the U.S. but it only lasted ten years. Wlhy should these WWII coalition groups have immortality?
The author sees this as cowboy diplomacy, as if that is a bad thing. O.k., she doesn't like that. What of Hercules? Remember what he did when confronted with the Gordian Knot? Nobody could figure out how to untangle it so Herc just cut it. Problem solved. Trump did that in the Middle East, ignoring decades of convoluted theorizing by stuffed shirt professionals who made their living off the "peace process" and just cut the knot they had tied. Cowboy diplomacy or Herculean cleverness, it amounts to the same thing.
In the final analysis this author has an ax to grind, an ax she wishes to impale in the skulls of the American body politic. It was a nice try but in the end she tips her hand. We aren't all cowboys. But if we tried really hard we could be - and should be.
This author misses the whole point of our love affair with cowboys.
Why are you seeing cowboys everywhere?
Of course she writes for CNN so that is not a surprise.
Her argument is essentially that we love a fiction that never was, that cowboying is a dirty and thankless business. And technically she's correct. In fact the Old West cowboys were almost all kids, in their early teens. I once saw a claim the average age was fourteen for the average cowboy. There were reasons for that; often parents on hardscrabble farms couldn't feed all their kids when times grew hard and had to send the ones who were just coming of age away. Cowboying paid poorly but they would be well fed on the trail. And the kids? ANYTHING beat being stuck in a one-horse town and working sun to sun in the fields! It's the same reason most outlaws/criminals came from the farms in the old days. Boredom is a powerful motivator.
And yes, it was dirty work, and you rarely bathed except when on the rae occasions you got into town. Once in town you probably squandered your pay in the saloon, or gambling, and a bunch of drunk teenagers did what teenagers do; had sex and got into fights. That is why the cowtowns were so dangerous and rowdy; they were full of a bunch of unsupervised teenagers drinking and carousing.And gambling; in those days there was no t.v. and nothing else to do but drink and gamble. Oh, and everyone was armed, drunk, and if they are losing at cards they might decide someone wasn't playing fair...
But the woman misses the point of the cowboy legend. It's not about the reality of the range but about a morality play. The cowboy is a morally upright man who does what is right even when it is inconvenient or dangerous or uncomfortable. He's a hero, even if a reluctant one. And he represents the frontier and the frontier spirit that built America.
There is something in historical circles called the Turner Thesis. Turner postulated his theory at the very closing of the frontier, and he argued there would be profouond psychological changes in the American People as a result of that. He understood that the frontier always offered an escape hatch to the masses back east; if times got hard they could always flee to the wilderness and start over. It gave people hope when they were in despair; nothing was ever truly over as long as there was a frontier to offer refuge. Criminals or those outcast by polite society could always go West. And the cowboy was the symbol of that lost frontier in a large degree; he was the man who wandered the wilderness, braving bad weather, wild animals, hostile natives, and evil men who had escaped the constraints of the law back east. Law and order were things made by cowboys; sheriffs and marshalls only operated in towns, by and large, and had limited jurisdictions and furthermore usually didn't care. It was up to the cowboy to mete out justice in a lawless environment.
That is why Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show was so popular; it didn't portray the gritty and dirty nature of the cow trails but the moral clarity and heroism and skill of the old West. It was wildly popular in America because it touched the very heart of what Americans WANTED to be. It was our morality play.
Any nation, any cultue, has to have a morality tale. The British had King Arthur, for example. The Greeks had their tales of Ulysses, and of Hercules, and the like. There was Gilgamesh. We had Wyatt Eart, Bat Masterson, James "Wild Bill" Hickok, etc. Even villains from the era - William Bonnie aka Billy the Kid and Jesse James - were imbued with a heroism and honor that we sought to emulate. Cowboys were about truth, justice, and the American way, and Superman just borrowed his moral code from the Old West ideal. Superman was nothing but a cowboy with godlike powers.
(BTW I met Buffalo Bill's grandson in Cody, Wyoming, when I was a kid. He was a friend of my mother's cousin, who was a rancher there and whom we had come to visit - it was a great trip for a little kid! I got bucked off a pony, and saw a rodeo.)
Modern cowboys aren't all that different from the Old West variety. As Yellowstone shows, many are ex-cons or those cast out from society. They do a thankless, dirty job. But they do have a code of honor and want that code there because it is something greater than themselves and they feel a sense of belonging if they follow it.
At any rate the cowboy ethos is deeply imbedded in the American psychology; it is an archetype in our souls. This woman writing this in CNN misses the whole point.
The Left has long waged war on the cowboy myth and has done so because they understand that this is indeed a core thing in the American culture and in our spirit, and they want to fundamentally remake America. To do that the old myths and legends, the things we hold dear, must disappear. So throught he seventies no cowboy movies were being made, for instance. The Western was largely revived by Silverado and Lonesome Dove, and the latter was not made by an American so much as an immigrant from Montserrat (Susanna DePasse, who worked for Motown and discovered the Jackson Five, as it turns out.) The Left, always seeking to change established order, sought to change the Western too. They added women cowgirls. They added black cowboys (blacks dared not go out West after the Civil War for fear of being shot in the back by ex Confederates so there were no black cowboys until pretty much the end of the cowboy era.) They painted the cowboys as the villains and flipped the script, making the Indians the good guys. They did everything they could to water down the legend of the cowboy and the Old West. But it hasn't worked because the West is our American narrative, what we want America to be.
And with the big push by the Progressive/Left to "remake America" as Barack Obama promised the American spirit has come out of it's hiding and we are now proud to be cowboys again. Where the Left used to use "cowboy" as a slur we are now standing proudlin in our boots and wearing our stetson hats. The cowboy IS the quintessential American. He embodies our spirit, our drive, our grit, our morality, and our hope. The Left can only offer hedonism and petulant rebellion.
This author just doesn't understand that the cowboy is our modern moral compass. He's our King Arthur.
And that is a good thing. People need role models, even if the legend does not really comport with the reality. George Washington really didn't chop down the cherry tree and fess up; but we believe he did because he SHOULD have done so. All cultures have their myths and legends and we need ours.
The Left prefers to create their own. "Hands up! Don't shoot!" is one such created by the Left which does not comport with reality. Ditto Geprge Floyd. Martin Luther King has been immortalized as a larger than life saint, a hero, when in fact he had many skeletons in his closet. The Labor movement has been granted this mythical status. So have the suffragettes. So too most leftist radicals. The Left wants to replace the cowboy, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and all of our heroes with their own. They want to eliminate Columbus, and Magellan. They want us to forget Stephen Decatur with Malcolm X. They want us to put Barack Obama where James Madison now stands. In short they want America to die, and to be replaced by a new America, one more in tune with their desires for a socialist utopia.
That's why the cowboy has to die. It horrifies them that this throwback to a simpler time that they deem racist and evil has returned.
The cowboy image may be factually inaccurate but it's who we want to be. The literature of the cowboy, the legend, is our ideal, a great ideal to strive toward.
I am mindful the the movie starring Robert Duvall and Michael Cain and Halley Joel Osmond called Secondhand Lions. Duvall was a former French Foreign Legionaire and he used to tell his new recruits "what every boy needs to know to be a good man". In it he argues for believing in what is good and right even if it isn't technically true. While I do not favor stupidity or belief without fact or reason to back it up (something the Left does all the time) I do think that something like the cowboy legend has great merit not as an historical treatise so much as a guide to a better moral and spiritual code of conduct. We should believe in the Cowboy, even if the reality was quite different from the legend. The legend matters more in this case...
We can accept that dichotomy. Facts are facts and we must accept them and legend is legend and it has a different purpose and roll. Our legend is a good one, and it is uniquely American. Nobody else has anything quite like it. Others have legends but ours is uniquely our own and it touches at the heart of who we are and what we want to believe.
It's why Country Music grew so big; it was our unique cultural soundtrack to our Cowboy heritage.
I love this from the essay:
"The Trump administration has taken
cowboy individualism now to an extreme, I believe, gutting the US
government and centering power in a dominant president, while also
pulling the United States out of the web of international organizations
that have stabilized the globe since World War II,” said historian
Heather Cox Richardson during a public lecture at the University of
British Columbia earlier this year.
Why is a female professor at a university in BRITISH COLUMBIA commenting on Cowboy ideals? Her culture gave us the lumberjack, Snidely Whiplash, and the Mounties. She should stick to analyzing those. And how s Trump "centering power in a dominant president"? In case she missed it the Bureaucracy, which Mr. Trump is downsizing, WORKS FOR HIM as he is the leader of the Executive Branch of government which the bureaucracies serve under. And what of this "international organizations" business? They didn't exist before WWII and things outlive their purpose all the time. The end of the Cold War should have seen the dismantling of NATO and these other organizations which were created to contain the Warsaw Pact Communist empire. I would point out the Republic of Texas served to stop Mexico from invading the U.S. but it only lasted ten years. Wlhy should these WWII coalition groups have immortality?
The author sees this as cowboy diplomacy, as if that is a bad thing. O.k., she doesn't like that. What of Hercules? Remember what he did when confronted with the Gordian Knot? Nobody could figure out how to untangle it so Herc just cut it. Problem solved. Trump did that in the Middle East, ignoring decades of convoluted theorizing by stuffed shirt professionals who made their living off the "peace process" and just cut the knot they had tied. Cowboy diplomacy or Herculean cleverness, it amounts to the same thing.
In the final analysis this author has an ax to grind, an ax she wishes to impale in the skulls of the American body politic. It was a nice try but in the end she tips her hand. We aren't all cowboys. But if we tried really hard we could be - and should be.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
09:20 AM
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