Made In America - Bill Bryson [85]
Even cowboy was an old term. It was first used during the Revolutionary War as a disparaging epithet for loyalists. In its modern sense it dates from 1867 when an entrepreneur named Joseph McCoy (another oft-named candidate for the source of the expression the real McCoy) began employing cowboys to run longhorn cattle up the Chisholm Trail from Texas to his railhead at Abilene, Kansas. He became immensely successful and by the early 1870s was shipping out up to 500,000 head of cattle a year from the dusty town. (Cow town didn’t enter the language until 1885.)
To distinguish one herd of cattle from another, ranchers began using brands, and these developed a complicated argot of their own. A letter tipped on its side was called ‘lazy’. A line underneath a letter was a ‘bar’. A letter written with curving lines rather than straight ones was called ‘running’. And from these came the names of many ranches: the Lazy X Bar, the Running Wand and so on.22 There were literally thousands of brands – 5,000 in Wyoming and nearly 12,000 in Montana by the early 1890s – and publishers made a good income from producing annual brand books. Unmarked cattle were called mavericks. The name comes from a Texas rancher named Samuel A. Maverick who refused to brand his cattle – though whether because he was eccentric or lazy or simply hoped to claim all unmarked cattle as his own is a matter of long dispute among western historians.23
Hollywood has left us with the impression that the West was peopled by little but cowboys. In fact, farmers outnumbered them by about a thousand to one. Even at their peak there were fewer than 10,000 working cowboys, at least a quarter of them black or Mexican (and the remainder not a great deal higher up the nineteenth-century social scale).24
The cowboy of popular imagination was largely the invention of two highly unlikely easterners. The first was the artist Frederic Remington, whose action-filled, hyper-realist paintings were in fact largely studio creations based on a lively imagination. He never saw any real cowboys in action. For one thing he was immensely fat – much too fat to get on a horse, let alone ride it into the midst of Indian battles. Even more crucially, by the time he made his first trip to the West the cowboy age was all but over.
No less disconnected from life around the camp-fire was his close friend Owen Wister, who mythologized cowboys on paper in much the same way that Remington mythologized them on canvas. Cowboys had begun to appear as heroes in dime novels as early as the 1880s (the genre appears to have been the invention of one Prentiss Ingraham), but it wasn’t until Wister published The Virginian in 1902 that the cowboy (or cow-boy as Wister insisted on spelling it) truly became a national figure. Wister was the quintessential dude (a word of unknown origin dating in a western context only from 1883, though it was used earlier in the East). Scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family and grandson of the celebrated actress Fanny Kemble, he was a Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, a close friend of Teddy Roosevelt, and of a decidedly delicate disposition. Unlike Remington, he actually travelled in the West, though he hardly hit the dusty trail. He was sent west by his parents to recover from a nervous breakdown and was chaperoned throughout by two spinsters.
Although Wister introduced many of the conventions of cowboy fiction – the use of a hero without a name, the introduction of a climactic shoot-out between the hero and villain, the immortal line ‘When you call me that, smile!’ – his main achievement was to make the cowboy a respectable figure for fictionalization. He began the process with a now forgotten novel called Lin McLean, but brought it to full fruition with The Virginian. The story of an easterner (unnamed of course) who goes west, it struck a chord with millions of Americans, but particularly among the better educated at whom it was aimed. The book sold 50,000 copies in its first four