Bob Meeks, who would be 88 now, told me once that down in Frio County the life of a cowboy was more drudgery than excitement. The only fun in it, he reckoned, was giving the women hell on Saturday night–if you could find one. No, the old pastimes like bronc busting and calf roping have been out of favor on the serious ranches for years. The large remudas are gone and the horses are expensive and indulged more as pets and symbolic hobbies than as work animals. Joe Boy Ellis, the big general manager at the Circle K in Kaufman County, says there are three things he will fire a hand for, and roping is one of them. “We’ve got from two hundred to a thousand dollars in each head,” he said, “and we don’t want their hides skinned.”
Everyone who works on a ranch isn’t called a cowboy. The rancher himself, even if he lives and works on the place, may not like the handle. There is a subtle connotation on the term that is both appreciative and pejorative. A cowboy can be admired for his skill in the old ways, but they aren’t of much unless he’s Larry Mahan and has good public relations costuming. If he isn’t willing to stay put and mend fence, bale hay, and drive a tractor, he isn’t worth hiring. You find ranchers correcting you: “I’m a cowman, not a cowboy.” The former implies manful responsibility and no nonsense, a manager, a businessman in boots and gabardine; the latter suggests immaturity and a romantic nature. The hand who insists he is a pure cowboy and will not touch anything but leather and hemp and animals is often a drifter, a kind of bad actor who is playing a role rather than working at a trade. This is the cowboy portrayed in our music, who has captured the popular imagination. Our last rustic of the road, riding into the sunset away from the corruption of city slickers and science. The old movie-and-TV popular imagination saw the cowboy as a killer with a six-shooter, a gun for hire. The new musical romanticism has him a gentle knight, repulsed by arms and armor and aggression and refinery air, returning to a pastoral West. Neither, of course, was ever a reality.
Excerpted from ‘In Search of the Modern Cowboy’ by Bill Porterfield. Published in Texas Monthly, volume 3, issue 10, October 1975.