SOURCE: “Nature and Cowboy Poetry,” in Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry, edited by David Stanley and Elaine Thatcher, University of Illinois Press, 2000, pp. 226‐38.

[In the following excerpt, Miller focuses on how early cowboy poets depicted their close association with nature, and how these references to the natural environment changed as the encroachment of civilization continued to alter the western landscape.]

The culture and way of life of cowboys and the cattle industry in the American West are inextricably linked to nature and the physical landscape. It is a relationship that has always been at the very soul of the cowboy's existence, for his occupation, cultural heritage, and often personal identity are built upon day‐to‐day, long‐term associations with nature.

Just as cowboying as an occupation has evolved since the early days of the western frontier, the cowboy's relationship to nature has also evolved. Evidence of change is everywhere visible; the cultural landscape is increasingly marked by technology as the pickup truck and other machinery have partly replaced the horse and rider, and the physical landscape is also greatly altered. The unbroken plains and mountains have given way to patterned rows of fencing, lushly irrigated pasture lands, overgrazed sand barrens, and even resort communities.

Not so obvious are the changes that have taken place in the ranching culture's perception of its interaction with nature. Although it is rare to find historical documentation of this kind of perceptual change, the strong oral tradition of cowboy poetry clearly reveals a shifting relationship. It also provides a rare opportunity to trace the evolution of a culture's perceived relationship with nature. Cowboy poets are great expressive chroniclers, and with the perspective of insiders completely fluent in their idiom are able to document, interpret, and reflect upon cowboy life.

Cowboy poets use their relationship to nature to generate metaphors and allegory, color the mood and setting of narration, and symbolize personal identity and cowboy culture. A review of cowboy poetry since the early twentieth century reveals an evolutionary development in its references to nature that correlates with the historical development of the American West. That development seems to occur in three stages:

1. The Old Paradigm: Nature Equals Chaos, Civilization Equals Order. The cowboy's encounter with nature became a metaphor for the human struggle for life and for the struggle to civilize the West. Poems of this period are characterized by enormity of landscape, natural disasters that test individuals and groups, and a correlation between nature and the devil.

2. A New Paradigm: Nostalgia Ushers in a Growing Respect for Nature. As the West was tamed, cowboy poets reflected upon old ways of life—times of unfenced range and long trail drives. Around 1900 they began to chronicle a growing respect for nature and describe personal identity in terms of the relationship between the cowboy's way of life and the natural environment. Major themes of this stage include nostalgia, regional patriotism, and nature separating westerners from the cultured East.

3. The Old Paradigm Inverted: The Chaos of Civilization Becomes the Major Threat to the Environment and to Cowboy Culture. During the 1980s and 1990s, civilization in the form of government, laws, regulations, and population pressures threatened the cattle industry in the West and the foundations of the cowboy lifestyle. The cowboy code expanded to include a responsibility to maintain the natural order and act as steward of the natural landscape. Poets began to correlate the decay of the natural environment with the erosion of cowboy culture.

These developments constitute a clear evolution in the relationship between cowboys and nature. At first the natural environment was seen as a threat to the pioneer cattle industry in the West. The forces of nature contained uncontrolled powers at odds with the destiny of humans. According to their poetry, early cowboys struggled to defeat nature, survive in a harsh world dominated by natural forces, and build a future for western culture. Just as their ancestors had domesticated cattle for the benefit of humanity, they believed their destiny was to tame the landscape and introduce civilization.

As cowboys worked to tame the forces of nature, cowboy culture became intimately wedded to the natural landscape. Indeed, cowboys' personal and occupational identity grew out of the day‐to‐day interaction between personal experience and the natural environment. Similarly, their cultural identity grew from the cumulative acceptance of nature as an integral part of his heritage and lifestyle. Work in harmony with nature has become an important theme in cowboy poetry that endows the cowboy with the power and wisdom of the environment.

Increasingly, cowboys have recognized that the relationship between the natural environment and the civilized landscape parallels the relationship between their culture and the increasing complexity of civilization—urban society—itself. In almost completely reversing their predecessors' relationship to nature, contemporary cowboys align themselves with nature to do battle against outside forces of government and civilization that threaten to destroy both the natural environment and their culture. Nature is no longer cowboys' rival, for they see it as a part of their identity, an inseparable component of their way of life. Indeed, the perceived threat to lifestyle and traditions is the same force that threatens the natural environment: the insatiable encroachment of civilization in the form of laws, taxes, regulations, economic constraints, the increasing expropriation of natural resources for national development, and the degradation of the landscape due to pressures of industry and population growth.

Cowboy poets are the chroniclers of this constantly changing West—how the landscape and environment have changed, how humans have adapted their lifestyles to accommodate or accelerate those changes, and how their cultural perceptions have evolved. Fortunately, the tradition of writing poems and songs has accompanied the occupation since its earliest days; consequently, the interpretive cultural record stretches back for more than a century. Cowboys and ranchers have chronicled their lives and occupations and, in parallel, their relationship to the natural landscape. Exploring this relationship between natural and cultural environments can provide insight into the interactive changes of environment, lifestyle, and perceptions of cowboys as a cultural group.

THE OLD PARADIGM: NATURE EQUALS CHAOS, CIVILIZATION EQUALS ORDER

Dating back to the commentaries of the first European‐Americans to enter the region, the West has been consistently described in exaggerated terms greater than reality. The awesome expanse of the Great Plains is frequently compared to the vastness of the ocean. The Rocky Mountains are described as barriers to civilization. The weather is extreme, summer and winter, and danger is everywhere. The enormous extremes of western landscape as depicted in the paintings of artists such as Albert Bierstadt are still mirrored in cowboy poetry and recitation.

Early on, the poets and balladeers of the nineteenth‐century West adapted the occupational songs of other cultures to the rigors of life on the frontier. The cowboy's struggle with the wild and untamed environment found resonance in the oral traditions of other occupational groups who risked their lives and fortunes in a struggle against nature. Songs of sailors, for example, were adapted to cowboy life. The sailor's vast ocean became the cowboy's rolling prairie, the herds of buffalo a living tide. In “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” burial at sea became death on the desolate western plains; “The Cowboy's Lament” is a funeral march down the streets of Laredo.

The poems of Robert W. Service, whose popularity peaked during the 1920s and 1930s, are clearly very different in their Yukon settings from cowboy poetry, yet they have entered the repertoire of many cowboy poets through recitation. Service's popularity suggests the lasting appeal of his themes of nature's power and humanity's struggle to survive. Although set in a land far from cattle country and replete with unfamiliar occupational references, the poems resonate with cowboys because they conjure up the primeval struggle between people who work in the elements and the natural environment.

Like the ancient sailors and the characters of the Service poems, early cowboy poetry demonstrates the struggle to calm the wild, uncontrolled, unproductive aspects of nature and to channel those resources into building a bucolic, safe environment where nature would exist under the control and to the benefit of humanity. The early cowboy poets knew well the terrors unleashed by nature in a land out of their control, and scores of poems attest to the hostility presented by the landscape. In “The Desert” (1914), E. A. Brininstool warns:

Sun, silence, sand and dreary solitude;
          Vast stretches, white, beneath a glaring sky;
Where only those stout‐hearted may intrude,
          With Death to harass them and terrify.(1)

A poem by Homer W. Bryant, “He Rang the Devil's Knell,” portrays nature as the devil himself as a cowboy endures a windy night: “The wind so long, made an eerie song, as it followed the first guard's trail,” and then “he saw a light in the darkened night and he thought of the fires of hell.” Bryant continues, “The restless herd and the eerie wind, it carried a deathlike song. … / That seemed to keep time with the beat of his heart, like the devil was tagging along.”²

“The Llano Estacado” is an old cowboy song that describes the fate of a cowboy who ventured across Texas's Staked Plains and died of thirst.³ Here and elsewhere, as in Bryant's poem, the West is portrayed as a living hell or worse, as described in the anonymous “Hell in Texas.” In that poem, the Lord tricks the reticent devil into taking excess Texas property off his hands, whereby the devil adds a creative flourish:

He began to put thorns in all of the trees,
And mixed up the sand with millions of fleas;
And scattered tarantulas along all the roads,
Put thorns on the cactus and horns on the toads.(4)

The literature also contains a large body of poems from the early twentieth century that describe the terrible forces of nature in terms of natural disasters that dwarf the presence and action of those on the landscape. In the anonymous “Wrangler Kid,” for example:

The grass fire swooped like a red wolf pack,
          On the wings of a west wind dry.
Its red race left the scorched plains black
          'Neath a sullen, smoky sky.(5)

Furthermore, unpredictable extremes of weather represent an ever‐present danger. Many poems relate the loss of whole herds of cattle to blizzard conditions; Hamlin Garland's “Lost in a Norther” compounds the danger of becoming lost on a featureless prairie with the life‐threatening conditions of a two‐day blizzard.⁶

Whether bound in print or maintained in the repertoire of oral recitation, few collections of cowboy poetry exist without reference to that dreaded occupational hazard, the stampede—a topic especially popular in the nineteenth century because eastern readers were so unfamiliar with it. In these poems, herds of domestic cattle represent raw energy ready to explode at the slightest spark, whether caused by man, as in “Utah Carroll”; by wild animal, as in Freeman Miller's “The Stampede”; or by the weather, as in “Lasca” by Frank Desprez.⁷

Many cowboy poems both past and present contain ominous descriptions of darkening skies and heavy, humid air that foreshadow approaching disaster. The lightning storm, representing the rawest energy of nature, can conjure up the most primeval animal powers feared by humans. It can ignite what little remains of the wild ancestry of the cattle and transform a calm, domestic, humanly controlled herd into a savage tidal wave of deadly energy. Melvin Whipple's “Electric Storm” begins with the Frankenstein‐like transfer of energy that takes place between lightning and monster: “Did you ever see the fire on the tips of the cattle's horns, / A‐dancin' and a‐playin' in a fierce electric storm?”⁸

This romantically adventurous and dangerous relationship between nature and man has become one of the symbols of the cowboy. Nature's challenge to the cowboy can be presented in two ways. Individuals pitted alone against the forces of nature must develop skills and acumen to combat nature on its own terms. But if the challenge is presented to cowboys as a group, their hope of survival lies in the ability to work as partners, each contributing their share to overcome natural adversities. Nature presents those challenges, which in turn identify the danger, the adventure, and the rewards of the occupation. According to tradition, a successful cowboy could meet each of nature's tests and wear each accomplishment as a badge converted into a poem, story, song, or recitation. With each repetition the individual and group connection to nature and the occupation itself was reinforced. Contemporary cowboys still work with the powers of nature every day, so tales of old adventures and dangers are well understood and relevant.

A NEW PARADIGM: NOSTALGIA AND A GROWING RESPECT FOR NATURE

As European‐American farmers and merchants moved west of the Mississippi and began settling the plains and mountains around the turn of the century, cowboy poets increasingly began mentioning a growing distaste for the complications of civilization in the forms of barbed wire, railroads, towns, restrictive laws and institutions, domestic culture, and conflicts with other groups. The cowboy lifestyle had changed substantially from the days of the great cattle drives, when cowboys could ride from Texas to Montana in one season, to the days when they would work at a single ranch for an entire season or a lifetime. Poetry began to highlight the distinction between the old days when the West was untamed and uncontrolled and the new era of fenced grazing allotments, towns within a day's travel occupied by diversely employed people, a whirl of technological advancements, and growing pressures on tamed but limited resources.

Unlike the early songs and poems that depict the cowboy struggling against nature, poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began chronicling their nostalgia for the old days and the old ways just as the Old West slipped from their grasp. Their former relationship with nature was now described as a part of the working life they loved, and in many ways that perceived relationship formed the core of their identity. “The Last Longhorn”—which the Lomaxes attribute to Judge R. W. Hall of Amarillo—uses a nostalgic, talking longhorn steer to symbolize the passing of the Old West and the end of the old cowboy life:

“I remember back in the seventies,
Full many summers past,
There was grass and water plenty,
But it was too good to last.
I little dreamed what would happen
Some twenty summers hence,
When the nester came with his wife, his kids,
His dogs, and his barbed‐wire fence.”(9)

As cowboys developed these new themes in their poetry, they also explored their relationship to nature and the land. With nostalgia they reflected upon their feelings and eloquently refined their stand regarding the landscape. More frequently now, nature was described with respect and referred to lovingly in terms of home and native land. Cowboy poets joined the ranks of other westerners in writing what amounted to patriotic poems dedicated to the natural environment. That in itself set them apart from Americans living and writing in the crowded, urban East. Examples of what might be called regional patriotism include Brewster Higley's “Home on the Range,” E. A. Brininstool's “Where the Sagebrush Billows Roll,” and Charles A. Siringo's “Way Out West.”¹⁰

As cowboys began separating themselves from cultured easterners, a closeness to nature became the symbol of that difference. The intimate relationship with nature is sometimes expressed in personal, down‐to‐earth terms. In deliberate contrast to what they perceive as a highly refined and overly sophisticated urban population, cowboy poet‐humorists enthusiastically approach the subjects of breeding and bodily functions in direct and natural terms. Although that repertoire is not completely free of vulgarity and tastelessness, it includes outstandingly clever gems of wit and tongue‐in‐cheek allegory that will undoubtedly remain a permanent part of the literature. No poet has ever delivered a cleverer friendly insult than Wallace McRae in “Reincarnation,” in which he elaborately develops the cycle of birth, death, and decomposition on the range simply to call a friend a pile of horse manure—but in much more eloquent terms.¹¹

In cowboy poetry, nature is also depicted as a worthy adversary, something that brings out the best in a man or woman. It is an opponent to be respected and negotiated with, and in those negotiations, even if cowboys do not gain material wealth they are always rewarded with a greater self‐understanding or an appreciation for the human relationship with the land. Gary McMahan's song “The Old Double Diamond” tells of a cowboy who at first “was a damn poor excuse for a man.” He credits nature for its role in making him a good cowboy and a mature man who concludes “I'm moving on, but I'm leaving with more than I came”:

I fought her winters and busted her horses,
          you know, it took more than I thought I could
                    stand.
But the battles with the mountains and the cattle
          seemed to bring out the best in a man.(12)

Respect for nature is often represented by the cowboy's relationship with horses and cattle. These animals—often wild, independent, and proud‐spirited—are frequently described with human traits of bravery, individualism, perseverance, devotion, loyalty, innocence, and purity. Indeed, the most domesticated animals may be portrayed with the worst characteristics of over‐civilized humans who create their own problems because they ignore innocent, honest, and pure natural instincts for the patterned, ingrained, and inbred responses of civilization. The careful breeding that humans employ to domesticate animals and improve stock is ironically responsible for the animals' stupidity and loss of individuality (as numerous poems making fun of chickens, turkeys, and sheep attest), dooming them to a destiny of eternal and inescapable subjugation and dominance. Modern cattle breeds, for example, are nearly incapable of surviving unassisted, and if left to the ravages of nature their demise would be immediate.

That situation is often contrasted in the stories and poems of cowboys by accounts of nature calling a formerly domesticated or renegade animal to return to its natural state, a theme made popular by Jack London's The Call of the Wild (1903). The animal regains its individuality, virility, cunning, and inventiveness, sometimes becoming magically invincible, as in “Windy Bill,” “The Strawberry Roan,” and “The Flyin' Outlaw,” all from the early twentieth century.¹³

In some poems, the renegade animal is characterized as a paradoxical combination of good and evil, as if all the wild and pagan powers of nature have gathered strength to defy the domination and control of humans. Some poems present this as a clear struggle between good and evil in which humanity (although somewhat reluctantly) performs its duty of domination because that is how it sees its role in the plan of life. The reluctance to dominate rises out of sadness and the realization that victory heralds the fall of free will and wildness. Even when the wild mustang is the personification of evil, the image of a self‐determined mustang running free and wild, the wind in its mane, is far more attractive and alluring than the well‐trained steed that obediently bends to command or spur.

“The Buckskin Mare” by contemporary poet Baxter Black develops this theme further than usual. In this poem, the narrator becomes obsessed with conquering a wild mare, which, over a period of years, has become legendary among local cowboys for her strength and independence:

Some attributed her prowess
to a freak in Nature's Law.
                    Still others said
                    she was the devil's spawn
                                        So the incident that happened
                                        at the top of Sheepshead Draw
                                                            Served notice hell's account
                                                            was overdrawn.(14)

His obsession drives the narrator to hunt her down and capture her, but instead of taming her in the traditional way, the cowboy submits to the base instincts of fear, anger, and frustration. In total disrespect, he shoots the wild mare dead. As the poem ends, other cowboys reject him for essentially murdering that symbol of nature incarnate and for acting like a traitor, betraying their culture and the Code of the West.

The tragedy of “The Buckskin Mare” is more apparent when one realizes her similarity to cowboys, who often see themselves as individuals who have managed to break away from the herd of modern civilization to establish identity and exercise free will. A closeness to nature has sharpened their wits and reflexes and provided the skills to maintain their independence and control their destinies. Like the wild mustang, they can draw upon the powers of nature to fortify their resolve to defy encroaching civilization, which in several different ways threatens cowboy culture and traditional lifestyles. …

Notes

1. E. A. Brininstool, “The Desert,” in Trail Dust of a Maverick (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1914), 19.

2. Homer W. Bryant, “He Rang the Devil's Knell,” manuscript copy.

3. “The Llano Estacado,” in John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 313‐15.

4. “Hell in Texas,” in Lomax and Lomax, Cowboy Songs, 319.

5. “The Wrangler Kid,” in Best Loved Poems of the American West, ed. John J. Gregg and Barbara T. Gregg (Garden City: Doubleday, 1980), 278‐80.

6. Hamlin Garland, “Lost in a Norther,” in Best Loved Poems, ed. Gregg and Gregg, 21‐24.

7. “Utah Carroll,” in Lomax and Lomax, Cowboy Songs, 125‐28; Freeman Miller, “The Stampede,” in Best Loved Poems, ed. Gregg and Gregg, 186‐88; Frank Desprez, “Lasca,” in John A. Lomax, Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp (1919), (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), 23‐26.

8. Melvin Whipple, “Electric Storm,” in Echoes of the Past: The Cowboy Poetry of Melvin Whipple, ed. Jim McNutt (San Antonio: University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures, 1987), 14.

9. R. W. Hall, “The Last Longhorn,” in Lomax and Lomax, Cowboy Songs, 326.

10. Highley's authorship of “Home on the Range” is documented in Jim Bob Tinsley, He Was Singin' This Song: A Collection of Forty‐Eight Traditional Songs of the American Cowboy, with Words, Music, Pictures, and Stories (Orlando: University Presses of Florida, 1981), 212‐15; E. A. Brininstool, “Way Out West,” in Trail Dust of a Maverick, 51; Charles A. Siringo, “Way Out West,” in Lomax and Lomax, Cowboy Songs, 333.

11. Wallace McRae, “Reincarnation,” in Cowboy Poetry: A Gathering, ed. Hal Cannon (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1985), 185‐86.

12. Gary McMahan's “The Old Double Diamond” has been recorded by a number of other singers, notably Ian Tyson, Old Corrals and Sagebrush (Columbia FC 38949).

13. The anonymous “Windy Bill” and Curley Fletcher, “The Strawberry Roan” and “The Flyin' Outlaw” are all in Cowboy Poetry, ed. Cannon, 26‐27, 57‐59, 59‐63. A contemporary example is Lucky Whipple, “Buckin' Horse Ballet,” in Cowboy Poetry, ed. Cannon, 137‐38.

14. Baxter Black, “The Buckskin Mare,” in Black, Croutons on a Cow Pie (Brighton, Colo.: Coyote Cowboy Co., 1992), 2:190.