SOURCE: “The Cowboy Hero: An American Myth Examined,” in The American Cowboy, by Lonn Taylor and Ingrid Maar, Harper and Row, 1983, pp. 63‐79.

[In the following essay, Taylor examines the rise of the traditional cowboy persona over the course of the nineteenth century, focusing on the evolving depictions of the cowboy in popular culture. Taylor theorizes that America's perception of itself can be traced through the years by examining the changing image of the cowboy.]

During the middle years of the nineteenth century—the four decades divided by the Civil War—a series of changes took place that profoundly altered the fabric of everyday life in America and, consequently, the way in which Americans thought about their country and its future. During those forty years, a federation of states in which life for most people was rural and agrarian became a nation whose future was irrevocably urban and industrial. This transformation, which was accelerated enormously by the war itself, was characterized by the increasing concentration of the population in urban centers, by the spread of a railroad network which linked those centers to each other and to their rural hinterlands in an interdependent economic system, and by the rise of gigantic manufacturing industries which provided that system's life's blood in the form of jobs, income, and durable goods. Within a lifetime, a pastoral nation became an industrial one, or, as we might say today, an underdeveloped nation became developed.

These changes meant that an American who had reached the age of seventy in 1890 could look backward over a youth spent in the bustling days of the Jacksonian republic; an early manhood observing, and probably participating in, the exuberant expansion of the nation from sea to sea; and a middle age marked by the sectional crises of the 1850s and the bloody horror of the Civil War. He could look forward to spending his remaining years in a country dominated by industrial monopolies, torn by open warfare between factory owners and workers, and flooded with immigrants from places he had not even imagined the existence of, who lived in slums and toiled from dawn to dusk in mills, mines, and factories.

The condition of the working class in post‐Civil War America was especially bad. The Jeffersonian ideal of a nation of independent farmers had somehow gone awry. Farmers all over the nation, but especially in the South, slipped into tenancy and debt in the 1870s and 1880s. Industrial workers had even less hope of advancement and independence. In 1869 Wendell Phillips described American industrial workers as a class “that only rises to toil and lies down to rest. It is lifted by no hope, mellowed by no comfort; looks into gardens it created, and up to wealth it has garnered, and has no pleasure there; looks down into its cradle … there is no hope.”¹

Suddenly, in the mid‐eighties, a new Jeffersonian figure burst upon America: the cowboy. As pictured in the illustrated press in the mid‐eighties, he was young, heroic, independent, and relentlessly Anglo‐Saxon. It is easy now, with the hindsight of a century later, to see him as yet another manifestation of that old American western hero Leatherstocking, who appeared over and over throughout the nineteenth century to glorify and explain the West, but to Americans a century ago the cowboy embodied all of the old American values, emergent once more in a new form at a time of national despair. An anonymous writer in Harper's summed up the apparent contrast between the dismal realities of industrial capitalism and the cowboy's life:

The herding and breeding of cattle … is … the primitive scriptural occupation, the grand, independent, health‐giving, out‐of‐door existence, the praises of which have been sung through all the ages. To how many a pale, thin, hard‐working city dweller does the thought of “the cattle on a thousand hills,” the rare dry air of the elevated plateaus, and the continuing and ennobling sight of the mighty mountains bring strangely vivid emotions and longings?²

The first flush of the cowboy's popularity came in the 1890s, and he was endowed by his eastern admirers with all the virtues of the Progressive movement. The first mythical cowboy was manly, self‐reliant, virtuous, competitive (but always fair), a free agent in the labor market, dependent only on his own skills for employment, and, above all, 100 percent Anglo‐Saxon, embodying all of the alleged virtuous characteristics of that ethnic group. Once established in this manner, the mythical cowboy hero became a medium through which America's own changing social values were displayed. In the 1920s, the decade of craziness, he became a daredevil entertainer, both on the screen and, as rodeo became a national spectator sport, in the flesh—riding, roping, shooting, and, as films acquired sound, singing. In the depression‐ridden thirties he became an escapist fantasy: a crooner in a fringed shirt and tooled boots, singing about a never‐never land where tumbleweeds tumbled and the water was always clear and cool. In the 1940s and 1950s, as juvenile audiences swelled, he became a surrogate parent. In the 1960s and 1970s he became a corporate spokesman. We have yet to see what new forms he will take in the 1980s and 1990s.

It is hard to conceive of a time when cowboys did not occupy a niche in the average American's set of mental stereotypes, but during the first years of the cattle boom, the late 1860s and early 1870s, easterners were only dimly aware of the cowboy as a personage. Their impressions of him were vague and sometimes contradictory. It was not until the mid‐1880s that these impressions began to coalesce into the single well‐defined image of the cowboy hero. This heroic image first appeared in the popular press at the same time that corporate investment in the open‐range cattle industry reached its peak, and it was refined in the 1890s, the years immediately following the collapse of the boom, when the cowboy, like the Indian, was thought of as a vanishing American.

Before this image coalesced, Americans got their impressions of the cowboy from a variety of sources: travel literature, dime novels, frontier melodramas, Wild West shows, and popular illustrated periodicals like the Police Gazette and Frank Leslie's. The strongest and most prevalent of these images, up to the mid‐eighties, was an extremely negative one fostered by the illustrated press: the average cowboy was a drunken, rowdy, dangerous individual, usually a Texan, whose occupation was very close to criminal activity.

The very word cowboy had pejorative connotations before the Civil War. In the 1830s it was applied to gangs of Anglo‐Americans in Texas who specialized in stealing cattle from Mexican ranches. James Harper Starr, a Connecticut Yankee who came to Texas in 1837 to practice medicine and stayed to become secretary of the treasury of the bankrupt republic, used the word in 1839 to record in his journal an encounter with “a company of Texas cowboys” who had stolen hundreds of cattle, mules, and horses from “the inoffensive inhabitants of Chihuahua.” Fifteen years later Charles W. Webber described a character in Tales of the Southern Border as “a cattle‐driver; or ‘cow‐boy,’ as those men are and were termed who drove in the cattle of the Mexican rancheros of the Rio Grande border, either by stealth or by plundering and murdering the herdsmen! They were, in short, considered as banditti before the revolution, and have been properly considered so since. This term ‘cow‐boy’ was even then—and still more emphatically, later—one name for many crimes.”³

After the Civil War, when the great cattle drives to Kansas began and cowboys first came in contact with illustrators and writers for the eastern press, they kept this reputation for bad character, which was undoubtedly exaggerated and sensationalized by the press. During the late 1870s and early 1880s virtually every issue of the National Police Gazette and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly carried at least one woodcut illustration purporting to represent an actual incident somewhere in the West, showing cowboys engaging in reckless, lawless, and frequently murderous behavior. … In some of the woodcuts the cowboys are merely being drunkenly frolicsome, but the texts accompanying the woodcuts made it clear that the activities pictured were reprehensible. Frank Leslie's of January 14, 1882, told its readers:

The cowboy of the great cattle ranges is a distinct genus … he enters upon his business in life when he is seven years old. His pet is his horse, his toy a revolver. When off duty cowboys are a terror in the way they manifest their exuberance of spirits. Two or three will dash through a town, and before the people know what is going on will have robbed every store … and made their escape. They practice a kind of guerilla warfare during their brief and infrequent holidays in the towns. … Two have defied successfully a dozen constables, and a score could circumvent an entire company of militia.⁴

The caption below a woodcut of two innocuous‐looking cowboys published the next year left no doubt about Frank Leslie's opinion on cowboys in general: “Morally, as a class, they are foul‐mouthed, drunken, lecherous, utterly corrupt. Usually harmless on the plains when sober, they are dreaded in the towns, for then liquor has the ascendency over them.”⁵

Taken as a whole, this group of woodcuts—and there are literally hundreds of them—first portray the cowboy stereotypes that continued to appear in fiction, on stage, and in films up through the 1930s, and in some cases up to the present. We see cowboys riding horses into saloons; galloping down the streets of small towns, pistols blazing; shooting at the feet of traveling salesmen to make them dance; disrupting theatrical performances; and generally behaving in a reckless, rowdy, and unbecoming manner. Their context, mixed in among illustrations of child‐murderers, wife‐beaters, bank robbers, and occasional boxers, jockeys, and actresses, makes it clear that the editors and their readers regarded the cowboy as part of the fringes of society, if not the underworld. Yet these woodcuts, nearly all of them anonymous, are the direct ancestors of the romantic and idealized illustrations of Frederic Remington, Frank Tenney Johnson, Maynard Dixon, and their followers. They are the original western art.

The first American encounter with the cowboy, however, occurred in the 1830s and was part of the much larger encounter with the Spanish Southwest that took place in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century, and the first cowboys that Americans came to know were the Spanish‐Mexican vaqueros of Texas and California. Their exotic costume, their superb horsemanship, and their skill with the lasso made an enormous impression on those who saw them, an impression that made its mark on visual representations and literary descriptions of the cowboy well into the 1880s.

The vaquero was first dimly perceived as a horse‐hunter, a shadowy figure associated with the vast herds of wild horses that roamed the western prairies. First described by Washington Irving in A Tour of the Prairies (1832), these herds and the horse‐hunters who followed them became a staple of every popular description of the West that followed. As American colonists pushed into Mexican Texas, they met vaqueros face to face. In 1834 the anonymous author of A Visit to Texas not only described the mustangs and the mustangers, he also provided a sketch to accompany his description. … That sketch, in the form of a woodcut, is probably the first American illustration of a southwestern cowboy. It shows two men on horseback, both wearing low‐crowned hats and one clad in the short breeches and white leggings of the early nineteenth‐century Mexican horseman. The vaquero has just roped a mustang; his lasso is taut and his horse squatting against the impact. The other rider is swinging a large loop over his head. The accompanying text explains:

The small horses of the country, called mustangs, introduced by the Spaniards, and now numerous in the more northern prairies, run wild in droves over these parts of Texas, and are easily taken and rendered serviceable to the inhabitants. … This is done with a strong noosed cord, made of twisted strips of rawhide, and called a lazo, which is the Spanish word for band or bond. It has often been described, as well as the manner of throwing it, as it is in common use for catching animals, and sometimes for choking men, in the different parts of America inhabited by the descendents of the Spanish and Portugese.⁶

The lasso and its use seemed to fascinate observers as much as the vaquero himself, as it was a peculiarly Hispanic tool, its use unknown to Anglo‐Americans until they crossed the Mississippi. It even insinuated itself into decorative art. At least four English potteries in the 1850s produced a china pattern intended for the American market showing a vaquero lassoing a horse or a bull. In the 1870s and 1880s, the image of the vaquero was frequently used in advertising, usually either for leather products or to indicate durability. … The lariat was always a prominent part of the design, as were the broad‐brimmed hat and short jacket. So deeply rooted in popular consciousness was the image that in 1887, at least a decade after realistic illustrations of Anglo‐American cowboys had begun to appear, a Texan penman advertised his skill with a trade card showing a “Cow Boy” horseman in full vaquero dress even though the calligrapher lived in Gainesville, Texas, on the edge of the cattle country, and must have had the opportunity to observe the dress of Anglo‐American cowboys almost daily. …

It was the California hide trade that brought the vaquero into his own as a recognizable figure with decidedly romantic associations. The trade began in the early 1820s, when Boston traders discovered that California rancheros would pay high prices in hides from their immense herds of cattle in return for manufactured goods, but it was not until the publication of Richard Henry Dana's popular Two Years before the Mast in 1840 that the general public began to have a clear idea of the hide trade or of the California ranches that supplied it, and of the vaqueros that roped and slaughtered the cattle on them. Dana described the dress of the ranchero and his vaqueros, consisting of a

broad‐brimmed hat, usually of a black or dark brown color, with a gilt or figured band around the crown, and lined under the rim with silk; a short jacket of silk or figured calico … the shirt open in the neck; rich waistcoat, if any; pantaloons open at the sides below the knee, laced with gilt, usually of velveteen or broadcloth; or else short breeches or white stockings. … They have no suspenders, but always wear a sash around the waist, which is generally red, and varying in quality with the means of the wearer. Add to this the never‐failing poncho, or serape, and you have the dress of the Californian.

In a later passage Dana remarked on the horsemanship of the California vaqueros, saying, “they are put upon a horse when only four or five years old, their little legs not long enough to come halfway over his sides, and may be said to keep on him until they have grown to him. … They can hardly go from one house to another without mounting a horse.”

By the end of the Civil War the vaquero had become a symbol for the old Spanish days in California, already invested with an aura of romanticism. The publication of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel of Spanish California, Ramona, in 1884, gave the vaquero a renewed symbolic life, but by then a new image of the cowboy had begun to coalesce, and the two went their separate ways.

In 1872 easterners got a chance to see an Anglo‐American cowboy in the flesh, if only as an adjunct to a frontier melodrama. That fall the impresario Ned Buntline engaged a Virginian named John Burwell Omohundro, Jr., who had gone West after serving in Jeb Stuart's cavalry, to play Texas Jack in his three‐act melodrama The Scouts of the Prairie, or Red Deviltry As It Is. Dressed as a scout or buffalo hunter, Texas Jack exploited the cowboy's peculiar tool, the lasso, on stage.

Omohundro had worked as a cowboy in Texas, had gone to Kansas on a trail drive, and was employed by the army as a scout at Fort McPherson. In the winter of 1870‐71 he served with William F. Cody as a hunting guide for the earl of Dunraven, who described Jack as “tall and lithe, with light‐brown close‐cropped hair, clear laughing honest blue eyes, and a soft and winning smile. … [He] might have sat as a model for a typical modern Anglo‐Saxon.”⁷ Cody was already a person of some note, having distinguished himself as an army scout, hunting guide, and buffalo hunter. He shared billing with Omohundro in The Scouts of the Prairie and later took over the troupe from Buntline. A third member of the cast was an Italian dancer named Giuseppina Morlacchi, who played the part of Dove Eye, an Indian maiden, who before the theater season was several months old married Texas Jack.

Buntline's play opened in Chicago in December 1872 and traveled to Saint Louis, Cincinnati, Rochester, Buffalo, Boston, and New York. No script has survived, but from a synopsis published in a New York paper it would appear that it was a thinly plotted series of skits, including a temperance lecture by Buntline, some shooting tricks, several Indian dances, a knife fight, a dramatic rescue, a prairie fire, and “Texas Jack and His Lasso.” The play was a precursor of the Wild West show. Texas Jack was the first cowboy performer and the first cowboy to gain national attention. Buntline, who knew a good thing when he saw one, kept his stars before the public during the run of the play with a dime novel entitled Texas Jack, or Buffalo Bill's Brother, published by DeWitt's Ten Cent Romances, and a serial story in the New York Weekly called “Texas Jack, the White King of the Pawnees.”

The Scouts of the Prairie was a great success, as were the plays that followed it—The Scouts of the Plains, Texas Jack in the Black Hills, and The Trapper's Daughter. Omohundro died in Leadville, Colorado, on June 28, 1880, but the name of Texas Jack was well-known enough in 1883 that Ned Buntline thought it would be profitable to entitle a dime novel Texas Jack's Chums; or, The Whirlwind of the West. In 1891 Prentiss Ingraham, another dime novel virtuoso, published Texas Jack, the Mustang King, and in 1900 Joel Chandler Harris used Texas Jack as the central character in a number of short stories about the Civil War. Today he is forgotten, but there is no doubt that he was the first cowboy star.

The popularity of the frontier melodrama continued through the 1870s and 1880s. Beginning in 1873, Cody's troupe, the Buffalo Bill Combination, took to the road each season with a new play. Some of his plays, like The Red Right Hand, or, Buffalo Bill's First Scalp for Custer, were based on Cody's roles in contemporary western events, although Cody himself remarked of this particular one that it was “a five‐act play, without head or tail, and it made no difference at which act we commenced the performance.”⁸

Cody was by no means the only producer of frontier melodramas, but his plays set a pattern for others, most of which emphasized the scout's and the miner's frontier—rather than the cattleman's—but nevertheless played an important role in preparing the public for the cowboy hero. These plays familiarized eastern audiences with western settings and characters. Since they were didactic, attempting to contrast certain types of behavior and, by doing so, teach a system of values as well as entertain, they spent virtually no time on character development but instead identified characters as good or bad by costuming, music, or even their names—a device that later made it much easier for the public to accept a completely untarnished cowboy hero. Finally, as theatrical historian Rosmarie Bank has shown, unlike most previous American plays, they were not about “the privileged few, but the ordinary and hard‐working many.” Thus, “the frontier character became a symbol for a whole range of social aspirations: the desire to begin again and to succeed solely on one's merits; the ability to contribute personally to national expansion and development; the opportunity for excitement along with one's daily toil.”⁹ All of these aspirations eventually came to be focused on the cowboy hero.

During the same decade that the frontier melodrama was bringing easterners the flavor of the West, an older medium was introducing them to the cowboy himself. The dime novel was the culmination of a publishing trend which began in the 1830s, when the introduction of the steam rotary press, combined with new techniques in marketing and distribution, made inexpensive popular literature possible. Its first form was the weekly story paper, followed in the 1840s and 1850s by fifteen‐ and twenty‐cent novels published in series like Ballou's Weekly Novelette and Gleason's Literary Companion. In June 1860 the House of Beadle and Adams published the first dime novel, Maleska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, which sold 65,000 copies within the first few months. By 1870, there were six major dime novel publishers in the United States, each one churning out an enormous amount of fiction.

Not all dime novels were set in the trans‐Mississippi West. In fact, in the majority of them the action took place in an unspecified eastern forest, on the high seas, or in some exotic tropical or Middle Eastern setting. Like melodramas, however, they dealt with basic social problems in a didactic and entertaining way and, as Daryl Emrys Jones has perceptively noted, the protagonist was usually a figure who stood outside society and thus could serve as both a critic and a righter of wrongs: a scout, guide, or horse‐hunter living with the Indians, a pirate, a spy, or a soldier of fortune. Jones goes on to point out that many dime novels explore a theme common to later western novels: the relative desirability of life in a state of nature and life in society.¹⁰ Obviously, as popular interest in the West increased, the cowboy became an ideal dime novel hero.

Since only a fraction of the dime novels published have survived, it is impossible to identify the first dime novel cowboy hero. A survey of titles copyrighted seems to indicate that cowboy protagonists appear as early as 1870, and that the hero of Lasso Jack, or, The Morning Star of the Commanches was certainly one of the earliest. Others were the heroes of Night‐Hawk Kit (1871), The Twin Trailers (1872), and Hurricane Bill (1874). Few of these novels carried any real information about ranching or cowboys. In fact, many of them were closely related to the tales of James Fenimore Cooper and the large genre of Indian captivity literature that was popular before the Civil War. On the other hand, they do carry the germs of the western romance. In Arthur Holt's Hotspur Harry: or, The Texan Trailers,¹¹ for instance, Hotspur Harry Haven and his band of cowboys are out on a roundup when a group of Comanches attack their home ranch and carry off the owner's daughter, Bessie Burke. The Comanches are led by Gerald Gordon, a rejected suitor of Bessie's who has gone to live with the Indians and is appropriately called White Weasel. With the aid of a grizzled scout named Old Whirlwind, Harry and his cowboys trail White Weasel and Bessie to the Indian camp and rescue her, hiding her in a nearby cave. White Weasel recaptures her, however. Harry trails the two and finds them, but then all three are captured by the Lipan Indians, who burn White Weasel at the stake. They are about to do the same to Harry when he and Bessie are rescued by the cowboys. They return to the ranch, where Harry marries Bessie and soon becomes, in the author's words, “a wealthy and influential cattleking.”

While the stage, dime novels, and illustrated magazines introduced the East to the cowboy and began to sketch a character for him, it was Buffalo Bill's Wild West that brought actual cowboys East and coupled their name forever with reckless, hell‐for‐leather horseback riding and feats of skill and daring. It also changed our attitude about cowboys forever. First organized in 1882, and in many ways the outgrowth of his stage plays, Buffalo Bill's Wild West (the word show was never used in his promotional material) made an impression on the popular consciousness that still endures. It toured the eastern United States and Europe from 1882 until 1916, and during those years the cry “Buffalo Bill's in town!” was enough to bring all business to a standstill. The open‐air spectacle was essentially a series of riding and shooting acts, interspersed with reenactments of Indian fights and, as a grand finale, the Indian attack on the Deadwood stagecoach.

From its very first year, the show featured real cowboys, both as acrobatic riders and as rescuers of the Deadwood stage. These were the first cowboys that most easterners had seen and they set both a pattern and a standard that has influenced the portrayal of the cowboy down to the present. Buffalo Bill did not exhibit cowboys as men who worked cattle but as supermen who could ride, rope, and shoot with extraordinary skill, who could leap from galloping horses to a careening stagecoach, and who always arrived just in the nick of time to save the maiden from danger.

These have remained standard elements in the portrayal of the cowboy, even though, with the exception of riding and roping, these activities cannot have occupied much of the real cowboy's time. The influence of Buffalo Bill's Wild West was so great that Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a New Mexico cowboy who became a fine western writer, told an audience of filmmakers in 1922 that the primary causes of popular misconceptions about cowboys and the West were, first, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, and, second, other Wild West shows.

Buffalo Bill himself invented portions of the show cowboy's costume. A fine‐looking man with upturned mustache, long hair, and a goatee, he always led his troupe into the arena clad in skintight white trousers, thigh‐high black leather boots, a wide leather belt with an oversize silver buckle, an embroidered shirt, a fringed and beaded leather jacket, enormous leather gauntlets, and a wide‐brimmed, ten‐gallon Stetson hat—a hat style that he introduced and that was subsequently copied by ranchers and cowboys everywhere.

Cody's show cowboys were as impressive as he was. During the first season of the Wild West, in 1883, they included Johnny Baker, the Cowboy Kid; Bronco Bill Bullock; Jim Lawson, a roping expert; and William Levi “Buck” Taylor, the King of the Cowboys.

Taylor was Buffalo Bill's star cowboy for nearly fifteen years, and during that time he was the best‐known cowboy in the world. He was a native Texan, born near Fredericksburg in 1857 and orphaned when he was six years old. When he joined Cody's show he stood six feet five, but the show's literature carefully described him as “amiable as a child.” Unlike Texas Jack, Buck Taylor was a cowboy first and a showman second. He never went on the stage, and when he retired he returned to ranching.

As Cody's show grew in size, he added more authentic cowboys, until his cast included Bud Ayers, Marve Beardsley, Dick Bean, Utah Frank, Con Groner, the Cowboy Sheriff, Blue Hall, Montana Joe, Jim Kid, Jim Mitchell, Jim Lawson, Bronco Charlie Miller, Antonio Esquival, and Joe Esquival. These men exhibited their skills in an act called “Cowboy Fun,” which included steer roping, bronc riding, trick riding, and relay races. This act was imitated in all of the fifty‐odd Wild West shows that flourished in the 1890s and survives in the modern rodeo. Another popular cowboy act was a square dance on horseback, which for many years featured Mrs. Georgia Duffy, “The Rough Rider of Wyoming,” who may have been the first cowgirl. In 1891 Cody added a “Congress of Rough Riders of the World” to his show, and Antonio Esquival became the leader of a group of twenty‐five vaqueros (there were also cowboys, cossacks, hussars, and lancers). The show at that time also featured a thirty‐six‐piece cowboy band, made up, according to a London newspaper, of “cowboys who have retired from the hardships of the plains and taken to music.”

Buffalo Bill's Wild West not only introduced the cowboy to the East, it took him to Europe, where, next to the Indians, he was the leading attraction of the show. The Wild West first went to England for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887, taking two hundred actors and nearly three hundred head of livestock, including buffalo, elk, and deer. The English were in awe of the Indians, but they took the cowboys into their hearts, in spite of the fact that one of them, Dick Johnson, was arrested for getting into a fight in a pub with a patron who said that he “would not drink with cowboys” and a second was arrested for firing his pistol in a restaurant. The Birmingham Daily Post said that “the cowboy is a gentleman … and not to be confused with the criminals and bullies who have disgraced the name of ‘cowboy’ in some American states.” The Era of London was even more effusive, saying:

The typical cowboy … is a perfect hero with respect to bearing pain and meeting danger. He has a code of honor which, half savage, as it is, he adheres to with far more rigidity than is the case in similar circumstances with the denizens of civilized districts. Absolute indifference to peril, perfect fealty to a friend, extreme amiability and openness, coupled with a readiness to shoot as soon as a certain code of civility has been transgressed … are, roughly speaking, the peculiarities of the cowboy's character.¹²

Buffalo Bill's Wild West went back to Europe for a four‐year tour in 1889, opening at the Paris Exposition, where they played to the shah of Persia and the queen of Spain. “L'Ouest Sauvage” was an instant success, and one of its most popular acts was “l'amusement des cow‐boys.” The show went on to Italy, through Germany, Holland, and Belgium, and back to England. By the end of 1892 every adult and child in western Europe knew what a cowboy was.

Cody's show had numerous imitators, each with its component of cowboys. In 1893, the year of the World's Columbian Exposition, there were at least fifty Wild West shows touring the United States and Europe, and by 1900 their popularity had spread to South America, Australia, and even South Africa.

The leading show of the twentieth century was the Miller 101 Ranch Wild West Show, an outgrowth of an Oklahoma ranch empire founded in 1892 by G. W. Miller. Miller's son, Joseph C. Miller, and his brothers began producing “roundups” and rodeos for the public at their White House Ranch in the early years of the century—one held in 1905 drew 64,000 people, who arrived on special trains. In 1907 they decided to take their show on the road, where it continued until 1949. It followed and elaborated on the original format developed by Cody. One of the Miller cowboys, a black Texan named Bill Pickett, brought an innovation to “Cowboy Fun.” He wrestled steers to the ground by biting into their lower lips, a technique he called bulldogging. Pickett and his “bite‐'em style” were the sensation of the Miller 101 for a number of seasons, and he can rightly be called the first black cowboy star.

The Miller 101 show recognized both the symbolic and the box‐office value of the cowboy, and it developed acts starring cowboys that had no relation to ranch work. Vernon Tantlinger, originally an exhibition rifle shot, learned to throw the Australian boomerang and was billed as “The Cowboy Boomerang Artist.” Another crowd‐pleasing act was “Cowboy Auto Polo,” played by cowboys driving stripped‐down model‐T's equipped with primitive roll bars.

The cowgirl was enthusiastically received by audiences in the early 1900s. To make her a legitimate part of the Old West, Miller publicity claimed, quite incorrectly, that cowgirls had always assisted with roundups, trail drives, and other aspects of ranch work. The leading Miller 101 cowgirl, Edith Tantlinger, told reporters that “the western girls' way of life made them superior to other women … a life in nature gave western girls such vitality that they could not be permanently injured” by bronc and steer riding. Tantlinger told reporters in 1914 that, if the United States went to war with Mexico, she would lead a company of cowgirls against the Mexicans. Philip Ashton Rollins, however, presented another view of the woman's role on the ranch:

There were, it is true, permanently living on a number of ranches women. … The horse being the principal and often only means of transit, many of these women and many of their daughters rode extremely well. The side‐saddles and woolen riding‐skirts used by most of these women, the modest divided skirts used by the few who rode astride, imparted to those quiet, unassuming courageous females of the real frontier none of the garishness which that modern invention, the buckskin‐clad “cowgirl,” takes with her into the circus ring. These “cowgirls” may be of Western spirit and blood, but their buckskin clothing speaks of the present‐day theatre and not the ranches of long ago.¹³

The positive image of the cowboy presented by Cody was reinforced by drawings such as those William Allen Rogers published in Harper's, contradicting the image produced by the woodcuts in Frank Leslie's and the Police Gazette. Rogers presented instead “a merry scene familiar to the jolly rangers of the west.” Significantly, the cowboys pictured in this particular drawing were on the northwestern ranges, in the Cuchara river valley of southern Colorado, rather than in the cow towns of Kansas. About them Rogers said, “The ‘cow‐boys’ of the Rocky Mountain regions are of a race or class peculiar to that country. They bear some resemblance to the corresponding class on the southern side of the Rio Grande, but are of a milder and more original type.”¹⁴ He also pointed out to Harper's readers the increasingly corporate nature of the cattle business: “Probably few persons who are not immediately interested in the subject have any idea of the enormous proportions to which the cattle trade of our great West has grown. The tendency to go into business seems to be also growing. The amount of capital represented in some of the herds is sufficient to supply a national bank.”¹⁵

It was in the year 1886—the same year that brought the downfall of the open‐range cattle industry—that the cowboy was fully rehabilitated. In that year there was a flurry of articles and illustrations glorifying the cowboy, the beginning of a flood that has never stopped. After publishing his definitive study of the ranching industry in 1885, Joseph Nimmo commented in an article for Harper's Monthly in November 1886 that, although the original cowboy was “a Texan, armed to the teeth, booted and spurred, long haired, and covered with a broad‐brimmed sombrero,” who belonged to “a class of men whom persons accustomed to the usages of civilized society would characterize as ruffians of the most pronounced type,” the opening of the northern ranges and the organization of the cattle trade on business principles meant:

The cow‐boy of to‐day … is of entirely different type from the original cow‐boy of Texas … a new class of cow‐boys has been introduced and developed. … Some have come from Texas … but the number from other States and the Territories constitutes a large majority of the whole. Some are graduates of American colleges, and others of collegiate institutions in Europe. … Throughout the northern ranges sobriety, self‐restraint, decent behavior, and faithfulness to duty are enjoined upon the cow‐boys. … The morale of the entire range and ranch cattle business of the United States now compares favorably with that of other large enterprises.¹⁶

The October 16, 1886, issue of Harper's Weekly carried a double‐page illustration by Rufus Zogbaum entitled “Painting the Town Red,” which shows four cowboys galloping abreast down the main street of a western town, firing pistols in the air. The same scene was depicted by Frederic Remington three years later, in the Harper's Weekly for December 21, 1889, with the title “Cowboys Coming to Town for Christmas,” and, with some minor alterations, by Charles Russell in his 1909 oil painting In Without Knocking, and subsequently in hundreds of films, television programs, and comic books, until it has become the only acceptable way to imagine cowboys entering a town. …

Zogbaum, a young South Carolinian who eventually became a well‐known military artist (once described in light verse by Rudyard Kipling), was the first “western” artist to consistently romanticize the cowboy. His illustrations placed the cowboy in a much more favorable light than the woodcuts of the previous decade had. They emphasized his youth, his closeness to nature, his carefree attitude, and the loneliness of his work. Most important, they showed the cowboy in situations that were to become stereotypes, the stock‐in‐trade of several generations of western artists, from Remington down to the present.

The text accompanying Zogbaum's illustrations, written by G. O. Shields, begins, “Cowboys as a class are brimful and running over with wit, merriment, and good humor. They are always ready for any bit of innocent fun, but are not perpetually spoiling for a fight, as has so often been said of them … altogether, cowboys are a large‐hearted, generous class of fellows.” Shields goes on to produce a perfect description of the romantic cowboy: “The constant communication with nature, the study of her broad, pure domains, the days and nights of lonely cruising and camping on the prairie, the uninterrupted communion with and study of self which this occupation affords, tend to make young men noble and honest.”¹⁷

Zogbaum drew the very image of Shields's romantic cowboy in his illustration “The Prairie Letter Box,” which appeared in Harper's Weekly on April 23, 1887. The artist depicted a lone cowboy in a vast prairie of wildflowers, his distance from civilization emphasized by his act of dropping a letter into a mailbox made from a preserved beef crate, the only man‐made object visible for miles. Like “Painting the Town Red,” this image was popularized by many other artists. The setting and the action were adapted by Remington for his 1901 oil painting Post Office in Cow Country, which shows the same mailbox with three cowboys receiving their mail at it. Zogbaum's lone cowboy posting a letter was duplicated from a slightly different angle in 1906 by N. C. Wyeth for an oil painting commissioned as an advertisement by the Cream of Wheat company, apparently without any acknowledgment to Zogbaum. In Wyeth's painting, the mailbox has become a Cream of Wheat box, and Wyeth gave it the title Where the Mail Goes, Cream of Wheat Goes. In 1909 cowboy photographer Erwin E. Smith tried to pose a cowboy and horse in the same situation for an artistic photograph entitled “A Cowboy from the LS Outfit Mailing a Letter.” The image appeared in the early 1920s on a sheet music cover, probably adapted from Wyeth's Cream of Wheat ad. … Thus a particular image proliferated, reinforcing in each manifestation the myth of the romantic cowboy.

Zogbaum's cowboy images were powerful, but his main interest was in military illustration. His contemporary Frederic Remington was a western illustrator who sometimes drew soldiers but whose real love was cowboys. “With me, cowboys are what gems and porcelains are to others,” he once wrote.¹⁸ Indeed, it was Remington, Wister, and Wister's Harvard classmate Theodore Roosevelt who launched the romantic cowboy on his mythical career: Remington through his illustrations, Wister through his writing, and Roosevelt through his political prominence. All three were upper‐class easterners; all three found something symbolically American in the West in general and the cowboy in particular.

Remington was the son of an upstate New York newspaper publisher who attended Yale, tried ranching in Kansas in the early 1880s, and finally decided upon a career as a professional artist, taking classes at the Art Student's League. In 1886 he made a second trip West and sold the sketches from that trip to Outing magazine, which was edited by his Yale classmate Poultney Bigelow. He remained throughout his life an easterner who made visits to the West, used it shamelessly as a commodity, and may have loved it. Like many easterners of his class and generation, he felt that something essentially American was being lost in the industrialized post‐Civil War Northeast, with its large immigrant population. He was given to expressing sentiments on the subject that can only be called racist: “Jews, Injuns, Chinamen, Italians, Huns—the rubbish of the earth I hate—I've got some Winchesters and when the massacring begins, I can get my share of 'em,” he wrote Poultney Bigelow in 1893.¹⁹ He saw in the cowboy the embodiment of a lost Americanism, and he saw the cowboy passing, too, with the closing of the open range. At the same time, he could be remarkably cynical about his use of the West as a commodity. In 1902, trying to persuade Wister to collaborate with him on the portfolio A Bunch of Buckskins, he wrote, “I am as you know working on a big picture book—of the West and I want you to write a preface. I want a lala too, no d——— newspaper puff saying how much I weigh etc. etc. but telling the d——— public that this is the real old thing—step up and buy a copy—last chance—ain't going to be any more West etc.”²⁰

Remington's first large set of cowboy illustrations were the drawings he did to illustrate a series of articles by Theodore Roosevelt published in Century magazine in 1888 and released as a book, Ranch Life and the Hunting‐Trail, the next year. In the text Roosevelt, who had already served as speaker of the New York State Assembly and was then a U.S. civil service commissioner, described his adventures as a gentleman rancher in the Dakotas. He attributed every virtue to cowboys, saying that they were:

as hardy and self‐reliant as any men who ever breathed—with bronzed, set faces, and keen eyes that look all the world in the face without flinching as they flash out from under the broad‐brimmed hats … they are quiet, self‐contained men, perfectly frank and simple, and on their own ground treat a stranger with the most whole‐souled hospitality. … They are much better fellows and pleasanter companions than small farmers or agricultural workers; nor are the mechanics and workmen of a great city to be mentioned in the same breath.²¹

The cowboys in Remington's illustrations replicated Roosevelt's word pictures. They were hard, lean, determined men, performing difficult tasks with ease and aplomb. These drawings show the economy of line and attention to detail that distinguished Remington's later work. … Accuracy of detail became almost a fetish with him, and he brought back from his annual trips West to his studio in New Rochelle, New York, large quantities of chaps, saddles, ropes, hats, and other pieces of costume and equipment to serve as models for his paintings. In the spring of 1889 he made a trip to Mexico and brought back an embroidered charro jacket and a sombrero which he painted, rather improbably, on one of the cowboys in his monumental oil A Dash for the Timber. At the same time he wrote a friend in Arizona: “I have a big order for a cowboy picture and I want a lot of chaperas [sic]—say two or three pairs—and if you will buy them off some of the cowboys there and ship them to me cod I will be your slave.”²²

Remington's career as an artist, writer, sculptor, and illustrator spanned the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. He became a sculptor in the fall of 1894 through his acquaintance with Frederick W. Ruckstall, who was working on a large equestrian statue in a tent near the Remington home. Remington became fascinated with the process, which Ruckstall suggested he try his hand at. By January 1895 he had roughed out a model, and he wrote his friend Wister, “My water colors will fade—but I am to endure in bronze—even rust douch.—I am modeling—I find I do well—I am doing a cowboy on a bucking bronco and I am going to rattle down through all the ages, unless some Anarchist invades the old mansion and knocks it off the shelf.”²³

The result was The Bronco Buster, which became a collector's item almost overnight. One hundred and sixty casts of it were produced in Remington's lifetime, and it was the statue that Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders chose to present him with at their first reunion. Remington went on to produce twenty‐two bronze statues, many of them in several versions. Eight of these depicted cowboys. The most complex, and probably the most famous, is Coming through the Rye, which shows the Zogbaum theme of four cowboys galloping abreast, pistols firing in the air. Its most impressive version must have been the heroic plaster replica at the Saint Louis World's Fair, which was twenty feet high. It was a magnificent symbol of the romantic cowboy's popularity.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Remington's career is the fact that it popularized a subject matter as well as an artist and a style. Once Remington broke the ground, there was an enormous demand for cowboy illustrators. Of course, this went hand‐in‐hand with the growing popularity of cowboy novels during the first decade of the twentieth century, but one is forced to conclude that it was this artist who made the subject respectable. Without Remington to pave the way, it is difficult to see how a man like Charles Russell could have moved from being a saloon painter to becoming a nationally known illustrator and artist.

Unlike Remington, Russell was a genuine westerner, a native of Missouri and a grand‐nephew of the famous Bent brothers, whose fort on the Arkansas River was the jumping‐off place for the Santa Fe Trail. He went to Montana in 1880, at the age of sixteen, and stayed there the rest of his life, working as a sheep herder, cowboy, and, eventually, full‐time artist. From 1880 to 1893, Russell worked on the sheep and cattle ranges, sketching and painting in his spare time and selling occasional works to friends. These were exhibited in saloons and store windows, and toward the end of the decade he became somewhat of a local celebrity, with Montana newspapers describing him as “the cowboy artist.” In 1887 seven of his paintings were reproduced as a one‐sheet photogravure by the Chicago Photogravure Company, under the title “A Copy of C. M. Russell's—‘The Cowboy Artist's’—Last Painting,” but the circumstances surrounding the production of this first Russell print are obscure.

Three years later, however, a Cascade, Montana, saddlemaker named Ben Roberts persuaded Russell to do some paintings for a printed portfolio. Russell obligingly produced a dozen paintings and Roberts arranged the printing with the Albertype Company in New York. The result was Studies of Western Life, a bound portfolio with twelve prints. In 1893, Russell stopped working as a cowboy and became a full‐time painter, selling paintings to clients in Montana and even as far away as Saint Louis. It was not until ten years later, in 1903, that he made his first trip to New York, under the sponsorship of the illustrator John N. Marchand, whom he had met in Montana. Marchand took him to the offices of Scribner's, McClure's, Outing, and Frank Leslie's—almost the same circuit that Remington had made fifteen years previously—and introduced him to the bohemian and artistic society of New York. Russell, with his cowboy boots, red sash, and inexhaustible fund of stories, was an instant success, and on the eve of his fortieth birthday his professional career was launched. He remained a nationally known artist and illustrator until his death in 1926.

Russell's art was realistic, rather than romantic, and the situations he depicted, with a few exceptions, grew out of his own experience with cattle and horses. Some of his work, such as the “Just a Little Sunshine …” series …, was done for saloon decoration and is somewhat earthy. A few paintings with coin‐operated mechanical devices attached were meant for the private rooms of saloons and are, as Russell biographer Frederic G. Renner tactfully puts it, “of the for‐men‐only variety.” Many of the books he illustrated, though, were definitely romantic, and Russell must be counted among those who furthered the image of the romantic cowboy. He may have reached his broadest public through the sale of prints and reproductions of his paintings as publishers' premiums, calendars, and even placemats. It is a safe bet that there is not a cafe or tavern in the West that does not have at least one Russell print on the wall, and every car‐owning citizen of Wyoming carries an adaptation of a Russell drawing on his license plate.

Remington and Russell, through their paintings, illustrations, and sculpture, had an enormous effect on the way that Americans perceive the cowboy. They standardized his costume and his poses; they made him picturesque. A peculiar example of their effect can be seen in the work of Erwin E. Smith, who is sometimes described as a documentary photographer of cowboys. Smith, who was born in Honey Grove, Texas, in 1886, made over ten thousand photographs of cowboys on West Texas ranches between 1906 and 1916. He held his first photographic exhibition in Boston in 1908, and his pictures are still often reproduced as accurate depictions of ranch life. Many of them are, but Smith's primary aspiration was to be a sculptor and record the cowboy in bronze. He studied with Lorado Taft and Bela Lyon Pratt and took photographs primarily as a guide to anatomical accuracy in his work. These pictures were carefully posed in accordance with sketches made beforehand and show cowboys in heroic and romantic poses, many of them derived from illustrations by Remington, Russell, and Zogbaum. Smith also took truly candid pictures, showing camp work, cattle on the move, and cowboys relaxing, but it is clear that he saw cowboys through the eyes of the artist, rather than the documenter.²⁴

The cowboy underwent his fullest literary development during the 1890s at the hands of Owen Wister, whose prose in Harper's was frequently joined with the illustrations of Frederic Remington. It was Wister, a Philadelphia‐born aristocrat and Harvard graduate (summa cum laude in music, 1882) who made the cowboy acceptable to eastern readers and worthy of the attention of literary critics. Inspired by a hunting trip to Wyoming in 1891, Wister wrote his first western story, “How Lin McLean Went East,” the next year and promptly sold it to Harper's. The story relates how a cowboy goes to Boston and decides that he prefers western forthrightness to eastern sophistication. In 1898 Lin McLean appeared again, this time as the protagonist in a full‐length novel entitled Lin McLean. Two years later another Wister collection, The Jimmyjohn Boss, appeared, and finally, in 1902, The Virginian.

The Virginian is, essentially, about a noble young cowboy, his love for an eastern schoolteacher, and their reconciliation of his sense of honor with her sense of legality. Critics have described it as a symbolic reconciliation of order and freedom, of East and West, of society and anarchy. It is a rattling good story, even if it is, as numerous critics have said, a story of “cowboys without cows.” It also marks the final step in the creation of the romantic cowboy.

The Virginian firmly established the stereotyped cowboy as young, handsome, courageous, soft‐spoken (who can ever forget, “When you call me that, smile?”), independent, and holding a high sense of honor. It also established him as irrevocably Anglo‐Saxon—there is not a black or a Mexican in the entire book. The Virginian (he is never named in the book) is “a slim young giant, more beautiful than pictures. His broad, soft hat was pushed back, a loose‐knotted, dull‐scarlet handkerchief sagged from his throat; and one casual thumb was hooked in the cartridge belt that slanted across his hips.” He was such a paragon of virtue that a reviewer in the New York Tribune commented:

To some writers of fiction, especially since the time of the admirable and lamented Bret Harte, the “cow‐puncher” or, as he is sometimes called, the “cowboy,” seems to be an object of almost bewildering enchantment. … As depicted by Mr. Wister, he is a creature of such physical beauty, such mental vigor, such moral attitude, such executive equipment, and such universal genius as ought to serve as a beacon or headlight for the nation and, indeed, an example for the human race.²⁵

In spite of such criticism, the book was an instant success. It sold 50,000 copies in the first two months, and Wister was deluged with letters from westerners who complimented him on the accuracy of his descriptions, often adding that they had known the Virginian.

Of course, the Virginian's path to heroism was prepared by a number of forerunners. There were dime novel cowboy heroes in the 1870s and the Live Boys in 1879 and 1880. Thomas Pilgrim, writing under the pseudonym Arthur Morecamp, published two adventure novels for boys that have been called the “first strictly cowboy fiction.”²⁶ An Austin, Texas, attorney, Pilgrim was the son of a pioneer Texas schoolteacher. Although it is doubtful that he ever went on a cattle drive himself, he certainly got his information from people who did, and he included remarkably detailed descriptions of the cattle trail, a Kansas cow town, and Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in the Live Boys; or, Charley and Nasho in Texas (1879) and Live Boys in the Black Hills (1880). At a time when there was a good deal of animosity between Anglo‐American and Spanish‐speaking Texas, these books are remarkable too for their protagonists, who are, as the subtitle says, “two boys of fourteen, one a Texan, the other a Mexican.” The boys decide to raise money to visit the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition by taking a herd of cattle to Kansas, and the book describes their adventures.

Another forerunner of The Virginian was the cowboy memoir. In 1885 a genuine Texas cowboy, Charles Siringo, published his autobiography, A Texas Cowboy; or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony, a book that was reminiscent of the nautical and whaling memoirs that poured forth from American presses in the mid‐nineteenth century. Siringo described his boyhood, his adoption by a wealthy New Orleans family, his running away from school, and his adventures as a cowboy on the coastal plains of Texas, where he worked for legendary cattlemen like Shanghai Pierce and Bradford Grimes. He gave a detailed account of the range cattle business, most of it accurate, written in a vivid and colorful style. Siringo judged his audience perfectly, for the public's appetite had been whetted for accurate information about cowboys. The author later claimed to have sold a million copies of his book and went on to rewrite it under three other titles, adding new anecdotes and adventures.

A second genre in addition to memoirs that popularized the cowboy in the 1890s was popular verse. Western newspapers of the nineties abounded with poems about cowboys and cattle sent in by readers, many of them in the style of Robert Service and at least some of them perhaps having their origin in the recitations given around the campfire in cow camps. A typical contributor was D. J. O'Malley, a soldier's son who became a trail driver and cowboy in Montana in the 1880s and sent a number of poems to the Miles City Stock Grower's Journal. O'Malley's compositions included “The Cowboy's Soliloquy,” “A Busted Cowboy's Christmas,” “The D2 Horse Wrangler,” “When the Work's All Done This Fall,” and “A Cowboy's Death.” There was an O'Malley in almost every western town, and, as small town newspapers often printed exchanges from other papers, their poems got wide circulation. Some even found their way into national magazines: Frank Leslie's of December 14, 1893, printed a version of “The Cowboy's Dream” (“Last night as I lay on the prairie / And looked at the stars in the sky / I wondered if ever a cowboy / Would drift to the sweet by‐and‐by”), along with a tale about it being found in an envelope in a dead letter office.

At least two cowboy poets achieved national notice in the 1890s. Wallace Coburn, a Great Falls, Montana, rancher and a friend of Charles Russell's, brought out his Rhymes from a Round‐up Camp in book form in 1899, with illustrations by Russell. It was an immediate success. Even more popular was Texas cattleman William Lawrence Chittenden's Ranch Verses, first published in 1893, which went through fourteen editions by 1918. The book contained a number of verses idealizing the cowboy (“He can sing, he can cook, yet his eyes have the look / Of a man that to fear is a stranger; / Yes, his cool, quiet nerve will always subserve / In his wild life of duty and danger.”) as well as the much‐printed “Cowboys' Christmas Ball.”

Finally, in 1897, Alfred Henry Lewis published Wolfville, a book that Eugene Manlove Rhodes ranked just below Wild West shows as one of the main causes of popular misconceptions about the cowboy. Lewis has been largely forgotten now, but in his heyday he was compared to Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Like them, he was a newspaperman, the publisher and editor of a number of political journals, including the Verdict. He visited Arizona in the 1880s, practiced law in Cleveland and Kansas City, and wrote biographies of John Paul Jones, Aaron Burr, and Andrew Jackson. But he found his milieu in Wolfville, which was an immediate commercial success. It is a series of humorous short stories, held together by a narrator called the Old Cattleman, and revolving around the population of a mining and cattle town. Wolfville was so successful that Lewis followed it with the sequels Wolfville Days (1902), Wolfville Nights (1902), and Wolfville Folks (1908). In all four books, the cowboys carry pistols, ride hard and recklessly, speak in western dialect larded with outrageous oaths and similes, and spend a good deal of time playing elaborate pranks on each other.

Much of the appeal of the adventure stories, the poetry, and the memoirs lay in the public's sense that they captured the essence of a disappearing breed of men. This was especially true of The Virginian. A letter to Owen Wister from an admirer in Indiana began, “A dozen years ago I punched cows in the Ponca Nation; tramped through sun‐blistered valleys in New Mexico and Arizona—and later spent upwards of a year in the Dakota cattle country,” and went on to say, “In The Virginian I lived it all again. I lived it because your characters were real ones—ones that have been but are no more. … Your story has helped to make my dreams of those days more vivid and to preserve types that are rapidly passing away.”²⁷ The idea that the cowboy was becoming extinct was a common theme in the 1890s and had much to do with his romanticization. It was expressed over and over again in popular magazines in articles with titles like “The Passing of the Cowboy,” “Goodbye to the American Cowboy,” “A Passing Race,” and “The Decaying Cowboy.”

The popularity of The Virginian was further enchanced by its production as a play in 1904. Several popular cowboy farces and melodramas had been staged in the 1890s, but this was the first serious play with a cowboy as the leading character. It opened at the Manhattan Theatre in New York on January 5, 1904, with Dustin Farnum as the Virginian, and ran for four months. The road company, which at one time included William S. Hart, kept the show open for ten years, and it was still being played as a tent show in the 1920s. The script was the basis for three films, the last made in 1946. Although Wister did not create the romantic cowboy, he did perfect him and propagate him.

The success of The Virginian on stage gave rise to a flood of cowboy plays, which probably did as much to fix a visual image of the romantic cowboy in the American mind as cowboy films did to fix other cowboy images in later years. The best‐known and most successful was Edwin Milton Royle's play The Squaw Man. It opened at Wallack's Theatre in New York in October 1905 and played 222 straight performances before going on the road. In 1908 it was produced in London as The White Man, and the script became, like The Virginian's, the basis for several films. The plot revolves around a young English aristocrat who takes the blame for another's crimes to save the family honor, flees to America, and becomes a cowboy in Utah. In the final act, his Indian bride commits suicide so that he can return to England and claim his rightful title.

A musical comedy called The Tenderfoot, by Richard Carle and H. L. Heertz, and David Belasco's The Girl of the Golden West both also opened in New York in 1905. Cowboy drama was at such a pitch on Broadway that in 1906 Joe Weber introduced a burlesque called The Squawman's Girl of the Golden West at Weber's Music Hall. David Belasco opened a second western drama, The Rose of the Rancho, that fall, and the next season brought Edmund Day's The Round Up and Dustin Farnum starring in Augustus Thomas's The Ranger. Even after the fad died out on Broadway, about 1908, cowboy plays continued to be popular with rural audiences. One of the most prolific tent show writers was a Texan, Charles Harrison, best known for Saintly Hypocrites and Honest Sinners, who wrote three popular cowboy melodramas: Her Cowboy Visitor (1905), The Lone Star Ranch (1911), and A Prince of the Range (1915). The most popular cowboy tent show of all time was not a melodrama but a “rube show,” a rural comedy, called The Girl of the Flying X, written in 1916 by George J. Crawley and known in the theater as Sputters, from the name of the leading comic character. Sputters is a cowboy who stutters, and who is taught by the heroine to talk without stammering. The plot involves a horse ranch, a mysterious foreman, a rascally Mexican, and the heroine, Rose. All in all, the popularity of cowboy plays following The Virginian can be judged by the fact that the U.S. Copyright Office recorded only four plays with the word cowboy in the title between 1870 and 1899, and thirty‐five such plays between 1900 and 1915.²⁸

Not only did it start a Broadway fad, but the publication of The Virginian marked a watershed in serious western fiction. In earlier books, such as Wolfville, the cowboy provides local color and comic relief, but he seldom exhibits sustained heroic behavior and rarely is the center of the plot. In post‐Virginian novels, the action revolves around a cowboy hero, who by his devotion to a code of honor, his manliness, his physical courage, and his riding and shooting skill both causes and resolves the plot action.

Some of Wister's early followers are worthy of criticism in their own right. Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, a Montana ranchwoman who wrote under the name B. M. Bower, published in 1904 a playful, almost humorous novel called Chip of the Flying U, illustrated by Charles Russell. Reviewers could not help comparing it favorably to The Virginian, one of them saying, “Few authors have come as close to duplicating Owen Wister's immortal hero.” Chip of the Flying U was followed by several Flying U sequels and sixty other novels, many of which are still in print. The strength of Bertha Sinclair's writing was not in plots but in the fact that she knew the country and the people she wrote about.

The true flood of western fiction may have started with Clarence Mulford, whose first novel, Bar‐20, appeared in 1907, and who published a western novel each year until his death in 1940. He was the first of a new breed of western writers, an easterner who had never known the West of the open range and the cattle boom. He relied on published accounts of the West for his details and local color and kept voluminous card files headed “trail drives,” “chuck wagons,” and so on, in which he filed appropriate excerpts from Siringo and from other firsthand accounts. Mulford is best remembered today for his invention of Hopalong Cassidy.

The writer who perfected the formula western was Zane Grey, whose Riders of the Purple Sage appeared in 1912 and was followed by a string of romances set in a never‐never West. In a perceptive essay on western fiction, W. H. Hutchinson has said, “The basic ingredients that Grey borrowed bodily from The Virginian, rejecting Wister's still discernible humor, and beat to a froth in Riders of the Purple Sage have remained unchanged ever since—virgins, villains, and varmints.”²⁹ Grey's partner in denaturalizing the West was Frederick Schiller Faust, who between 1917 and 1944 wrote thirty million words under a dozen pseudonyms, including Max Brand. The Grey‐Brand school had countless imitators, who found an outlet for their work in the dozens of pulp story magazines that sprang up in the 1920s: Argosy, Adventure, Short Story, Blue Book, Western Story, and Ranch Romances, to name only a few.

During the first decade of the twentieth century—the years Frederic Remington worked in watercolor and bronze while Owen Wister fashioned his soft‐spoken hero—the romantic cowboy was defined and flourished. Curiously, it was a New York‐born and Harvard‐educated politician who came to symbolize the purifying force of the cowboy to the American public. Theodore Roosevelt, with his unfailing political instinct, sensed the popularity of the cowboy and frequently presented himself to the public as one. His credentials were good: he had been a ranch owner in the Dakotas in the 1880s and had certainly worked cattle. He also believed in the moral superiority of the cowboy. In Ranch Life and the Hunting‐Trail he wrote, in a tone that foreshadowed the political philosophy of John Wayne, that

The cowboy will not submit tamely to an insult, and is ever ready to avenge his own wrongs; nor has he an overwrought fear of shedding blood. He possesses, in fact, few of the emasculated, milk‐and‐water moralities admired by pseudo‐philanthropists, but he does possess, to a very high degree, the stern, manly qualities that are invaluable to a nation.³⁰

When the Spanish‐American War broke out, Roosevelt sought to take advantage of those “stern, manly” qualities by organizing a regiment of cavalry composed solely of cowboys. The resulting First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, called Rough Riders—a name borrowed from Buffalo Bill—eventually contained one company of elite New Yorkers as well as companies of cowboys from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado, but all wore a distinctive cowboy's blue‐and‐white bandanna in addition to regulation uniforms. The bandanna became a Roosevelt campaign emblem in 1904, decorated with the initials TR joined as though on a cattle brand. Political cartoonists as early as 1899 pictured Roosevelt as a cowboy, with hat, bandanna, chaps, and, sometimes, blazing pistols, and a probably apocryphal story has Mark Hanna remarking, on hearing of William McKinley's death, “Now that damned cowboy is President of the United States.” The most famous of all Roosevelt cartoons, published at the time he died, shows him ascending into heaven on horseback, waving farewell with his ten‐gallon hat.

During his presidency, Roosevelt frequently presented himself, especially to his western constituents, as a cowboy. On two long tours of the West, in 1903 and 1905, he was photographed on horseback at every opportunity and participated in a trail ride and rodeo at Cheyenne, an Indian riding demonstration at Pocatello, Idaho, a “cowboy breakfast” at Hugo, Colorado, and a famous weeklong wolf hunt in Indian Territory. Roosevelt became the first person—though by no means the last—to symbolize the cowboy on a national level.

The myth of the romantic cowboy as described by Wister, pictured by Remington, and personified by Roosevelt, was in its fullest flower in the same decade that the American film industry was in its infancy. In fact, the picture often cited as the first American feature film, The Great Train Robbery, appeared the year after the publication of The Virginian and was probably inspired by a scene in Scott Marble's cowboy drama of the same title. This coincidence of media undoubtedly accounts for the continuing popularity of the cowboy myth in the United States today. Film gave the cowboy new life and added, almost immediately, another dimension to his character—or, to be more accurate, it revived an old dimension and created a new type of cowboy hero. The nature of film as a medium called for action as well as character and plot development, and for action that was visually exciting. The activities of the real cowboy—roping and branding calves and moving cattle from place to place—were repetitive and dull, but the action of the Wild West show cowboy—trick riding and roping and shooting stunts—was exciting and suited to fast‐paced films. American filmmakers, after a false start with filmed versions of cowboy melodramas with titles like The Bandit of Point Loma and The Rustler's Reformation, realized the necessity of action, and a new cowboy hero was born: the fast‐roping, hard‐riding, and straight‐shooting acrobatic cowboy.

The first actor to realize the full potential of the acrobatic cowboy hero was Gilbert Max Aaronson, known to his public as Bronco Billy Anderson. Anderson invented the “series western,” a group of 376 one‐ and two‐reelers made by his Essanay Film Company between 1908 and 1915, all starring the same hero, Bronco Billy. The character Anderson developed was a throwback to the dime novel hero: an athlete with a boyish grin and tousled hair who saved scores of heroines from bandits, runaway horses, and fates worse than death. Bronco Billy was the ancestor of all the acrobatic cowboys—Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, Johnny Mack Brown, Ken Maynard, Buck Jones, and Lash Larue, to name only a few—who have thrilled youthful audiences with their daring escapades. The acrobatic cowboy is easily distinguished from the romantic cowboy. He wears a distinctive costume that frequently looks more like a uniform than cowboy dress. He rides an identifiable horse, with a name, and has an inseparable companion. And last, he is frequently identified with some sort of gimmick, which for Lash Larue was a whip and for the Lone Ranger was a mask and silver bullet. Tom Mix, a former Wild West show performer and poolroom‐keeper whose fictional autobiography almost equals in incredibility his exploits on the screen, was the epitome of the acrobatic cowboy, leaping from saloon roofs, climbing under runaway stagecoaches, and igniting dynamite caps with pistol shots. The acrobatic cowboy eventually disappeared from the screen in the 1950s, only to resurface as a rodeo hero.

This is not to say that the romantic cowboy was denied his share of screen glory. He moved off the pages of novelists onto the screen as the strong, silent man of action with an independent but impeccable moral code. William S. Hart, who had once played the Virginian on stage, first personified this type in silent films (one of Hart's immortal subtitles was, “Better a Painted Pony than a Painted Woman,” and one of his best characters was a resolute cowboy known as Three‐Word Brand because he seldom spoke more than three words at a time). Hart's successors in talking films include Randolph Scott, Gary Cooper, and, most recently, John Wayne.

The coming of sound to films brought with it a third type of cowboy hero, even more removed from reality than the romantic cowboy or the acrobatic cowboy: the cowboy entertainer. The cowboy entertainer, peculiarly enough, has his roots in the folksong scholarship of John A. Lomax.

Lomax became interested in collecting songs sung by cowboys while a professor of English at Texas A & M College. His initial motives are somewhat obscure. There is no question that he was caught up in the myth of the romantic cowboy. In the “Collector's Note” to the first, 1910 edition of his Cowboy Songs (dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt) he wrote:

That the cowboy was brave has come to be axiomatic. If his life of isolation made him taciturn, it at the same time created a spirit of hospitality, primitive and hearty as that found in the mead‐halls of Beowulf. He faced the wind and the rain, the snow of winter, the fearful dust‐storms of alkalai desert wastes, with the same uncomplaining quiet. … He played his part in winning the great slice of territory the United States took away from Mexico. He has always been on the skirmish line of civilization. Restless, fearless, chivalric, elemental, he lived hard, shot quick and true, and died with his face to the foe.

He went on to say that the Old West was disappearing, and that “the last figure to vanish is the cowboy. … He sits his horse easily as he rides through a wide valley, enclosed by mountains, clad in the hazy purple of a coming night—with his face turned steadily down the long, long road, ‘the road that the sun goes down.’ Dauntless, reckless, without the unearthly purity of Sir Galahad though as gentle to a pure woman as King Arthur, he is truly a knight of the twentieth century.”

Lomax may also have been motivated by regional pride. He was a native Texan, and was raised, in fact, in a Bosque County town on the Chisholm Trail. He relates in several places how his boyhood efforts to collect songs from cowboys on the Chisholm Trail were ridiculed by an eastern‐educated professor at the University of Texas, and how, as a result, he destroyed his early notebooks. In his preface to Cowboy Songs, he points out that “the Anglo‐Saxon ballad spirit that was active in the rural districts of England and Scotland even after the coming of Tennyson and Browning” has survived equally well in the American West. He was definitely interested in proving the communal theory of ballad composition, and saw cowboy ballads as evidence of this theory. In his unsuccessful application for a Carnegie Fellowship in 1908, he wrote:

A cowboy soothes, with rythmic cry, an unquiet herd of cattle as he rides about them in the darkness. The notes are heard by his mates. They sing them also, with variations and additions. The notes take form in words; the words fall into meter and rhyme; at times a story creeps in. And there is made a ballad, as genuine, however crude and unpolished, as the best that comes from English and Scottish sources.³¹

Lomax did receive a series of Sheldon Fellowships from Harvard for his project, and between 1907 and 1910 he spent a good deal of time collecting cowboy ballads. He used two methods, making field recordings with an Edison wax‐cylinder recorder and sending a letter of inquiry to newspaper editors all over the West, asking for examples of “ballads of the cattle trade and other frontier occupations.” Unfortunately, only fifty‐four recordings and no field notes have survived. These fifty‐four recordings, according to a note accompanying them made by Lomax in 1941, “are all that remains of probably 250 records that I made … during the years 1908, 1909, 1910.” They include “The Chisholm Trail,” “The Cowboy's Lament,” “Little Joe the Wrangler,” and “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” all published in Cowboy Songs, but they also include an even larger number of songs that have nothing to do with cowboys, including “Days of '49,” “Poor Girl on the Town,” “Frankie and Albert,” “The Ram of Derby,” and “Jerry Go Ile That Car,” all sung by singers who were presumably cowboys.

Lomax's second method seems to have elicited more ballads that were topically oriented to cowboy work, as newspaper editors responded by sending clippings of verses from their papers. Subsequent scholarship has shown that many, if not most, of these ballads were the work of the “cowboy poets” of the 1890s. As one correspondent, a former cowboy and Texas Ranger, warned Lomax, “In my opinion, if you will permit me the liberty to say it, your greatest danger is to be imposed upon by imposters. Many so‐called cow‐boy songs reputed to be old are not over fifteen years old, and some people are singing them as old songs.”³² Lomax edited the ballads he collected, “selecting and putting together,” as he said, “what seemed to be the best lines from different versions, all telling the same story.”³³ He also severely bowdlerized some ballads, thinking, quite correctly, that the sexual allusions they contained would not be acceptable to any publisher. The original versions, as preserved in the Lomax Papers, offer an insight into the cowboy's attitudes toward cattle and women that Cowboy Songs does not. In a typescript copy of “The Old Chisholm Trail,” undoubtedly a genuine cowboy song and one “with a verse for every mile of the trail,” as Frank Dobie said, we find

My foot in the stirrup, my ass in the saddle
I'll bid goodbye to these God damn cattle

instead of Lomax's published

Feet in the stirrup and seat in the saddle
I hung and rattled them longhorn cattle

and

There's old Miss Annie she's a mighty fine squaw
She lives on the banks of the old Wichita
I wanted for to frig her and I offered her a quarter
Says she, “Bill Moore, I'm a gentleman's daughter”

instead of

Well, I met a little gal and I offered her a quarter
She says, “Young man, I'm a gentleman's daughter.”

Verses like

I'm going down south 'fore the weather gets cold
I'm going down south to get some tallow on my pole

and

I'm going down south just whooping and yelling
If I don't get a woman I'll take a heifer yearling

didn't get into print in any form. As Lomax himself said of the song, “many stanzas are not mailable.”

The point is not that Lomax was an inaccurate collector or a prude, but that Cowboy Songs was not a terribly accurate reflection of the song vocabulary of the average cowboy, which included many songs that had nothing to do with cattle and did not include many of the supposed songs, actually poems, included in Cowboy Songs. Significantly, the first edition of the book contained 112 texts and only fourteen tunes.

Cowboy Songs was uncritically accepted by the public, however, and during the next decade many of the texts in it were set to music. The English composer Liza Lehmann provided music for “The Rancher's Daughter,” “The Night‐Herding Song” (which was written in 1909 by a Texas A & M student named Harry Stephens), and “The Skew‐Ball Black” in 1912 and University of Texas music professor Oscar Fox wrote tunes for “Rounded Up in Glory” and several others.

At almost the same time, a smattering of so‐called cowboy songs written by professional songwriters began to appear. The team of Harry Williams and Egbert Van Alstyne copyrighted “San Antonio” in 1907, and at about the same time a young vaudeville actor named Will Rogers was twirling his rope on stage to a ditty called “Cheyenne.”

Cheyenne, Cheyenne
Hop on my pony,
There's room for two, dear,
After the ceremony.

It was to Lomax, however, that the professional singing radio cowboys of the twenties turned for their initial material, and it was the radio cowboys who became the singing movie cowboys of the thirties. When radio programming was in its infancy, in the very early twenties, it was a poor station indeed which could not boast a Lonesome Cowboy, an Oklahoma Yodler, or a Sagebrush Sam. Their repertoire, far from being made up of songs sung by cowboys in the 1870s and 1880s (many of which could not have been sung over the air), consisted of texts taken from Lomax, like “Poor Lonesome Cowboy,” “The Dying Cowboy,” and “The Cowboy's Dream,” supplemented by their own compositions. Carl T. Sprague, a Texas A & M track trainer and radio singer who is often referred to as the first cowboy recording star, chose D. J. O'Malley's poem, “When the Work's All Done This Fall,” as given in Cowboy Songs, for his first recording session with Victor in 1925. Gene Autry's first recording hit, made while he was singing on radio station KV00 in Tulsa, was a song of his own composition, “That Silver‐Haired Daddy of Mine.”

When sound came to films, in 1928, cowboy singers moved onto the screen, and in 1934, when the Ziegfeld Follies included “The Last Round‐Up” as a production number, they arrived on Broadway. Judging by the sheet music filed for copyright with the Library of Congress, the thirties were the great years of the cowboy singer, whose costume, demeanor, and action on screen generally indicated that he was an entertainer first and a cowboy second, if ever. By the onset of the forties, most Americans believed that a guitar was as much a part of the cowboy's equipment as a rope or a horse.

The cowboy entertainer gained prominence through two other American institutions that grew to maturity in the twenties and thirties: the rodeo and the dude ranch. Although organized rodeos can be traced back to the 1880s, when they were given as Fourth of July entertainments, it was not until the twentieth century that rodeo became a national spectator sport. By 1915 four western rodeos had emerged as the principal two‐ or three‐day money contest for cowboys: the California Rodeo in Salinas, Frontier Days in Cheyenne, the Calgary Stampede, and the Pendleton (Oregon) Round‐Up.

In 1916 a promoter named Guy Weadick conceived the idea of taking a rodeo to the East, and he organized the New York Stampede, held at Sheepshead Bay Speedway in Brooklyn, where it ran for twelve days. A total of $50,000 in prize money was offered, and the announcer was Foghorn Clancy, who had made a career of announcing western rodeos. The events included saddle bronc riding, bareback bronc riding, trick and fancy roping, and steer roping, and the cowgirls who participated in the women's divisions attracted a great deal of attention. Although a financial failure because of a streetcar strike, the Stampede introduced New York to rodeo, setting the stage for the great Madison Square Garden rodeos of the twenties, and it marked the beginning of a new era in rodeo.

Before the Stampede, rodeos were an ancillary event to some other sort of celebration, usually a stock show or a pioneer reunion, and the participants were normally working cowboys, eager to pick up prize money by showing off their skills. After 1916, rodeos increasingly became events in themselves, and a specialized class of participants developed who came to think of themselves as professional athletes.

The twenties were the great years of spectator rodeos in the East. The World Championship Rodeo in Chicago and the Madison Square Garden Rodeo in New York became annual events. In 1924 Tex Austin, the promoter of the Chicago event, organized a rodeo at the British Empire Exposition in London. Perhaps the most publicized, and improbable, rodeo fan of the decade was Calvin Coolidge, who had to weather the criticism of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Anti‐Rodeo League for both his well‐publicized enthusiasm for the sport and his penchant for attending rodeos dressed in a gaudy cowboy costume.

In the early thirties, another important change took place: the use of contract riders instead of actual contestants in the more spectacular events, especially bronc riding and trick riding. By 1935, rodeos bore a strong resemblance to Wild West shows, and indeed many participants worked for both. Tad Lucas, a cowgirl trick rider, learned her skills with the California Frank Hafly Wild West Show, which toured Mexico and rural New England in the early twenties, and then participated in the Madison Square Garden Rodeo in 1923. Each season thereafter, she worked for the Miller 101 Show until the rodeo season opened, and then she went on the rodeo circuit, eventually becoming a much sought‐after contract rider.

In 1936, the final step in the professionalization of rodeo was taken when the cowboys at the Boston Garden Rodeo went on strike for a fairer distribution of prize money and formed the Cowboy's Turtle Association, so‐called because the members felt they had been so slow to act. The Turtle Association soon became a nationwide organization of rodeo cowboys, certifying rodeos that agreed to its conditions and rules. In 1945 it was reorganized as the Rodeo Cowboys' Association, and today it administers rodeo as a professional sport, setting contest rules and judging standards. In 1961 the R.C.A. estimated that five hundred rodeos were held each season under its auspices, and that these were seen by ten million spectators. Today's rodeo participant is unquestionably a professional athlete, the ultimate cowboy entertainer.

In another sense, however, dude ranching represented the epitome of cowboy entertainment, since it was participatory entertainment. Dude ranching, like rodeo, had its origins in the 1880s, when eastern‐owned ranches in the northwest began to take paying guests. The first of these was probably the Eaton Ranch near Medora, Dakota Territory, which specialized in rehabilitating dissolute young easterners. Thirty years later, enough dude ranches had developed in the West to warrant the organization of a Dude Rancher's Association. The ranches fell into two distinct categories: working ranches, where guests paid to participate in actual ranch work, and larger, more elaborate establishments where portions of ranch work—such as roundups, brandings, and trail drives—were simulated to entertain the guests. These ranchers employed a “dude wrangler” to supervise the guests' activities and tactfully keep them out of trouble, and they frequently retained cowboy singers to entertain the guests around an evening campfire. They became so popular that in 1927 a dude ranch was opened in Florida, with a herd of cattle and seventy‐five horses imported from Montana, and so profitable that in 1935 the University of Montana instituted a degree in “recreational ranching.” Curiously enough, most dude ranch advertising did not emphasize recreational opportunities but instead extolled the scenery, the clean air, and, most of all, the authenticity of the western way of life that could be sampled. Unlike other resorts, dude ranches were places to pretend, rather than places to relax.

In the same way that Theodore Roosevelt symbolized the romantic cowboy to Americans in the first decade of the century, Will Rogers represented the cowboy entertainer to Americans of the 1920s. No one has ever been able to equal the position that Will Rogers held in American hearts—he was our first national “personality.” He struck chords that predated the cowboy and went all the way back to Brother Jonathan, Artemus Ward, and the wise rube who outsmarts the city slicker. At the same time, he was an authentic cowboy, raised on a ranch in the Cherokee Nation, and a master of the lasso. His own experiences recapitulated the history of the cowboy hero: he had been a horse wrangler, a working cowboy, a Wild West performer (in South Africa), and a movie star. Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, he had access to the radio and to motion pictures, and he took advantage of both. He also wrote a syndicated political column and several books of political commentary. In those heady times, he provided just the right anchor to the American past. Paradoxically, one of his own enthusiasms was aviation, and his personal hero was Lindbergh. Will Rogers represents a transition between the world of the real cowboy and the world of the make‐believe cowboy, and he is a pivotal figure in the growth of the cowboy myth.

During the last years of his life—Rogers was killed in an airplane crash in 1935—the depression curbed the activities of both organized rodeos and dude ranches, and the cowboy entertainer's stage was limited almost entirely to the movies and radio. Both media were directed primarily at juvenile audiences. As a result, the cowboy hero began to assume a fourth aspect, one he was to wear all through the 1940s and early 1950s: that of cowboy father, a moral preceptor to small children.

Filmmakers had always been aware that much of their audience was juvenile—and an early Tom Mix film shows Mix striding into a saloon and courageously ordering root beer—but it does not seem to be until the late thirties that the connection between cowboys, children, and commercial sponsors that manufactured children's products, primarily breakfast foods, was made. Ralston Purina, the Saint Louis cereal company, began sponsoring a juvenile radio show featuring Tom Mix in 1933 which was so popular that it continued until 1950, a decade after Mix's death. The sponsor invented an organization, the Tom Mix Ralston Straight‐Shooters, that young listeners could belong to, and issued hundreds of premiums, available for ten cents and a Ralston box top. As William Savage says in The Cowboy Hero, his perceptive and biting account of the cowboy myth. “The cowboy sold the cereal, the cereal was necessary to acquire the premium, and the premium reinforced interest in the cowboy, which meant, presumably, more listening and more eating and of course more dimes.”

Ralston Purina's success with Tom Mix was quickly imitated by Quaker Oats with Roy Rogers, Langendorf Bread with Red Ryder, General Mills with Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger, and Grape Nuts Flakes with Buck Jones. In order to sell food to children, however, the cowboy had to reform. He could no longer drink whiskey, chew tobacco, or swear. It may well be that William Boyd had the advantages of commercial sponsorship in mind when, in 1935, he agreed to play Hopalong Cassidy in a filmed version of one of Clarence Mulford's stories only if the part was rewritten to present Hopalong as a clean‐liver.

At any rate, by the beginning of World War II, screen cowboys were advising American children over the airwaves and in personal appearances on diet, health, and behavior. During the war, when fathers were away in the service, mothers disciplined their children by saying, “What would Gene Autry say if he saw you do that?” and Gene Autry responded by codifying ten “Cowboy Commandments” as model behavioral rules for children:

1. He must not take unfair advantage of an enemy.
2. He must never go back on his word.
3. He must always tell the truth.
4. He must be gentle with children, elderly people,
                    and animals.
5. He must not possess racially or religiously
                    intolerant ideas.
6. He must help people in distress.
7. He must be a good worker.
8. He must respect women, parents, and his nation's
                    laws.
9. He must neither drink nor smoke.
10. He must be a patriot.(34)

Somehow, Charlie Siringo and his fellow saddle‐tramps had been turned into Frank Merriwells.

The use of the cowboy as a salesman by commercial sponsors had great ramifications for the cowboy hero. It gave him his fifth—and current—aspect, that of the commercial cowboy. The image of the cowboy had been used occasionally in the early 1900s in advertising, primarily for food products associated with the West. For instance, a canned corn label used about 1910 advertised Lasso Brand corn as “the epicurean's dream” and showed a distinctly non‐epicurean cowboy serving an opened can to someone who looks suspiciously like Colonel Cody. A 1906 shipping crate label advertised Cowboy brand California prunes. But the two products that today are the greatest exploiters of the cowboy image, tobacco and alcoholic beverages, shunned cowboys almost completely until the mid‐fifties.

It was Philip Morris that started the trend in 1954. Leo Burnett, president of Leo Burnett, USA, Philip Morris's advertising agency, has explained how Philip Morris wanted a masculine image to counteract the idea that its filter‐tipped Marlboro cigarettes were effeminate. The Burnett agency hit on the idea of running a series of ads showing tattooed men in masculine occupations smoking Marlboros. The tattoo was a small anchor on the back of the hand. The first series of ads showed a tree surgeon, a cowboy, a lumberjack, and several other occupations, but the cowboy seemed to elicit the largest response from buyers, and he was chosen as the exclusive representative for the next series. The initial campaigns were newspaper and magazine campaigns, and nonprofessional models were used. Owen Smith, vice president of Leo Burnett, explained the shooting strategy: “To get the outdoor type for the cowboy, the suburbs were combed for healthy, manly faces. Tree surgeons, gardeners, and farmers were contacted.” Eventually, however, the agency began to use real cowboys and to shoot television commercials on western locations. Ironically, one of their early cowboy models was a foreman on the Four Sixes Ranch at Gutherie, Texas, the ranch that had sponsored Theodore Roosevelt's famous wolf hunt in Indian Territory in 1905. In 1961 Darrell Winfield, a cowboy on the Quarter Circle Five ranch at Riverton, Wyoming, began posing for commercials shot on that ranch, and he has since become the best‐known Marlboro Man. The tattoos and the other masculine occupations were dropped long ago, and the concept of Marlboro Country was added to the Marlboro Man, in beautiful color photographs.³⁵

Historian William Savage is the only scholar who has seriously examined the commercial cowboy. He has noted that Marlboro's lead was followed in the 1970s by cowboys who “sold barbecue‐flavor potato chips for Frito‐Lay, motor oil for Phillips 66, trucks for Toyota, and beer for Miller and Schlitz. They sold bath soap, cigars, juice, razors, snuff, barbecue sauce, flashlight batteries, and laundry detergent.” As curious as the unlikely products they sold, he goes on to say, was “the presentation of characteristics assumed to be (and evidently accepted as) typically cowboy,” which he describes, in the case of a series of 1972 Falstaff Beer commercials, as “adolescent” and demonstrating “a marked preference for raising hell to working hard, or, indeed, working at all.”³⁶

Savage has hit on a highly significant point. The commercial cowboy was originally introduced to represent masculinity, but he has come to represent leisure and pleasure, which are frequently associated with the so‐called “Southwestern way of life” that has developed in the Sunbelt. Furthermore, the men who are advertising beer and boots and men's cologne are not even movie stars who have built a reputation playing cowboy roles—they are simply male models dressed as cowboys, or as an advertising agency imagines cowboys would dress if they could afford Ralph Lauren clothing.

The current fad in western fashions is still too close to us in time to analyze completely, but its connection with the cowboy commercials of the 1960s and 1970s is obvious. For twenty years, with gathering strength, television and magazine advertising have been telling us that cowboys have more fun. A number of factors, including the popularity of the television program “Dallas,” the release of the film Urban Cowboy, a nostalgia for the 1950s (which brought with it a revival of interest in Roy Rogers and Gene Autry films), and, perhaps, the growing economic prosperity of the Southwest, combined with this residual force to produce a fashion explosion in the East. The situation was summed up by two cartoons which appeared in the New Yorker in 1980. One showed an elevator in an urban office building, full of businessmen in three‐button suits wearing cowboy hats. The elevator operator opened the door and said “First floor! Happy trails, gentlemen.” The second showed a similarly costumed group of businessmen, each with a briefcase, standing in front of a receptionist's desk. The receptionist was speaking into an intercom, saying “Mr. Smith and his buckaroos are here to see you, sir.” The clothes are expensive—embroidered silk shirts, feathered or silver‐and‐turquoise hatbands, thousand‐dollar boots—and are associated with leisure and “dropping out” rather than with the hard work and brutal weather that they were designed for.

The future forms that the mythical cowboy will take are uncertain, but it is certain that we will continue to ring changes on him. We have recently seen the gay cowboy and the outlaw cowboy emerge as parts of American subcultures; we seem to be on the verge of the leisure cowboy. The future may hold the punk cowboy, the computer cowboy, the Third World cowboy, and the astral cowboy. None of these could be farther from reality than the series of mythical cowboys that we have already created, yet all will be equally important as reflections of ourselves and our aspirations—which is, after all, the function of a myth.

Notes

1. Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Letters, and Lectures, 2d ser. (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1905), p. 166.

2. Harper's New Monthly Magazine 59, no. 354 (November 1879):878.

3. Charles W. Webber, Tales of the Southern Border (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, & Co., 1853), p. 124.

4. “A Common Incident in Southwestern Life—The Capture of a Texas Town by Cowboys,” Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, January 14, 1882, p. 347.

5. “Texas—Types of Cow‐Boys on the Plains,” Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, December 1, 1883, p. 229.

6. A Visit to Texas (New York: Goodrich and Wiley, 1834), pp. 58‐60.

7. Richard Henry Dana, Two Years before the Mast (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 73‐74 and 81.

8. Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), p. 253.

9. Rosmarie K. Bank, “Melodrama as a Social Document: Social Factors in the American Frontier Play, “Theatre Studies 22 (1975‐76):46.

10. Daryl Emrys Jones, “The Dime Novel Western: The Evaluation of a Popular Formula” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1975), pp. 66, 95.

11. Arthur Holt, Hotspur Harry: or, The Texas Trailers, The Champion Library, vol. 1, no. 29 (New York, 1882).

12. Clifford P. Westermeier, “Buffalo Bill's Cowboys Abroad,” Colorado Magazine 52 (1975):277‐98.

13. Paul L. Reddin, “Wild West Shows: A Study in the Development of Western Romanticism” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1970), pp. 193‐95; and Philip Ashton Rollins, The Cowboy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930), p. 36.

14. Harper's Weekly, November 27, 1880, p. 759.

15. Ibid., October 2, 1880, p. 637.

16. Joseph Nimmo, “The American Cow‐Boy,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 73 (November 1886):883‐84.

17. Harper's Weekly, October 16, 1886, p. 671.

18. Frederic Remington, “Cracker Cowboys in Florida,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 91 (August 1895):339.

19. Poultney Bigelow, “Frederic Remington; with Extracts from Unpublished Letters,” New York State Historical Association Quarterly Journal 10 (1929):46‐48.

20. Frederic Remington to Owen Wister, April 1900, Wister Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

21. Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting‐Trail (New York: Century Co., 1888), pp. 9‐10.

22. Peter H. Hassrick, Frederic Remington (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1973), p. 68.

23. Remington to Wister, January 1895, Wister Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

24. Eldon S. Branda, “Portrait of the Cowboy as a Young Artist,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 71 (July 1967):69‐77; and J. Evetts Haley, Life on the Texas Range (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1952).

25. New York Tribune, January 6, 1904.

26. Joe B. Frantz and Julian Choate, The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), p. 144.

27. W. H. Griffin to Wister, undated, Wister Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

28. William Lawrence Slout, Theatre in a Tent: The Development of a Provincial Entertainment (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), pp. 71‐77; and U.S. Copyright Office, Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States, 1870 to 1916, 2 vols. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918).

29. W. H. Hutchinson, “Virgins, Villains, and Varmints,” in Eugene Manlove Rhodes, The Rhodes Reader: Stories of Virgins, Villains, and Varmints, 2d ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), p. x.

30. Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting‐Trail, p. 109.

31. Lomax to the Trustees of the Carnegie Foundation, January 10, 1908, John A. Lomax Papers, Barker History Center, University of Texas at Austin.

32. S. P. Skinner, Athens, Texas, to Lomax, December 4, 1910, Lomax Papers, Barker History Center, University of Texas at Austin.

33. John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Macmillan Co., 1941), p. xxix.

34. Quoted in David Rothel, The Singing Cowboys (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1978), p. 17.

35. “Marlboro Won Success by Newspaper Ads,” Editor and Publisher 91 (December 6, 1968):26; Mason Smith, “The Marlboro Man,” Sports Illustrated 46 (January 17, 1970):59‐67; and Bruce A. Lohof, “The Higher Meaning of Marlboro Cigarettes,” in George H. Lewis, comp., Side‐Saddle on the Golden Calf: Social Structure and Popular Culture in America (Pacific Palisades, Calif.: Goodyear Publishing Co., 1972).

36. William Savage, The Cowboy Hero: His Image in American History and Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), pp. 119‐20.