CSotD: Meanwhile, back at the ranch …
Skip to comments
The legalization of marijuana seems to be getting as much joking here in Colorado as it has everywhere else, and, while I'm sure the pot shops are welcomed by a great many people, I was out here a decade or so ago when they opened a Krispy Kreme and I think that sparked more of a traffic jam.
Though I suppose it's good they didn't do both at once.
Anyway, my reason for being here is not to score weed but to rally my young reporters for a workshop and subsequent reportage at the National Western Stock Show, one of the major events in agriculture and a real reminder that Colorado is not entirely made up of ski bums and hipsters, nor has it totally abandoned its historical roots in ranching.
Which makes it a good opportunity to trot out the work of one of my favorite cartoonists, J.R. Williams, whose classic "Out Our Way" panel had several recurring topics, one of which was cowboy life, something he knew about from personal experience and the element on which we will focus today.
I'm sure that, in the days of trail drives, cowboys did arrive in town looking pretty scuzzy, but you won't see battered hats and faded jeans at the Stock Show any more than you'd see guys in greasy coveralls at a car show. If they aren't living out of a saddlebag (and nobody is these days), cowboys will spruce up after work to go into town, while a social event like the Stock Show (or any rodeo) is a time to get out the new rig.
Old Ephaino is, indeed, a romantic figure to this extent: The vaqueros, who began as slave labor for the rancheros of the padres in the Southwest, developed methods of working cattle on open ground that were quite different than the paddock-and-pasture based cattle raising the Americans were used to back East.
I learned in school that cowboys picked up a lot of language from Spanish — vaquero became buckaroo and a night on the town could land you in the calaboose — but nearly the entire cowboy culture comes from the vaqueros, right down to the fast, nimble little cowponies with roots on the open plains of southern Spain and North Africa who could run circles around the big quarterhorses the Yanquis brought west.
In any case, it was dusty, hard work, but that was work: If you see some guy in a battered Stetson and two days' growth on the street in town, he's probably a Country and Western singer, not a cowboy.
Williams' continuing cast included Wes the tenderfoot, and the laconic humor of his compadres was key to the tone of the fun, as it likely was in real life.
The most famous four-eyed tenderfoot in the West was well aware of his lack of skills, but Roosevelt earned the respect and affection of the real ranchers with whom he lived in the Dakotas by, first of all, acknowledging their expertise and, second, not shirking the hard work, even if he wasn't very good at it.
He also refused to take these things over-seriously, and told this story on himself in his autobiography:
The Elkhorn ranch house was built mainly by Sewall and Dow, who, like most men from the Maine woods, were mighty with the ax. I could chop fairly well for an amateur, but I could not do one-third the work they could. One day when we were cutting down the cottonwood trees, to begin our building operations, I heard some one ask Dow what the total cut had been, and Dow not realizing that I was within hearing, answered: "Well, Bill cut down fifty-three, I cut forty-nine, and the boss he beavered down seventeen." Those who have seen the stump of a tree which has been gnawed down by a beaver will understand the exact force of the comparison.
Mind you, in his autobiography he also said he wasn't much of a boxer, though he lost the championship at Harvard on a controversial decision, and that he wasn't much of a scholar though he graduated with honors.
TR subscribed to the Old Timey notion that the less credit you take, the more you will be given once people figure you out. The benefit, my grandfather used to say, being that they will not only give you all the credit you deserve but also some that you don't.
In any case, ropin', tyin' and brandin' were not the only duties of a cowboy, despite the dime novels folks might have read back East. And while TR won over the initially skeptical Westerners (the proof being their willingness later to join the Rough Riders and follow him into battle, and their eagerness to seek him out personally ever after), there is always room for fun at the expense of the starry-eyed.
But there was also room to poke fun at more experienced hands. Having seen the plains of Colorado and Wyoming, I'll concede that putting the horse on automatic pilot was possible, but doing it to this extent would, indeed, get a horse laugh from the rest of the crew.
Then again, when else is he going to have time?
And, besides, in those old days, his saddle was the most valuable thing, and maybe the only thing of any value, that a cowboy could call his own. Gotta take care of it.
I don't know at what point the collection of cow ponies available for buckaroos became a stable group from which to choose, but in the post-Civil War era — the days of roundups and long drives to railheads — the remuda consisted of whatever cayuses were brought along, some of which were barely broken, others of which were reliable workers. You'd put in some hours on one, then, when he'd had enough for the day, you'd ride back and grab another and there was a strong element of chance.
However much that had changed by the time Williams was punching cattle, he often notes the contrast between the critical need to trust your horse and not try to second-guess his footing …
…with the fact that a lot of horses are boneheads.
And that, if nothing else, their normal behavior can, in the right hands, be spun into a joke.
By the way, I find it interesting that, in this 1954 panel, the Chinese cook speaks imperfect English, but Williams doesn't make the tradition R and L swaps of stereotypical depictions. In order to work, the question has to be asked by a non-cowboy-non-rider, and the Chinese cook is readily seen as just that, but Williams apparently saw no reason to make him a comic figure.
That could have been sensitivity, or it might have just been because it would distract from the focus: The joke is on Wes; the cook's ignorance of horses is simply the set-up.
One thing Williams worked hard to bring forward was the tender hearts under those dusty, crusty exteriors, and, while horses from the remuda — the outfit's four-legged motor pool — may have been interchangeable, a good personal horse was more than just a tool.
Anybody who has ever gone to the vet with heart in mouth and a chilling awareness of the potential for hard decisions can relate to this one.
And I don't know when "cowboy poetry" actually broke out into the mainstream culture, but Williams was an unapologetic softy as well as a staunch defender of the souls of buckaroos.
The idea that living out in the wide open spaces does not lead to indifference is a recurring theme throughout cowboy culture, and that 20's Williams panel is very reminiscent of what Stan Lynde frequently presented on Sundays nearly a half-century later in another memorable strip that depicted the Westerner from the inside.
Then again, just as not all cowboy poetry is serious and respectful, not everybody who ventures out under the stars is a romantic.
Some are downright annoying, in fact.
So I'm off to the Stock Show. Meanwhile, here's to a fading lifestyle and an immortal tradition:
Comments 4
Comments are closed.