National Day of the Cowboy is coming up this Saturday, July 27, and to celebrate we're asked the acclaimed author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Ron Hansen, about what it means to be a cowboy. Learn more about National Day of the Cowboy on our blog here.
Some years ago in central Mexico, I visited a city that was famous for its leather products, and I decided to buy some fancy botas de vaquero, or cowboy boots. And as I was getting measured for them, it struck me that just as the Spanish sabe became our English savvy, so vaquero became, through mispronunciation, buckaroo. A cowboy’s chaps in English are just the shortened form of the Spanish chaparreras, and Stetson’s famous Boss of the Plains hat is a stylized adaptation of the Mexican sombrero.
Almost everything about our cowboys was invented in Argentina or Mexico and only made it to the United States around the time when there were cattle drives across vast unfenced country to northern railheads where the steers and heifers could be loaded onto freight cars bound for the slaughterhouses.
The best film on such a longhorn drive is still 1948’s Red River, directed by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne in his most interesting, tyrannical role. Except for Montgomery Clift’s too-fancy attire, the costuming seems impressively accurate to me, and when I have taught the film in college classes, it has not gone without notice that the hands never change out of their clothing over several hot and dusty months.
There are supposed to be nine thousand cattle on that 1865 drive and probably ninety horsemen, and I don’t recall anyone being called a cowboy. That was a sarcastic, pejorative term—spelled with a hyphen: cow-boy—that I first read in a Tombstone, Arizona, newspaper, from around the time of the gunfight in the OK Corral (from the Spanish corral). The emphasis was meant to be on the boy—that whiskey and too much time on the open range had made the hands wild, ornery, childish, and impetuous, the very sort that the Earp brothers were there to civilize or scare away. Cowboy now has far more strong, heroic, gentlemanly, and romantic connotations, and the few men I’ve known in that profession—most of them rodeo stars—are justly celebrated.
Ron Hansen is the author of eight novels, two collections of stories, and a book of essays. His historical novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was a finalist for a PEN/Faulkner Award, and was adapted into a movie starring Brad Pitt.