Tag Archives: Cowboys

The “Old West” in the “New West.”

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            A bunch of strands run together in Prescott, Arizona.  William Prescott (1726-1795) farmed in Massachusetts and served in the militia in a bunch of small-scale wars.  Then he commanded the American troops at Bunker Hill.  His grandson, another William Prescott (1796-1859), made himself into America’s first great historian.  Possessed of rare intelligence and determination, he struggled against gravely defective eyesight.  He chose as his subject the Spanish rampage through the America’s in the early 1500s.  In his books, handfuls of bold men fired by religious conviction and greed launch themselves into the South American wilderness.  Vastly out-numbered and far from home, they conquered the Aztec and Inca Empires.  The first fruits of victory—gold–fell to these “conquistadors,” but over the long run their conquests enriched their homeland.  Prescott had a brilliant writing style.  More importantly, 19th Century Americans thought that he spoke directly to them. 

            By the 1830s, the mountain men had trapped out the Rockies, then fell to other work.  Mostly this meant scouting for the Army and guiding Westward-bound “pilgrims.”  Joe Walker (1798-1876) fit this mold.  His expertise lay in the mountains of the Southwest.  In 1863 he led a party of gold-hunters into the mountains of West Central Arizona.  They found gold, so more prospectors arrived.  The Apache Wars brought an Army fort.  A mining camp more than a town, but in 1864 it became the chosen site of the territorial capital.  What to call it?  Prescott, after William Prescott the historian.[1]  The rough-and-ready town prospered.  Then the gold and silver played out; the Apache were defeated; and the state capital moved away. 

            The old town is the location for two good movies about the “New West.”  Prescott has revived, in part thanks to tourism.  It hosts “Frontier Days,” which includes a rodeo that has run continuously since 1888 and which pulls in 30,000 visitors.  In “Junior Bonner” (dir. Sam Peckinpah, 1972), Steve McQueen plays a rodeo cowboy on the downslope of his career.  He returns home to Prescott in stubborn pursuit of one more chance to ride a bull that has thrown him before.  His father is an old-fashioned boom-and-bust prospector; his brother is a money-hungry property developer selling nostalgia.  His sister-in-law tells him derisively “He’s working on his first million and you’re still trying for eight seconds.”[2]  Bonner refuses a chance to move into management, punches his brother, rides the bull, and spends his prize money on a one-way ticket to Australia for his father.[3] 

            Prescott also shows the dangers of development pushing towns out into Nature.  In “Only the Brave” (dir. Joseph Kosinski, 2017), wildland fire is a constant from the Rockies westward.  On the news you see reporters in spotless yellow Nomex shirts and guys in dirty yellow Nomex shirts.  Never pictured are the “Hotshots” who do the real work cutting containment lines close to the fire.  Twenty-person crews with chain saws and shovels working 12-hour days.  It builds pride and comradeship among tough people far from the limelight.  The movie portrays the redemptive powers of comradeship among people sharing hard experiences.  Brendan McDonough is leading a disastrous life: drugs, indolence, lies, theft, and a pregnant ex-girlfriend all come together.  Hitting bottom, he applies for a job with the Prescott-based “Granite Mountain Hotshots.”  The job and the people start him on a new life.  McDonough gets bitten by a rattlesnake.  At the hospital, he opts to take the pain, rather than blunt it with drugs.  Soon afterward, the crew is sent to fight a fire named for Yarnell Hill near Prescott. Still lame from the snakebite, McDonough is detached to fire-spotting.  While he is away, the fire suddenly overruns his crew.  Nineteen men are killed.  They died together, doing work that gave their lives meaning.  But the heartbreak among their families and friends and community is terrible.  “And I alone am left.”[4]  

            Both movies center on the survival of “Old West” values in a modern world that seems to lack—and miss—them. 

[1] The name was suggested by Richard McCormick, the secretary to the territorial governor.  A sickly child, McCormick had read a great deal in bed and well-plumped chairs.  Subsequently, he became a war correspondent, frontier newspaperman, and politician.  “We see how he comes over us with our wilder days,…” 

[2] The time he has to stay on the bull to win the big buckle. 

[3] See: Monte Walsh – The Cowboy Life 

[4] 1 Kings, 19: 10. 

Cattle Ranch.

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            To this day, much of Spain consists of dry, high-plains covered with grass and brush rather than trees.  Much of the land is poor farmland, but suitable for sheep.  Before “Columbus sailed the ocean-blue,” wool–rather than cotton—provided the “fabric of our lives.”  However, sheep eat the grass down to the roots if they get the chance.  Sheep-owners learned to move the flocks of sheep from pasture to pasture, often over long distances.  So, sheep were a movable gold-mine.  The flocks were vast, if docile, so the shepherds learned to manage the flocks from horseback.  By the Age of Discovery, Spain abounded in “sheep-boys.” 

            The Spanish “conquistadors” imported these familiar techniques to Mexico.  They applied them to the vast “haciendas” and added cattle to the bargain.  So, “vaqueros” developed the skills of handling cattle herds from horse-back on huge tracts of arid grasslands.  Citizens of the United States first encountered this culture and economy when the government of the Mexican Republic encouraged immigration into Texas (then a part of Mexico) in the 1830s and 1840s.  English-speakers called “haciendas” ranches and “vaqueros” “cowboys.”  From Texas, “ranching” and “cowboys” spread northward and westward. 

            The method in the early days was simple.  Grass land abounded and water could be found.  Horses were faster than cattle, so riders could collect the cattle when needed.  Each year, ranch owners just turned the cattle loose after the calves were born in the Spring.  They fended for themselves for the next six months or so.  In the Fall, the “cowboys” would “round up” the cattle, separate the herd into those suitable for sale and those suitable for breeding.  Most of the cattle would be driven to market, while the minority would be herded back toward the ranch so that they could be cared-for over the winter.  As more and more ranches were started, it got to be difficult to tell who owned which cattle.  This led some clever person to invent “branding.”  This got added to the tasks of the “cowboy.” 

            The classic or “golden age” of “open range” ranching lasted from about 1866-67 to 1886-1887.  The completion of the first trans-continental railroad began a rush of railroads across the Plains.  This opened up access to the cattle markets of the Eastern United States.  At the same time, both industrialization and immigration shot ahead in the East.  Cattle prices rose as demand for meat zoomed upward.  Cattle ranchers began driving their herds toward distant railroad towns for shipment east.  Smelling money, ranchers built up the size of their herds.  Eastern and foreign investors bought up cattle ranches to run on an industrial basis. 

            All of these forces for expansion over-strained the grasslands.  Over-grazing wrecked the grasslands.  Cattle ranchers could see problems coming, even if they did not really understand the causes or see a solution to those problems.[1]  Then the Winter of 1886-1887 broke all sorts of records for different categories of Awful.  Long, bitterly cold and very snowy, it killed off much of the cattle grazing on the open range.  Many ranchers who had borrowed money to expand their herds or Easterners who had invested in Western ranches ran the danger of bankruptcy when their main form of capital—cattle—died in droves. 

            The survivors cut costs and changed their operations.  They fenced the land, not just around the outer edges, but also sub-divided them; limited the size of their ranches; and they leased grazing rights on public lands according to the market for cattle anticipated each year.  The cattle “boom” had ended and the survivors began treating ranching just like some eastern business.  Fencing and sub-division greatly reduced the number of cowboys needed.  They started to go the way of the buffalo and the Indians. 

[1] Like the Plains farmers of the 1870 to 1930s era.  See: “The Grapes of Wrath” (dir. John Ford, 1940).