Urban Cowboy or Urban Legend: The Myth of the Cowboy Image

Stone talks of Will James, a writer of popular cowboy stories in the early 1920's, as someone who played up a non-existent cowboy heritage. "He wrote immensely popular books, in the tradition of writing in a backwoodsy fashion with poor grammar to give the appearance of an uneducated man with great stories to tell. He did indeed have great stories to tell, mostly autobiographical ones about horses he'd owned, places he'd been and how he lived his life as a cowboy. It was only after his death that people found out he was actually from Quebec, even though in his books he would say he was born in Montana. To explain his French accent he said he was supposedly orphaned as a young boy, and a French-Canadian trapper in the Rockies saved him and raised him in Alberta."

Silversides says that the myth started building right before the first World War, when there were still real cowboys roaming the ranges, but was after the cutoff point for the really big ranches after the disastrous winter in 1906 killed off herds of cattle.

As people became more removed from cowboy life, the image of the romanticized cowboy got stronger and stronger. According to Stone, while the true cowboy life was indeed quiet and noble, "in western life in North American there has always been a sort of frontier hero. The idea of this hero moved west as the country settled from the east, and the cowboy was the last frontier hero, and because of that became such a large part of the North American imagination. People tend to build heroes into so much more than they were in real life."

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Next Week: This discussion of cowboy culture and image continues.

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