Home » Reading & Literature » Canadian Literature » The Myth of the Cowboy Image: Part Two

The Myth of the Cowboy Image: Part Two

© Paula E. Kirman

When the first Calgary Stampede came in 1912, it was an event which Silversides explains was created "to remember the era of the cowboy, not to celebrate the ongoing cowboy." By now, the majority of people who participated in events like the Stampede were not really cowboys who ranched for a living, but men who maybe had spent a summer or two on a ranch. "The events that they were remembering in the rodeo were based on what was going on on ranches, the everyday activities, but they had taken it to a different level, and not a realistic one at that."

Stone agrees. "Rodeos have become a real athletic event, and most of the people who participate are people who took up the sport in high school or university."

The idea of a real cowboy, the definition of which is simply one who earns his bread by herding cattle and operating a ranch -- neither of which activities are particularly glamorous -- has grown stronger in the minds of Canadians. It is a powerful image responsible for the "Urban Cowboy" craze, with dude ranches, places where weekend warriors could go and try their hands at cowboy work, springing up like mushrooms.

"I recently read in an article in our local newspaper, that most of the people who go to dude ranches aren't even North American. It's people from Japan and Europe who are also interested in that image of ranch life," says Stone, who lives in a rural town in Manitoba.

"It's a highly romanticized memory, and it's only a memory, because there are not enough people around anymore who have actually experienced a real ranch" says Silversides. "They pick and choose aspects of what they think the cowboy was like, and then they expand upon it, taking it to a really absurd degree, whether it is the cowboy dress or the way they think cowboys talk, or they suppose the character of the cowboy was like."

Silversides himself was guilty of such notions. "I was torn between two points of view before I started doing the research for Shooting Cowboys. One was that the Canadian cowboy was a joke; it didn't exist. The second was if they did exist they had to be exactly like the American cowboys, where they would ride into town, shoot it up, drink, and go to saloons. Both of those were very wrong."

He hopes that exposing non-cowboys as "poseurs" in his book will help build an image of the Canadian cowboy in our minds which has more integrity than the current idealized one. "I am glad I delved beneath the surface. I think the best way to debunk these myths firstly is to show what the real cowboy was like, but secondly to show the permutations -- how they developed and how absurd they were. It is only be seeing how far along they went that you realize that this is crazy. What the hell were we thinking?" he laughs.

The copyright of the article The Myth of the Cowboy Image: Part Two in Canadian Literature is owned by Paula E. Kirman. Permission to republish The Myth of the Cowboy Image: Part Two in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.