How the Gilded Age Turned Cowboys Into ‘Adventure Heroes’
Cattle Herding May Have Been Boring and Demeaning, But It Seemed Like an Antidote to Soul-Killing Industrial Jobs
It is rare to find cowboys on the silver screen who spend much time performing the humdrum labor—herding cattle—that gave their profession its name. Westerns suggest that cowboys are gun-toting men on horseback, riding tall in the saddle, unencumbered by civilization, and, in Teddy Roosevelt’s words, embodying the “hardy and self-reliant” type who possessed the “manly qualities that are invaluable to a nation.”
But real cowboys—who worked long cattle drives in lonely places like Texas—mostly led lives of numbing tedium, usually on the fringes of society. They were the formerly …
