Branding Houston: How the West was spun
Despite its cowboy heritage pride, H-town was never a cowtown
Weekdays are usually slow at Tecovas, the new cowboy boot store in Rice Village, but the shop was thrumming Tuesday afternoon, with boot-ogling customers outnumbering the clerks who’d fetch their sizes. It was rush season: On Friday, Go Texan Day would launch the rodeo with Houston’s annual burst of giddy civic pride.
“Every Texan needs a pair of boots,” laughed Laura Henry, who was buying an ostrich-hide pair for her husband.
Her statement seemed self-evident. In a city with little patience for tradition, Go Texan Day and the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which kicks off Tuesday, are time-honored and beloved — a joyful salute to our cowboy heritage, our Old West history as a cowtown.
The only problem: That’s not really Houston.
Longhorns, cattle drives and cowboys existed in Houston in Old West era, but they weren’t a big deal, and weren’t something the city prided itself on. Houston wasn’t Old West so much as West-adjacent — a Southern city in the Spanish moss part of Texas, more Confederate than cowboy, more cotton than cattle. Houston, then a little city, didn’t eye western Texas’ ranches or rowdy cowtowns with envy; instead it took aim at Galveston, the state’s biggest, most bustling metropolis. Houston wanted to become a big city, a cultural center, a place where all the world came to do business.
Only later — after Houston actually had become all those things — did we embrace our inner cowboy.
“There would be no cowboys if it weren’t for Texas,” said Michael Grauer, the McCasland Chair of Cowboy Culture and Curator of Cowboy Collections at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. “It’s as simple as that.”
The Old West — the era of trail drives and lawless territories — existed only 30 years before barbed wire and creeping civilization shut it down. After the Civil War, former soldiers and freed slaves cast about for ways to make a living. Some Texas landowners began rounding up feral longhorn cattle, driving them to faraway markets where meat fetched high prices.
Cowboying as we know it started then, with the men hired to herd those longhorns, a tough, rangy breed escaped from domestication centuries before. “They were the cow brutes for the open range,” wrote folklorist Frank Dobie. “They suited the wide, untamed land and the men who ranged it. Although of Spanish origin, they were marked by Texas suns, magnified by Texas grasses and scarred by Texas brush. … Had they been registered and regulated, restrained and provided for by man, they would not have been what they were.”
Tending longhorns was hard, low-paying work, and the men who did it — white, black and Mexicano — tended to be poor and uneducated, as tough as the cattle they herded. Most Texas cowboying took place in the dry parts of the state, west of Houston, starting in South Texas and heading north. Fort Worth, Abilene, Denver and Dodge City were cowtowns, rough places full of the cowboys who provided their economic reasons to exist.
“Houston was never a cowtown,” Grauer, the cowboy historian, said flatly. “It never had a cattle market to speak of.”
A few longhorns did roam the unfenced Gulf Coast in both Texas and Louisiana, and those areas also had a few ranches and a few cowboys. Some early cattle drives even passed through Houston on their way to New Orleans, or to fatten cattle on the saltgrass of Texas’ Gulf Coast. But those didn’t amount to much.
What Houston had was cotton, lumber and, increasingly, trade. The ambitious, business-friendly city courted railroads. It built the Ship Channel. After the Storm of 1900 laid Galveston low, those transportation networks allowed Houston to seize the oil business unleashed by Spindletop’s discovery.
The Old West, which Houston hadn’t been a part of, was dead. But oil redefined the state, and Houston owned that era.
‘A veritable fairyland’
At first, the cherished institution that Houstonians now call “the rodeo” didn’t actually include a rodeo, and it didn’t look like it was going to be a big deal. In 1932, the first Houston Fat Stock Show wasn’t judged worthy of a newspaper front page. The Houston Chronicle relegated it to Page 12, which it shared with a preview of a Lanier High School operetta and a story about a swarm of unusually large flying ants.
The Fat Stock Show’s connection with the mythic Old West was complicated. As its name implied, it aimed to promote fat stock. “Aristocrats of range,” the Chronicle headline called the livestock on display — portly purebred cattle, as opposed to longhorns.
Genteel student performances accompanied the displays of show animals, the Chronicle reported, transforming Sam Houston Hall into “a veritable fairyland, with lovely maidens singing and dancing.”
The story shows only a single hint of the Old West.
A photo shows one performer, identified as “Miss Lillie May Crummy, mezzosoprano,” dressed as a cowgirl, in the way an opera singer might dress as a Valkyrie. The smiling Miss Crummy was a sunny, softened version of the Old West; shameless showbiz; part of the fairyland.
By 1941, when J. Frank Dobie published his book “The Longhorns,” the breed verged on extinction, but Houston and its Fat Stock Show and Livestock Exposition were beginning to take the shapes we know now. Together they grew at breakneck speed. In 1940, Houston’s population was 384,500; by 1960, it reached 938,000. The livestock show added its rodeo, parade, celebrity shows and trail drives.
In those midcentury decades, Western movies and TV shows dominated American boys’ dreams. Playing cowboys was a full-time career for actors such as Roy Rogers, John Wayne and James Arness. Their Western heroes led simple, free lives and rode clever horses. They were the squarejawed white embodiment of manly virtues, like selfreliance and plainspoken grit. In their worlds, bad guys wore black hats, and it was easy to tell when one needed shooting.
This became the world’s idea of Texas, and Houston newcomers, busy with the jobs that drew them, could be forgiven for assuming the city’s history was a tapestry of such cheerful legends. Business leaders in Houston and Dallas were happy to play along. By trumpeting the state’s Western heritage, they could conveniently skip their cities’ Confederate and slave-holding histories.
Houston, Dallas and Atlanta, historian Michael Phillips writes, “won over Northern investors by consciously diluting their Southern identities, transforming themselves into economic colossi supposedly too busy to hate and too forward-looking to have a past worth remembering.”
Consider, for instance, how Houston presented itself to the world at one of its proudest moments. NASA’s first astronauts arrived here in 1962, in the thick of the Civil Rights era. The Chamber of Commerce welcome parade ended at the Sam Houston Coliseum, then the home of the rodeo. There, in front of a cheering crowd of thousands, each Mercury 7 astronaut was ceremonially issued a cowboy hat and a star-shaped badge “deputizing” them into the “Harris County sheriff ’s posse.”
John Glenn, from Ohio, followed the Houstonians’ lead. “Howdy,” he told the crowd.
Acting the part
That astronaut moment illustrates one of the most endearing things about Houston’s love of cowboys: It’s welcoming. No one’s excluded. Academics call being Texan a “performative identity”: It requires acting the part, complete with costumes, props and catchphrases that tell the world who you are. Notably, people in other states don’t do this: No one in Newark “goes Jersey.”
But in Houston, going Texan tells the world that you belong to this city, and it belongs to you. That’s why orthodontists here put cowboy boots on their signs, and it’s why schoolkids’ Go Texan Day photos blow up on Facebook. When India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Houston last year, the area’s Indian Americans welcomed him with an event they called “Howdy, Modi.” The Indian press ate it up.
While researching her book “Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City,” historian Tyina Steptoe noticed hardly any newspaper ads for Western wear in the early 1920s, but lots more midcentury, as the Civil Rights movement was gathering steam. Notably, those Western-wear ads appeared in both the black and white press. Nobody wanted to relive slavery, but everyone could enjoy a hat and boots: a costume that declared its wearer to be free, self-reliant, and a full-fledged Texan.
Performative identity peaks every year with trail rides, one of the Houston rodeo’s most beloved, timehonored traditions. The first started in 1952 as a publicity stunt. Now every year, thousands of people dress up and ride horses and chuck wagons long distances to appear in the rodeo parade.
As a child in the ’50s, writer Susan Chadwick lived across the street from a Salt Grass Trail Ride family who parked their trailers in their suburban front yard. Chadwick’s ancestors had settled in Texas in the 1820s — the state equivalent of coming over on the Mayflower — but her family didn’t make a big deal of its heritage. The people across the street, the ones who dressed up and rode in the trail ride, struck her as real Texans.
At the Tecovas store, manager Stephen Gehman looked at home wearing boots, but he was still getting used to Houston and Texas. He grew up in Stockton, Calif., and moved here just before the store’s opening on Black Friday. He hadn’t realized how big Houston was. And he remained astonished by how many different kinds of Houstonians buy Western wear.
“People from all kinds of cultures come in,” he said wonderingly. “We get doctors from the Medical Center. We get Uber drivers. Everybody — I mean everybody — wants boots.”