I should have been a cowboy

Not long ago I ran into a student of mine. Maryann is about 27, Chinese, and a teacher at a local high school. As an exchange teacher she has been in South Korea since last September and teaches the Chinese language to students. She is a bright young lady and is learning both Korean and English. She is so smart that she seems to be picking up both languages about three times as fast as my other adult students.

When I met her, she was carrying a canvas tote bag full of books with the words “I Should Have Been a Cowboy” printed on it in large block letters.

I was delighted to see this Americanism and asked if she knew what it meant. Of course she didn’t; to her it was just a handy bag with the English words as decoration.

Ever the teacher, I endeavored to bring her up to speed. I started with “cowboy.” She had no idea what a cowboy was. It was that serious. I whisked her off to a nearby coffee shop and began. In American culture, the cowboy is as iconic as it gets.

Without knowing about cowboys and the cowboy culture there is no hope of understanding America and Americans. In 1865, at the end of the American Civil War, the real movement into the west began. Of course there were already mountain men, miners, explorers, and even some homesteaders that had already arrived. The large scale movement of people and the railroads were to make the vast wilderness America.

The endless grasslands known as the prairies were ideal for the grazing of large herds of cattle. As the buffalo disappeared, the cattle, first brought by the Spanish, replaced them. Entrepreneurs acquired a few head and turned them into herds of thousands and tens of thousands. It was the age of the open range and the grass was free.

All you had to do was to brand them, let them go out on the range, and then round the fattened critters up. As for labor, boys as young as 15 or 16 and up into their early 20s were just right. And so the cowboy made its brief appearance on the American scene.

Go to Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, or any number of western states and you will find both men and women wearing cowboy hats, boots, shirts, and huge belt buckles holding up their jeans. They probably are listening to country music and they might even be chewing tobacco. And these are doctors, lawyers, bankers and such.

The cultural footprint of the cowboy is disproportionately wider than their actual role in history. Why? The cowboy’s job was to tend the cows and he did this on horseback. He had to develop some skills like riding, roping, and branding. He may have even packed an old pistol or toted a rifle in a saddle scabbard. Here we need to give a tip of the hat to the vaquero.

The boys may have gotten good with such tools. His mastery of these essential and real life skills embedded in him an unshakable confidence. He had to dress for life in the great outdoors, thus the 10 gallon hat, the high heeled boots, and the other duds.

During the round ups and drives to the railhead he slept under the stars and ate food fit for the campfire. He became a lover of the great outdoors. For entertainment all he could do when gazing up at the lightshow in the heavens was to whistle tunes of loneliness, heartbreak, and longing unless he had a beat up old guitar that he could strum.

He was a free agent. He signed on with an outfit and worked until the job was done. Or, if his back was up, he saddled up and rode off when it suited him. He was beholden to no man and his word was his bond. He was free, was capable of independent action, and he fancied himself one of the good guys.

As folks from the east rushed into the western lands the journalist tagged along. Their job was to write stories that would sell newspapers back in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The stories they wrote brought the cowboy in his most romantic and adventurous imagined manifestation to the city folks and the legend of the cowboy in a white hat, riding off into the sunset was born.

The stories sold so well that they began to write popular fiction known as the dime novel. When the movie camera and projector transformed popular entertainment, the cowboy stories became hot properties being told over and over again with unlimited variation. The western movie not only cemented the cowboy image in the national psych but it spread it around the world. Gunfight at the OK Corral, Shane, and Rawhide are common perceptions of Americans even in Korea.

In Europe, when you want to express disdain for someone’s brashness, you call them a cowboy. Ronald Reagan was called a cowboy because some perceived him to be quick at the draw. “Cowboy up” means to be a man and do what needs to be done. More than any actor, John Wayne in his movies was the gold standard of what it means to be a cowboy. Always the good guy, always ready to do what needs to be done, always ready to go it alone, and good with a shooting iron. What’s not to emulate?

Truth be known, the cowboy’s time on stage was brief. By the 1880s barbed wire had arrived and the age of the open range with its freedom as great as the great outdoors came to an end. The legend overtook the reality but the spirit of the cowboy remains.

I did my best to explain the spirit of the cowboy to Maryann. The cowboy is:

— One of the good guys

— An outdoorsman who knows and is comfortable in the natural world

— Skillful, good with his hands — Independent in his thinking and action, might saddle up and ride off at a moment’s notice

— Can be counted on to stand up and do what needs to be done

— Likes to sing

Ah well, that about sums it up. At least for me.

“I should have been a cowboy …” Michael P. Downey (mpdowney308@gmail. com) is an author and teacher living in South Korea. In his free time he is a human rights activist primarily working with refugees from North Korea. As a volunteer English teacher and speech coach (with Teach North Korean Refugees) he is endeavoring to give them a voice by assisting them in telling their stories.