The Texas Cowboy [antikvár]

Introduction XI Ever since the first barbed-wire fence went up a hundred years ago, some people have been saying the cowboy is extinct, a remembered relic out of the past. Of late, some have even claimed he was a myth and never existed at all. That would have been a surprise to my great-grandfather and great-grandmother, who moved from the East Texas piney woods to West Texas more than a hundred years ago with a covered wagon and a string of horses. It would have been a surprise to my grandfather, their first-born, who after his father's untimely death had to go to work at age twelve, cowboying and breaking horses and mules for the Scott Robertson Ranch in Callahan County to help support his younger brothers and sisters. He punched cattle all the way from the XIT Ranch in the Texas Panhandle to the lower Pecos River before he married. It would have been a surprise to my great-uncle, his brother, who drifted west before the turn of the century and spent the rest of a long life as a cowboy and ranch manager on the Pecos. It would have been a surprise to my father, who was a third-generation cowboy and remained one all his life, or to my three brothers who took up the cowboy trade in their younger years and to some degree have held to it. Myth? Not hardly. When I was a boy at Crane, Texas, some of the old cowboys who still worked or ranched there and in the nearby Odessa-Midland country were veterans of cattle drives up the long trails north. Though I never met him, J. T. McElroy, the founder of the ranch on which i grew up, was a trail driver who saved his wages and became a cowman. He once bought a herd in Sonora, Mexico, and spent two years grazing it two thousand miles to Dodge City, Kansas. The first funeral I can remember attending was of an elderly rancher, a neighbor who was said to have hunted buffalo in his youth and cowboyed later until he saved a stake to go into the cattle business on his own. He was a pioneer cowman in the West Texas sandhills. The cowboy was a fact of life for me as a boy. Until i became old enough to go to town for school, he was almost the only fact of life. I learned very early to identify men by the jingle of their spurs in the yard or on the porch. I was only vaguely aware that any other world existed except that of ranches and cattle, horses and cowboys. Not until i began to read and see the movies did it slowly come to me that the cowboy i knew had been glamourized and fictionalized into something different than he was in my own closely-fenced little world. Glamour was in short supply where i was used to seeing him, but always there was