The Story Of The Cowboy — Emerson Hough

Like everything peculiarly distinctive, the life of the cowboy through its very raciness has lent itself to literary abuse, and the cowboy has been freely pictured by indolent and unscrupulous pens as an embodiment of license and uproarious iniquity. If he were only this, the great business which he has conducted on the plains could never have grown to its imposing proportions. With the cowboy, as with the Indian, it is essential to disabuse ourselves of illusions. Picturesque the cowboy assuredly is, easily superior, so far as effectiveness is concerned, to the gaucho of South America and, from an Anglo-Saxon point of view, to the bedizened vaquero of Mexico. Beyond this picturesqueness of effect and environment very few have cared to go, and therefore Americans have had little actual realization of the vastness of the cowboy's kingdom, the magnitude of the interests in his care, or the fortitude, resolution, and instant readiness essential to his daily life. ...Like the other typical figures of the country west of the Missouri, the cowboy is receding into the shadows of past years. The cattle, wild descendants of Andalusian stock, which he herded in Texas and, later, drove to the North, have been bred to the ways of civilization, with a distinct gain to their comeliness, if not to their agility. The long trails have been blocked, the ranges traversed by barbed wire, and the superb freedom of the unowned plains is exchanged for the bounds and limits of exact ownership...

Contents: The Long Trail. The Ranch in the South. The Ranch in the North. The Cowboy's Outfit. The Cowboy's Horse. Marks and Brands. Free Grass and Water Fronts. The Drive. The Round-up. Drifts and Stampedes. A Day at the Ranch. The Cowboy's Amusements. Society in the Cow Country. The Nester. The Rustler. Wars of the Range. Beef and Freedom. The Iron Trails. Sunset On The Range.