There are some things to sympathize with in Jeffrey
Lockwood’s lament regarding criticism of the Cowboy Myth (HCN,
6/9/08). A sense of place and connections with the land
are good values that might help us save this Last Best Place.
There are also many sound reasons for criticizing the
Cowboy Myth, and for the now long tradition of such criticism
extending back to Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration through
Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1973).
The Cowboy Myth does indeed turn on values such as the lone hero,
violence, and conquering the land and its native inhabitants. There
is no place for buffaloes or wolves in the Cowboy Myth, and in the
many Western novels and movies I recall, cowboys spent a lot of
time killing Indians. It is indeed ironic that only after Indians
and buffaloes were practically extinct and safely locked up in
prisons (reservations and Yellowstone National Park) did America
memorialize them with Indian-head pennies and buffalo nickels.
Despite Lockwood’s effort to include women in the Cowboy
Myth, it is telling that no women (or blacks, or Indians) appear in
the illustrations that accompany the article. The Cowboy Myth is a
world where men do not need women. At best, women are treated as
frail and defenseless property to be guarded and defended. At
worst, the treatment is violent misogyny.
Lockwood and
other historical apologists or revisionists cannot successfully
sanitize the Cowboy Myth. It will always include the dark side, as
shown by Cormac McCarthy in novels such as Blood
Meridian. In the dark side of the myth, we have to deal
with the chilling Judge Holden and the rampages of the Glanton gang
as they ethnically cleanse the Southwest of Indians and Mexicans to
make way for white settlement.
From the cowboys on ATVs
who are out to realize their freedom by tearing up the landscape to
the cowboy that suggested someone “Put a bullet in her head!” when
a woman criticized ATVs at a public meeting in Hamilton, Mont., the
dark side of the Cowboy Myth is all too alive and well.
Pat Munday
Walkerville,
Montana
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The dark side of the cowboy myth.
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