Should've Been a Cowboy

There is a story that is often told in my dad’s family: My grandfather, Thomas Edison White, was out in a pasture trying to rope a calf. He missed and fell out of the saddle, getting his foot caught in the rope. The horse broke into a dead run, my grandfather dragging behind. 

He remembered he had a pocket knife in his chest shirt pocket. Each time the horse bounced him up he would try to reach into his pocket. The first time, he reached in and pulled out a stick of gum. Rather than toss it aside, he waited for another bounce, put the gum back in his pocket, and then, with another bounce, he finally pulled out the knife and slowly sawed himself free. His clothes shredded, he staggered into the barn where the family rushed him to the hospital. 

There are lots of stories like this: The time a horse fell over on my dad, puncturing almost every organ in his midsection. Or countless cows and bulls who charged, mauled or stomped my cousin Doug or me or my Dad. Pain, but with a punchline. They are the stories of nearly 75 years of the cowboy way, and they are the founding principles of the White Family as I knew them. 

The real cowboys – the ones from the late 19th century – don’t look much like the cowboys we’re used to seeing. They were most often Irish immigrants, former slaves or Spanish vaqueros. There were cowboys here in Florida, too, known as Crackers because of the long whips they carried. Cowboys often herded feral cattle and drove them to markets to be sold and shipped. Their usefulness trailed off around the time the West’s wide open spaces were fenced in. By the ‘20s, cowboys were mostly a thing of the past. 

But cowboy stories and folklore never really went away, first in dime store novels and eventually in Hollywood movies. These cowboys, strangely enough, almost never herded cattle. They rode horses, yes, but mostly they carried guns and settled scores, chasing bandits and doling out frontier justice. John Wayne, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Randolph Scott became the ideal American archetype for a generation of Depression-era young men and boys. 

It was amid this backdrop that life started to change for my grandfather, Tom. He married young (19 years old) and after some odd jobs like driving a grocery store truck, he took over the family farm. Things didn’t go well. He lost the farm – a failure that stuck with him his entire life. 

After everything was sold, he packed up and moved the family – which included his wife, Evelyn, three boys and a daughter – to California, where Evelyn’s parents lived. He found a job on a ranch in the Mojave Desert and, right there under the California sun, Tom White the Cowboy was born. 

He certainly looked the part – 6’4, rail thin and serious in demeanor – and before long he moved the family back to the Great Plains, this time to Oklahoma, where he managed a ranch raising Polled Hereford cattle. 

As much as the era of the free-roaming cowboy was over, the lifestyle still had its fans, especially among wealthy oilmen like Glenn W. Peel, who owned the Oklahoma ranch Tom managed in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Doctors, too, like the one who owned the Louisiana ranch he managed in the mid-to-late ‘60s. The idea – the myth – of the cowboy seemed to speak to men with money. And there was money to be made on cattle, or, more likely, losses to be written off. 

I’ve always been a little reticent to fully embrace the cowboy lifestyle for this reason. On one hand, being a cowboy was little more than a fantasy often bankrolled by the real American story of the 20th century – oil. Much like the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition was conceived largely by Texas business interests to separate the Lone Star State from its stars-and-bars history (cowboys and all) and promote capitalist expansion, the midcentury cowboy was something akin to Tony the Tiger on a box of Frosted Flakes – little more than a brand for big business.

For the most part, the media idea of a cowboy is a cross between a lawman, a country singer and a stuntman. The cowboy is a handy vehicle for American ideas. Vehicle – I’ll come back to that word later. 

The closest thing to a true cowboy Western was maybe the TV show Bonanza, which featured a family of brothers out on the Ponderosa. They seemed to occasionally do ranch work in between whatever trouble this week’s episode brought their way. But even that was just as much about singing and shoot-em-ups as anything else. 

But, on the other hand, the cowboy life was the life my grandfather – and his children – actually, authentically lived. They rode horses and roped and drove cattle from the time they could walk until they found a better paying job. When you grow up like that, it does get down in your soul. 

I bring up these old memories because even in liberal Hollywood, cowboys are cool again. Yellowstone – a TV show I’ve never watched and have no interest in seeing – has reinvigorated America's fascination with ranch life. Beyoncé posed wearing a cowboy hat astride a horse on her latest album cover, Cowboy Carter.

Across the country, Baby Boomers crowd into cowboy churches that put a decidedly Western spin on Christianity. A favorite craft project in my family is making wood cutouts of a cowboy kneeling at a cross. I have always found this to be a bizarre glorification of what amounts to, well, a job. There’s nothing more or less Christian about being a cowboy than there is being a truck driver or an oilfield worker or even a banker. But it seems America’s Culture War has returned to an old battlefield – the idea of the cowboy. 

Cowboys came under fire for a few years as the ultimate symbol of toxic masculinity. When Kristin Kobes Du Mez released her book Jesus & John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, she made some valid points about masculinity, religion and mythmaking. The modern cowboy has come to represent an entire idea about not just wide open spaces, but about America, religion, being white, being conservative, and a dozen other unrelated ideas that people have tacked onto a job that is about 75 percent spreading feed or hay and 25 percent giving shots or shoving pills down a cow’s throat. 

Tom was not a particularly religious man. He went to church, but he rarely discussed religion and mostly talked about horses, dead family members or what jobs needed to get done that day. He was, politically speaking, conservative in the Barry Goldwater kind of way, although he didn’t spend much time talking politics, either. And among the men and women of his world there was much alcohol, much hanky-panky and depressive streaks that all the Xanax in the world couldn’t tame. 

Nor were the 19th-century cowboys especially religious. If anything, they were the opposite. The cowboys of the Old West were enthusiastic prostitution clients, whiskey drinkers and, much to the dismay of modern, masculine cowboy lovers, often sexually fluid. The West, remember, was the Wild West. Liberal, uninhibited San Francisco and the conservative Cowboy Way®? Well, they come from the exact same place, partner.

Perhaps the closest historical example of a right wing, semi-religious, virile cowboy is New York-born President Theodore Roosevelt, a wealthy, powerful fella who loved to cosplay cowboy nearly any chance he got. But the holes in the rugged Roosevelt story are easy to find and Teddy, a known exaggerator and privileged man of means, was much better at telling his version of the story than the truth. And who loves to play cowboy more than a politician? But once the cameras are gone, they are on the first flight back to D.C. or NYC. Being a cowboy is, for them, a way to get or keep what they really want, which is money and power. I never saw a politician show up on a day the cowboys were actually working cattle. They show up at the county fair where the speeches are made and the awards are handed out.

Again, there is the reality and there is the myth. Otherwise, you’d have to go back to those old Westerns. Those are your cowboys, or at least the idea of your cowboys – and off the silver screen their lives were, shall we say, messy. Again – left, right, Hollywood, Main Street, the Ponderosa, Rodeo Drive – it’s all the same road and it heads West.

Are cowboys the best representation for toxic masculinity? Maybe, but I’m not totally sure They are. they have always been, though, a great vehicle for an idea.

The cowboys I knew were a lot like musicians – they didn’t really care what your gender or race was so long as you could show up on time and not act like a jackass when the dangerous work was going down. Cowgirls have been a part of the myth ever since Dale Evans and Roy Rogers rode off into the sunset together and they occupy an ever-important role in the worlds of ranching, rodeo and rural life that includes more than a little manual labor and grit. That’s not to say that cowboys aren’t prone to racism or sexism, because they are, but it is to say they aren’t any more prone to it than anyone else in this big, wild country of ours, and, in fact, they may be a little more “progressive” than they let on to outsiders. 

My grandmother, Evelyn, was the only person in my family I ever saw use a gun regularly, and she was by far the best shot out of all of us. She was tough, too. She grew up in a house in Nebraska before central heat and air and slept under buffalo hides with the hair still on them and snow on her bed when she woke up in the morning. “I was milking as soon as I could keep a milking stool under me,” she wrote in her memoir. She got bit by a water moccasin and just rode it out in bed until she got better. She told my dad “he wasn’t college material” before he left for Louisiana State University. This was their life. It’s easy to critique from a place of privilege. 

Now, maybe I’m being a bit defensive of my family, but hey, they are the only ones I’ve got. But some particularly racist and sexist sectors I’ve noticed recently include technology, insurance, education, government and healthcare. Oh, and oil. But then again, what do I know? Jesus and John D. Rockefeller doesn’t have the same ring to it. But the Culture War isn’t about work – it’s about ideas and who owns them. 

So, my perspective on being a cowboy is warped by being among the small, small sliver of Americans that weren’t just cosplaying on the weekend. My family was living it. And, looking back on those 75 years I would argue the damage they’ve done to the country is far less than the damage done by education, healthcare, government, architecture, oil or law – you pick the grift. Like so many people unfairly targeted among this Cold Civil War, they were folks just trying to get by. 

But there is a dangerous idea embedded in the cowboy lifestyle, one that anyone who has ever loved a cowboy knows all too well. The addiction to risk-taking and to stubborn toughness sends many cowboys to an early grave and many marriages to divorce attorneys. Cowboys don’t know when to quit, and that toughness is something that gets kicked into you by the back hoof by a 1,000-pound quarter horse. But, like my grandad being dragged to near-death out in the pasture, letting go isn’t always as easy as it looks when you’re all tangled up in this life. Is that toxic masculinity? Maybe a little, or maybe it’s just the way you survive. I do not know.

“If you’re gonna be stupid, you gotta be tough” was an oft-repeated maxim in my family and there are times it has served me well and times it has not. That toughness was often a mask for another emotion – anger. Pain, anger, toughness and penitence. If you want a book on cowboys and religion, there’s one for you right there. 

So, if Modern Americans, who have lived through NAFTA, a major terrorist attack, two failed wars, a years-long recession, a housing crisis and a pandemic feel the need to reinvent themselves as cowboys, who am I to stop them? Who are you? Being a cowboy is a survival vehicle, just like it was for my grandfather 75 years ago, just like it was for former slaves and immigrants 150 years ago. I’ve always had a quiet contempt for wealthy bros pretending to be rural, cowboys or anything of the sort, but that’s been going on as long as there have been rich people. Being a cowboy, for most people, means getting back on that horse and giving it another go. 

being a cowboy – a real cowboy – in my opinion, comes down to one thing, and it's something Du Mez failed to take into account in her book.

It’s not guns. In a country full of cops, hunters and soldiers, America’s obsession with guns would be just fine without cowboys. No. It’s the horses. 

Riding horses is cool as Hell and you’ll never convince me otherwise. I got on my first one at four years old and did everything from cattle drives to cutting horses to calf roping. I’ve been bucked off and I’ve hung on a few times, too. There’s nothing quite like riding a horse. Being on a train is fun and driving a car is exhilarating, but until you’ve seen this country on horseback it’ll just never sink down deep in your soul. I can still smell the horse hair and saddle leather as I type this. 

What made the Hollywood cowboy so appealing and what makes my grandad look so damn cool in old photos is being on horseback. And therein is the real American idea. The cowboy, so often promoted by oilmen and other American industries, represents what’s been lost. It’s what the vast majority of those rich fellas never were and could never, ever be. These days you don’t ride on a horse, you drive a Mustang (now an e-vehicle!). Like a suburban housing development named Panther Trace, only the idea of what’s been sacrificed for progress remains in America. If a few more Americans find a way to go out and ride, it would probably be a good thing for us all. If you wanna know what makes America — its people, its geography and its ideas — you’ll find it on the back of a horse. And you’ll appreciate — for better or worse — the sweat and blood it took to get here.

Because riding a horse is an act of remembering. You remember your dad teaching you how to put on a saddle. You remember the time the horse got scared and bucked you off. You remember who you were, who you are and where you came from. And that’s a good thing. American memory is so short these days that it barely extends past our own nose, let alone a generation or two. How sad. We remember not. We aren’t even curious. But who you are and how you got here? It matters – now more than ever.

When you’re on a horse, there is no myth. You are a cowboy. You are as connected to the natural world as you could possibly be. Without a horse a cowboy is just a guy with a funny hat. 

Cattle, the cowboy’s namesake, are less thrilling. They are fun to look at and sometimes they do funny things. If you are in the cattle business, they are an excellent way to turn $100,000 into $10,000. But a horse? Man, there’s nothing like it. 

America is all about moving – moving West, moving forward, moving states, driving, highways. America, my friends, is roads and trails and they aren’t just here, they go all over the world. With which vehicle do you wish to ride? For the folks out there still doing it on horseback, all I can do is admire their grit and memory. For the rest of us, being a cowboy remains what it has always been – an idea about movement. So, where are are we going and what are we bringing with us?

My dad is nearly 76 years old and lives on his own ranch now, and he splits the difference between Glenn Peel and Tom White. He made his money in South Florida plumbing construction, a tough job if there ever was one, but he bailed out in the late ‘90s for Texas, where he and my stepmom, Patti, work the cattle and bale the hay all on their own. It’s hard work. 

He doesn’t ride anymore after the horse wreck I mentioned earlier that brought him within an inch of his life. He does most of his work from a tractor or a little four-wheeler called a Mule. I haven’t ridden a horse since I was a teenager. These days, I miss it. I miss the silence and being away from the tweets and think pieces and viral videos. But even that nefarious brain rot has made its way into cowboy culture and these days you see most Stetsons pointed down at an iPhone screen. Round and round we go. 

Amid this recent cowboy renaissance, I thought a song called “Purple Gas” written by Canadian singer Noeline Hoffman and covered in a duet with her by Oklahoman Zach Bryan on his most recent record, The Great American Bar Scene, is as good a place as any to end this. “Pump jack checks and baler twine/a ton of grit or maybe it’s spite” touches on the repressed anger I mentioned earlier, but there’s another verse that goes right down into the heart of why Americans always come back to cowboys.

Was taught not to throw the first fist
But if you take a hit, finish that son-of-a-bitch
In life having the upper hand’s a myth
Your only fighting chance is too stubborn to quit. 

This is America. Hang on.