The cowboy is a man who possesses resilience, patience, and an instinct for survival. Cowboys get climbed on, rained on, snowed on, kicked, battered by the wind, burned by the sun. The cowboy's job is just to take it. It doesn't require courage as it's commonly thought of to do that. It demands stoicism.
To be tough on a ranch has nothing to do with combativeness or macho strutting. It's about dealing with what you have to deal with and can't turn away from. That's what a cowboy does, handle situations that are trying to overwhelm him. He routinely faces such things as the horse he’s riding miles from anywhere breaking a leg or a sudden rock fall knocking him senseless, blocking the trail and trapping him in a coulee. When he comes to, his head is bleeding and hurts like hell, and his horse has wandered off and is nuzzling a clump of jimson weed.
In a rancher’s world, courage has less to do with facing danger than with acting quickly, correctly and without regard to injury to oneself to help an animal in your charge or another rider. If a cow is stuck in a bog hole, the cowpoke throws a loop around her neck, takes his dally and pulls her out with horsepower. If a calf is born sick, he takes it home, warms it in front of the kitchen fire, and massages its legs till dawn.One cowhand, whose horse was trying to swim a lake with hobbles on, dove under water and cut its legs free, then swam it to shore, his arm around its neck lifeguard-style, and saved it from drowning. Another, working on foot with border collies to herd some cow brutes, carried one of the dogs more than two miles in his arms over rough ground when it stepped in a bear trap and had its paw nearly severed. He tourniqueted the leg, calmed the hysterical dog as it struggled and bit at him in its pain and fear, then trudged for an hour up and down dry washes to his truck, drove to the line shack, sewed up the wound and settled the dog, then drove and hiked back to where he was working and finished getting the cattle out of the mess they had gotten themselves into.
Because these incidents are usually linked to someone or something outside himself, the cowboy’s courage is selfless, a form of compassion, of empathy. He becomes used to thinking about about the welfare of others, animal and man and land, and not about himself. If he doesn't, he doesn't make it as a cowboy. He probably heads for the swarming, foul, me-me mobs of the city with their self-centered hedonistic ethos.
The physical punishment that goes with cowboying is brutal. When I asked one cowboy if he was sick as he struggled to his feet at the bunkhouse one morning, he replied, "No'm, just bent." Cowboys do not complain. They laugh at their failures and injuries and at what fools they are for doing the job. They are the kind of men who, if they accidentally cut off their foot in a chain saw accident would say they were okay, they'd walk it off. That's only partly a joke. I knew one cowboy whose foot was crushed when a tractor rolled back on him. His boot filled with blood as he kept working for the rest of the day. Only that night, when, his foot swollen and purple, he couldn't get his boot off did he causally mention the accident.Although a cowboy is a man’s man—laconic, reliable, hard-working—there’s no person in which the balancing act between male and female, manliness and femininity, can be more natural. If he’s gruff, handsome and physically fit on the outside, he’s compassionate at the core. Ranchers are midwives, nurturers, providers. The toughness, the weathered skin, calloused hands, squint in the eye and growl in the voice only mask the tenderness inside.
Around women, cowhands are stand-offish but chivalrous. A cowboy tips his hat to a woman and calls her miss or ma’am, tolerates no disrespect to her character or person, whoever she may be. Urban males would deride them as white knights. If one of these called a woman a "bitch" or "'ho'" in the presence of a cowboy, he would get a quick and forceful explanation of the lay of the land and his position in it, and probably a broken jaw as well.
But the geographical vastness and the social isolation of the West make emotional involvement with the women a cowboy interacts with difficult. Caution colliding with passion gives a cowboy a wide-eyed but drawn and wary look. He wishes he had someone to care for him the way he cares for a lost dogie, but doesn't expect he ever will and doesn't look for someone who might. She has to find him.At heart, cowboys are fragile. Women are, too. But for all the women who use frailness to avoid work or as a sexual ploy, there are just as many cowboys who try to hide their emotional vulnerability, even as they cling to an almost childlike dependency on the women in their lives. Urban males, sophisticated in the ways and wiles of man- and womankind, have developed a callousness that insulates them from the pain of failed relationships. Cowboys have no such internal armor and often misunderstand a woman's words and can be deeply hurt. They can grow bitter and prefer to be away from all people, working far out on the prairie where there is just God and his country and his creatures.
Because cowboys work mostly with animals not machines; because they live outside in landscapes of overwhelming beauty; because they are confined to a place and a routine rife with violent variables; because calves die in the arms that pulled others into life; because they go to the mountains as if on a pilgrimage, their strength is also a vulnerability, their toughness a kindness.
The moon rides high in the cloudless sky,
And the stars are shining bright.
The dark pines show on the hills below,
The mountains are capped with white.
My spurs they ring and the song I sing
Is set to my horse's stride.
We gallop along to an old-time song
As out on the trail we ride.
My horse is pulling the bridle reins,
I'm hitting the trail tonight.
You can hear the sound as he strikes the ground
On the frozen trail below.
His hoof beats hit and he fights the bit,
He's slinging his head to and fro.
We'll ride the trail till the stars turn pale
And camp at the break of dawn.
Nobody will know which way I go,
They'll only know I've gone.
~ Bruce Kiskaddon
"It's beefsteak when I'm hungry,
Corn whiskey when I'm dry,
Pretty girls when I'm lonesome,
Sweet heaven when I die."
~ Dick Duval
