I was skipping through an on-line yak yak forum when I ran across some brilliant mind asserting that in the 1870-1890 era cowboying was "a low status job." I paused over that, thinking how people, especially urban/suburban types, project their own attitudes and lifeways onto not only the present but also the past. I don't know any cowboys from 1880, though I am descended from some, but I do know cowboys in the here and now and you can bet your saddle cinch that the last thing they considered when becoming cowboys, indeed the last thing they ever think about, is social status in the sense that that forum person considered it. In fact, they don't give the proverbial pest's posterior about any kind of status except maybe that among their peers, but some don't even care about that. They want nothing to do with a world of social rank, status or prestige.
You know what they want? Do you really want to know? Well, I'll tell you. Or I will tell you what one cowhand told me: "I want the world to leave me the God-damned hell alone. A day that passes without me seeing another human being is a damned good day, a week a damned good week." This a man who may spend weeks alone far out on the range, tending cattle, mending fences, fending off predators, caring for his mounts, eating pan biscuits, pinto beans and side meat, drinking eggshell coffee and smoking a pipe of pouch tobacco when the day is done.
If that is the way a cowpoke is today, can you imagine that 150 years ago cowboys would have been concerned with the social status of their job? I wonder if they even considered cowboying a job as we think of it. It was just life.
A lot of the men who drifted west after the civil war wanted to get away from society, from people. Of course there were many who went west looking for their fortune, but there were also a lot of disaffected veterans of the war who couldn't ever go back to their old life, so they lit out for the western horizon just to get away, put everything behind them, forget all that was. They took up the life of the cowpoke because it suited them and because that's about all there was to do to get three squares and a flop.
I've written more about cowboys as I've come to know them, about all I have to say, here if you care to read it.
Besides cowboys, there are a lot of people who have no interest in society, certainly not social status, and prefer to go their own way. They prefer nature to the world of man.
“One could starve to death on an enviable job — for mountain wind, for stars
among pine trees, or the call of a wood-thrush to his mate.”
― Barbara Newhall Follett
I think most people can't even understand what motivates such mavericks, if I may call them that. But I feet very much kin to them. My brother the forest ranger does even more so. For him the happiest life lies out of doors, far into the wilderness. He's told me that he feels as if he were born centuries after his true time, that his real life, the life he was born to live, was of a mountain man in the early 1800s, traveling alone through the far high country, living by hunting and trapping, encumbered by nothing more than a Hawken rifle, axe, Bowie knife and possibles bag filled with powder, shot, flint and steel, mending needles, and some salt.
I wonder how many others feel that way, perhaps not pining for the life of a mountain man or cowboy, but maybe that of an early 19th century sailor as depicted in the stories of Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville. Or maybe they dream of a life as a yeoman farmer on a quarter section, growing and raising all they need for life, visiting a market town on fair days to sell their surplus but otherwise living on their own. Others may wish to have lived in a time when they just could have been a rover and rambler, a Johnny Appleseed, with no fixed abode, no fixed profession, no fixed anything, just letting their feet take them hither and yon as they listeth.
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the
sound thereof,
but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it
goeth." .
~ John 3:8
Give to me the life I love,
Let the rest go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway night me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river --
There's the life for a one like me,
There's the life for ever.
Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around
And the path before me.
Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I seek, the heaven above
And the earth below me.
Or let autumn fall on me Where afield I linger, Silencing the bird on tree, Biting the blue finger; White as meal the frosty field -- Warm the fireside haven -- Not to autumn will I yield, Not to winter even!
~ Robert Louis Stevenson
