By: Burke De Boer
Sports Editor
It has been explained to me a few different times over the past couple of years that there is no such thing as a cowboy.
It was a myth, created by wild west carnival shows who ripped off Hispanic culture. If there were any people that could be called “cowboys” or “cowgirls,” they only existed for a few decades in the 19th century. And they certainly weren’t white.
Being from a town that dubbed itself “The Cowboy Capital of Oregon,” I was a bit shocked to hear all this.
The explanation, often given to blow the minds of the audience with revisionism, takes the history of western expansion and astonishingly oversimplifies it. The idea is that Mexicans were in the west before Americans and did all the work before the American government stole the land. Eventually, touring shows made up the idea of gunslinging western icons and it was their lie that captured the imagination of the Americans.
Of course it is true that Mexican vaqueros raised cattle on the high plains before American cowboys did, but when people say that the English word “buckaroo” is a corruption of the Spanish “vaquero” they conveniently forget that this would require English speakers to be in the west to adopt the term.
The English speakers adopted much of their vernacular and techniques from the Spanish. And they also learned a lot from the Native tribes that had developed their own horse cultures. This is important to remember when we consider the history of the west.
And it’s equally important for the contemporary culture of the west. Because history is not some closed book. I like to think of history as the genealogy of a culture – it allows you to see where a people and their customs come from.
I grew up alongside a lot of Chicano kids, many of whom went on to work ranches and farms in Central and Eastern Oregon. My father went to high school and worked on ranches on a Shoshone-Paiute reservation. Raising agricultural prosperity from the desert was a tough business and a diverse array of tough people took up the task.
Yet some say the cowboy is dead, that with the invention of barbed wire fences, which quickly spread across the west, the cowboy disappeared.
The duty of the ranch hand had been keeping the owner’s livestock on the owner’s land, a duty now fulfilled by grids of fenceline.
But that’s only true most of the time. I remember on more than one occasion as a child when the phone would ring in the middle of the night; a neighbor calling that our cows were out, or their cows were out and they would like some help.
It’s very rare that automation actually kills an industry, or even a specific job within that industry. Ranching has certainly not been hurt by automation. At the end of the day, humans are needed should fences fail. At the start of the day, humans are needed to put the fences up.
And fences aren’t even a universal rule.
I’m not sure if this happened before I was born or when I was simply too young to remember it, but my father still brings it up regularly; sometime after he came in from the range and got a job in town, Pop and his brother-in-law were hired by a coworker at the mill to cut a bull calf; so, they drove up to his little house on the mountainside to do some castrating. They found that the bull in question could barely be called a “calf” anymore, and this big old boy was penned up in a corral that was half made out of broken appliances.
The notion that the range is settled, whether by fence or any other means, hits its biggest snag when you consider the Bureau of Land Management.
Ranchers need as much range and pasture as they can get. Enter the BLM land lease system, where ranchers buy permits and leases to range rights.
The BLM office in my hometown presides over 284 leases a year, and another 122 permits.
The most of any in the state; and yet people say Pendleton’s the real cowboy capital.
They also maintain land for recreation such as offroading, and administer one of the state’s 17 wild horse management areas.
It’s a lot of ground to cover.
A calf without an ear tag or brand is open game to illicitly tag and sell. Furthermore, bears, cougars and the recently reintroduced wolves pose threats to unguarded cattle.
And most outfits birth their calves in January and February – which gives them the entire spring and summer to grow, but are also born into prime blizzard months. Mama cows will leave weak calves to freeze in the drifts.
Without men and women patrolling the livestock, any number of these misfortunes would befall them. These ranch hands will be needed as long as people eat beef.
The men and women working any industry will reflect the society they live in. It’s all a matter of demographics, and the demographics of western cattle country are fairly diverse. A diversity that includes, to some people’s evident dissatisfaction, white folks.
We do need to respect the cultures and experiences of the wide array of people who made our nation. But respecting the legacy of one does not need to come at the expense of another, especially when what’s being dubbed cultural appropriation would more accurately be called cultural exchange.
The iconic images of cowgirls and cowboys on the range and in the rodeo arena are shining examples of what voluntary economic and cultural exchange can do. In this instance, raising an industry and an identity that became a vital element of the backbone of the nation.
Contact the author at bdeboer11@mail.wou.edu
