All Things Oklahoma....

The cowboy and his six-shooter, songs and sex

By Ed Montgomery
THE NORMAN TRANSCRIPT (NORMAN, Okla.)

Once upon a time two Oklahoma educators decided to get some expert help and produce a book that would tell the world who the western cowboy really was.

The result was some good reading in a book named “The Cowboy: Six -shooters, Songs and Sex,” published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

One of the editors, Buck Rainey, admitted in the introduction that they had taken on a hard job.

“Fiction has created a myth,” he wrote, “and the myth has fashioned The Cowboy into the most romantic occupant of the West, consistently gunning down badmen and saving virgins from ‘a fate worse than death.’ Yet, if the truth be known, there were neither enough badmen nor virgins available in the Old West for the involvement of any sizable number of cowboys in either of the activities.”

Rainey at the time was business education chairman of East Central Oklahoma University at Ada. His partner, Charles W. Harris, was assistant professor of history at Southeastern University at Durant.

The six-shooters of the title were among the things that interested Philip D. Jordan, emeritus professor of history at the University of Minnesota.

“The average wrangler,” he wrote, “busy with range chores, roundups and the rigors of a long drive, was no professional gunslinger, although a few, to their chagrin, thought they were. Cowboy marksmanship with a handgun was about on a par with the shooting skills of town marshals, county sheriffs, United States marshals and yokels generally.

“A puncher who carried a gun for show or because it was the custom was a fool, but among them were those who ‘could not hit the side of a barn with all day to aim in.’”

Guy Logsdon, director of libraries at the University of Tulsa, wrote the cowboy songs chapter. He says people who think cowboy songs died with the old cowboys are mistaken. Too little attention has been paid to 20th century advancements, he feels.

“Cowboy music is very much alive and well in both traditional and popular cultures,” he wrote.

Clifford P. Westermeier, University of Colorado history professor, wrote about cowboys and sex.

Early writers of dime novels, who did much to create the popular image of the cowboy were on the prudish side, the author says. The dime-novel cowhand was “highly moral.” The real cowboy was something else.

“Perhaps the subject of sexuality does not deserve the attention it is given,” Westermeier wrote, “but whatever conclusion is reached regarding its relation to the cowboy — bad taste, sensationalism, iconoclasticism — it did exist in his life. ...”

A cowboy’s line of work seldom gave him the opportunity to meet the kind of women he might want to marry.

“His work did not encourage family relationships nor a normal pattern of dating, courtship, marriage and family,” the author wrote.

The feminine population of the saloons, dance halls and red-light districts were much handier.



Ed Montgomery writes for The Norman (Okla.) Transcript.