"In all truthfulness as I remember it": deciphering myth and masculinity in cowboy memoirs

Dulce Louise Kersting

The American cowboy of the open-range era of cattle ranching played an indispensible role in extracting the resource-based wealth of the great western frontier, thus ensuring economic success for the country’s expansionist policies. His work as a wage laborer, however, is not the stuff of cowboy legend and mythic West lore. Cowboys became symbolic representations of the West and popular culture superstars because they supposedly embodied many of the values that the public associated with American exceptionalism: freedom, self-reliance, and independence. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, moreover, cowboys became the poster men for a new formulation of masculinity that emphasized ruggedness, aggressiveness, and physical fitness. In my thesis, I review the development and deployment of these stereotypes, which painted cowboys as one-dimensional characters obsessed with violent retributions of justice and who spent very little time actually tending to cattle. After reviewing the genesis of these myths, I then investigate the previously unexplored story of how actual working cowboys reflected and rejected those myths in their own life-narratives. Through a careful interrogation of cowboy memoirs, I am able to reveal how cowpunchers internalized, perpetuated, sometimes challenged, and other times integrated into their autobiographies the often times fantastic stories told about their community in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century popular culture outlets. The American West of popular conception is comprised of a series of myths that endeavor to explain the country’s origin and identify a sub-set of the population as special contributors to the nation’s greatness. While historians have for many years now dismissed the “myth of the West” as a relic of nationalistic sentiments and nostalgic scholarship, it was a very real ideology that American culture eagerly endorsed throughout much of the twentieth century. Western mythology shaped attitudes and shaped lives, as my research illustrates. Through my investigation of cowboy life-narratives, I reveal how individuals utilized myths about themselves but not of their own making to rationalize their experiences and lend meaning to a lifestyle that had already become obsolete.

"In all truthfulness as I remember it": deciphering myth and masculinity in cowboy memoirs

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