Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries [Paperback]

David Dary (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1989

A nationwide bestseller--with more than 65,000 copies in print since publication by Alfred A. Knopf in 1981, this fascinating chronicle of cowboy life and legend is now available in a trade paperback edition. It's the 500-year saga of the "real cowboy"--from fifteenth-century Mexico to the twentieth-century American West.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Comprehensive and entertaining. . . . Full of wry anecdotes." -- Time

"Dary tells the unvarnished truth about cowboys and analyzes the cultural force of the cowboy myth." -- New York times Book Review

"Evocative reading. . . . A kind of source book for all the Westerns you've ever seen and are ever likely to see." -- Los Angeles Times

"Fun and enriching, packed with original research." -- Chicago Sun-Times

"If one were going to buy a single book on the cowboy and his life, this ought to be it." -- South Dakota History

"The definitive treatment of the cowboy. . . . Impressive in its thoroughness, scope, and depth." -- San Diego Union

From the Back Cover

Winner of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame Wrangler Award, the Western Writers of America Spur Award, and the Westerners International Best Nonfiction Book Award

"Immensely readable. A classic is what I label it."--Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Kansas (March 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0700603905
• ISBN-13: 978-0700603909
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #442,172 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly researched, vastly informative . . ., September 12, 2004

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries (Paperback)

Currently there is no review here for this fine book, and it deserves one. For starters, the title for this well-researched history of 400 years of cattle raising in North America is not exactly right. It should be called "Cattle Culture," because cattle and not cowboys are at the center of the story the author tells. And his story traces their introduction to the New World by Columbus in 1494 through to the end of the open ranges in the American West in the late 1800s. Horses, also introduced by the Spanish, are no less a part of that story, along with the cattlemen who owned, bought, sold and sometimes stole cattle, and the horsemen (vaqueros, buckaroos, and cowboys) who worked the cattle.

Readers learn a great deal about cattle as a business, how the price of livestock fluctuated with demand and depended always on getting cattle to market, often many hundreds of difficult miles away. In some periods, the value of cattle was not in the beef on the hoof but in the hides and tallow. The California vaqueros, we learn, were not just herders but also expert slaughterers of cattle.

Not surprisingly, a great swath of Texas history is interwoven with the rising and falling fortunes of cattlemen, and the author puts together a detailed picture of the industry as it emerged there in the mid-19th century, foundered during the Civil War, and then flourished as the railheads worked west into Kansas. But the cattle drives from Texas to cow-towns like Abilene were only some of the many that the century witnessed, as herds were driven in various directions, sometimes by west-bound settlers on the Oregon Trail, or often to meet the sudden demand for beef wherever there were gold strikes. The author provides accounts of many of these, illustrated with maps.

There are many black and white period photographs in the book, which challenge the back-lot Hollywood imagery that readers are likely to have of the West. There are also informative illustrations, like that of the early western bridle called a jáquima by the Spanish-speaking vaqueros, later anglicized to "hackamore" by their American counterparts. The reader learns of many words flowing from Spanish into English, including "ranch," from the Spanish "rancho." The meanings of Spanish words like "hacienda" (a place where work is done) are also clarified. There are also illustrations of how to throw ropes in different ways to catch cattle and horses, how to dally a rope around a saddle horn, and the design of various kinds of barbed wire.

One chapter, "Bunkhouse Culture," is devoted to describing the fraternity of young men, mostly from the South, who came to be the Texas "cow-boys" that eventually emerged as the mythic figures on horseback that excited popular imagination. The author describes the unspoken "code" that bound them together and notes their quick passing from history as long-range drovers when barbed wire brought an end to the open range starting in the 1870s. About the same time, ranching as a corporate enterprise transformed the old conditions of loyalty between cowman and cowboy that characterized the earlier years. And so 400 years of history drew to a close.

At 300+ pages, plus another 50 of notes and an index, the book is not a quick page-turner. It reads instead like a very informative and often entertaining textbook on its subject, drawing heavily on contemporary accounts from diaries, journals, and newspapers. Doing so, it brings the past to life with people, personalities, and arresting incidents. I'm happy to recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the American West, the origins and development of the cattle industry, and the interplay between cattle, politics, economics, and social history.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining ... and informative, September 25, 2004

By 

Bill Staley (Santa Monica, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries (Paperback)

I enjoyed it. The title sounds like a college textbook, but the style is very conversational and there are stories on every page. The author clearly relishes his subject. The writing is crisp and the humor is understated. He puts the cattle business in a very helpful historical perspective. Although it's not a page turner, I always looked forward to picking it up. I also expect to get more out of it the next time I read it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History lovers special, February 15, 2009

By 

D. Chandler (Georgia) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Cowboy Culture (Hardcover)

I bought this as a Valentine's Day present for my husband, after he got intrigued by Old West history while viewing the dvd collection of "Gunsmoke: the first season" which was also an Amazon purchase (Christmas present.) We are finding it to be well written and cohesive, with lots of fascinating details, and good quotes from primary (eyewitness) sources. So much of our self image as Americans is rooted in our ideas about the Old West. If you want to separate fact from fiction about this time and region of USA history you will enjoy this account.