The Secret Life of Cowboys [Hardcover]

Tom Groneberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 22, 2003

"One of the stories I tell myself when I am trying to fall asleep is that I have tried. I've tagged along after myself in the pages of my own modern Western, and every few years is another chapter to the story. The myth of the cowboy. I chased a dream and it kicked me in the teeth. Yet I find myself falling for it again and again."

Across the rugged and beautiful landscape of the contemporary American West, Tom Groneberg paints an unsparing portrait of his flawed, funny, and sometimes triumphant efforts to become a cowboy. It is a classic tale: a young man, facing a future he doesn't want to claim, has an inspiration -- Go West.

Leaving behind his friends and family, Groneberg follows his heart and heads to a resort town in the Colorado Rockies, where he earns his spurs as a wrangler leading tourists on horseback. Like an old saddle blanket, the tale unfolds, revealing the clean threads of a new story. Groneberg moves to Montana, working for wages at a number of ranches before getting a chance to become the owner of a sprawling ranch, fifteen square miles of grass and sky.

In lean but passionate prose, Groneberg demystifies the image of cowboy as celluloid hero and introduces us to the tough and kindhearted men who teach him how to be a real cowboy, the woman who teaches him how to love, and their son, who teaches him how to be a man. The Secret Life of Cowboys is both a coming-of-age story as stunning as the land itself and a revealing look at America's last frontier.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As a young suburbanite from Chicago, Tom Groneberg first falls in love with horses and the rural West during a stint as a guide on a Colorado dude ranch. In this affecting memoir, he traces his decade-long attempt to shrub all evidence of his strip-mall roots through a series of cowboy jobs--mending fences, baling hay, and disposing of dead calves while working as a cattle hand. Later, he tries to command nearly 10,000 acres of inhospitable land as a way-over-his-head owner of a cattle ranch in Miles City, a tiny eastern Montana town so cold in winter, Groneberg writes, that "the clear night freezes the stars in place."

In an ever more desperate need to prove himself to "real" cowboys and himself, Groneberg briefly attends rodeo school and insists on entering a bucking bronco competition, clutching on to his three seconds of saddled glory as if it were an Olympic trophy. What saves The Secret Life of Cowboys from cliché--big-town boy learns important life lessons from craggy Marlboro cowboys--is that the more "authentic" his life becomes, the more miserable he is. Eventually, he falls into a depression so deep that he seeks the help of a psychotherapist and anti-depressants.

After a particularly disastrous year, when an alarmingly high percentage of his cows remain "open"--free of calves--he and his ever-patient wife sell the ranch and Groneberg seems destined to a particularly humiliating brand of failure. Fortunately for him, he discovers a different kind of satisfaction leading a semi-nomadic life with more modest expectations and even simpler pleasures, which he captures in his beautifully spare prose. --Keith Moerer

From Publishers Weekly

This book's jacket (of a cowboy and his shopping cart in a supermarket frozen-food aisle) perfectly sets the tone for its offbeat theme: an account of Groneberg's evolution from Chicago suburbs to Montana ranches. Graduating from college with a degree in English and rhetoric, Groneberg, who writes for Big Sky Journal, Out and Sports Afield, shuns a traditional career. He spots an ad in the Utne Reader: "Hard work with horses in a beautiful setting." Following up, Groneberg summers at a Colorado ranch and is hooked. He moves to Montana, "a place where you can stretch your eyeballs," viewing his new life as almost fictional: "I will tell you a story about a hapless English major, a hopeless dreamer who finds a job guiding trail rides in Colorado. He falls in love with the West and a horse and a girl. Later he finds work on a ranch in Montana. He drives an hour each way, labors for ten hours a day and earns $210 a week. He marries the girl. And later still, he becomes part owner and full-time manager of nearly 10,000 acres.... It is the story I tell myself." However, the story this buckaroo tells readers takes a darker turn. Groneberg attends rodeo school, but bronc bruises are minor compared to the trials of running a ranch, which triggers a knotted stomach, depression and psychiatric sessions. "I chased a dream and it kicked me in the teeth." Groneberg succeeds as cowboy and poet, tossing a saddle on his soul and riding into the shadows: "Night is gathering. I can smell the burning stars."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1ST edition (July 22, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743236106
• ISBN-13: 978-0743236102
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,007,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wanted: To be a Cowboy, October 1, 2003

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Secret Life of Cowboys (Hardcover)

This is a great title for maybe a different book. Expecting to find some salty insight into the hearts and minds of cowboys, the men who live and work as agricultural laborers in the modern West, I found instead the memoir of a young man from Chicago, still in his 30s, who falls in love with wide open spaces and tries to live out a dream of working with cattle and being a rancher. The problem is that he is almost totally unprepared for the arduous task of running a ranch and lacks the seasoned philosophy of a man who has experienced lean years, loss, and failure. Taking on a 15-square-mile ranch outside Miles City, Montana, he is quickly in over his head and in a matter of time is surviving on anti-depressants.

Hard winters, hard luck, and lack of experience combine to turn his dream into heartbreak. I seldom read a book that makes me tear up, but this one did, about page 220 when on a September day, he watches as his neighbors gather to buy at auction his machinery and equipment. Any reader used to the unforgiving seasons of the plains, especially in Montana, might remain dried-eyed at Groneberg's foolhardy and romantic expectations of ranching, but to know him for the tender, ingenuous soul that he seems to be in his book, it's hard to see his failure as anything but the unhappy end of a big-hearted dream.

The secret in the secret life of cowboys remains something of an elusive mystery for Groneberg. Along with him, we observe cowboys from the outside, a fraternity of men engaged in hard, physical labor, masters of skills learned from boyhood, able to do their jobs in severe working conditions, and possessors of a kind of grace beyond words to describe. Groneberg's book is an attempt over and over to capture this grace in words, always falling a little short, while making ever more vivid the extent of his admiration. He even takes a class in saddle bronc riding in hopes of breaking through this barrier and feeling at least for a moment like a cowboy.

In anyone else's hands, this might all seem over the top, but his love of cowboys comes from a heart that is pure as a boy's, and it is easy to allow him his earnest wish to become and be accepted as a man of their perceived character - honest, true, fearless, tough, physically agile, and ethically uncompromised. At the end of the book, he has not yet forgiven himself for being less than all that, but he has found a place for himself as a hand on another smaller ranch, chastened by his experiences toward a kind of self-respect and most importantly loving the life he has found for himself, his wife, and young son.

I'm happy to recommend this book to anyone with an interest in ranching, the modern West, Montana, rites of passage, and soulful memoirs. Along similar lines, I'd recommend the personal stories of some other youthful writers from the West: C. L. Rawlins' "Broken Country," Mark Spragg's "Where Rivers Change Direction," Pete Fromm's "Indian Creek Chronicles," and Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire."

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow!!!, June 21, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Secret Life of Cowboys (Hardcover)

This is the best book I've read all year. It surprised me--The Secret Life of Cowboys is a book for anyone who has ever had a dream--of a different job, a different future, a different life--and wondered what it might take to pursue it. The book left me feeling energized to live my life to the fullest, to take a few chances, and to appreciate what I already have. It made me laugh, made me cry in places, and made me think. I recommend this book highly. Everyone should read it.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SHOULD BE A MOVIE, June 27, 2003

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Secret Life of Cowboys (Hardcover)

This book renewed my belief that good things do happen to people who have dreams and are willing to pay the price to achieve them. Tom Groneberg, in my opinion, is such a person and maybe one day I'll be lucky enough to meet him and tell him that. His story is beautifully told in unvarnished prose and readers will enjoy his word pictures and his smooth writing style. I really enjoyed this book very much and I highly recommend it.