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Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries Paperback – March 20, 1989
| David Dary (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherUniv Pr of Kansas
- Publication dateMarch 20, 1989
- Dimensions6 x 0.75 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100700603905
- ISBN-13978-0700603909
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"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
- Publisher : Univ Pr of Kansas; Reprint edition (March 20, 1989)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0700603905
- ISBN-13 : 978-0700603909
- Item Weight : 1.2 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.75 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,267,755 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #13,507 in Folklore (Books)
- #29,346 in U.S. State & Local History
- Customer Reviews:
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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.

