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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2014
Violence inevitably plays a part in discussions of the cowboy, historical or mythical. Traditionalists celebrated his manly fighting as what tamed the West and saved American manhood; revisionists have castigated the brutality with which he dealt with Native Americans and the environment. It is important, however, to consider what purpose violence served for the cowboy himself. To the working-class cowboy, violence could preserve social harmony, both through defending personal honor and through regulating social behavior of women and minorities. Its use was a clear marker of masculinity, as it allowed him both to show his equal worth with the men around him and to maintain social hierarchies that gave him an advantage over other people. The middle- and upper-class townspeople and cattlemen around cowboys, however, increasingly saw violence as counterproductive. Although parents encouraged aggression in boyhood, they thought that in order to become a real man, one should learn proper restraint and channel that aggression into socially acceptable activities. More and more, respectable ideas of maintaining social order left no room for violence, and consequently cowboys faced increasing social regulation of their masculine self-identities.
1 “Derby Caused Stir,” Alpine Avalanche, June 28, 1962.
2 Undated [possibly 1940] clipping from Alpine Avalanche, Crosson, George, Vertical Files, The Archives of the Big Bend, Bryan Wildenthal Memorial Library, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, TX.
3 Woods, Lawrence M., British Gentlemen in the Wild West: The Era of the Intensely English Cowboy (New York, 1989)Google Scholar, 156.
4 This essay elaborates on themes in my 2010 book, Cow Boys and Cattle Men: Class and Masculinities on the Texas Frontier, 1865–1900 (New York, 2010)Google Scholar. Although I explore the issue of violence in various parts of that work, I am bringing these threads together for the first time and situating them in the larger historiography of violence and masculinity. This was a peripheral argument in the book that I believed deserved further exploration. In the process of researching further for this article, I have added more supporting evidence from court records that I did not include in the original monograph, included new secondary research, and tried to refine my discussion of honor and social order as motivating factors.
5 For examples of more romantic cowboy scholarship see Dobie, J. Frank, The Longhorns (New York, 1941)Google Scholar, Dobie, A Vaquero of the Brush Country (New York, 1929)Google Scholar, and Dobie, Cow People (Austin, 1964)Google Scholar; Rollins, Philip Ashton, The Cowboy: An Unconventional History of Civilization on the Old-Time Cattle Range, rev. ed. (1936; Norman, OK, 1997)Google Scholar; Duke, Cordia Sloan and Frantz, Joe B., 6,000 Miles of Fence: Life on the XIT Ranch of Texas (Austin, 1961)Google Scholar; Holden, William Curry, The Espuela Land and Cattle Company: A Study of a Foreign-Owned Ranch in Texas (Austin, 1970)Google Scholar, an enlarged and revised version of Holden, The Spur Ranch (Boston, 1934).Google Scholar
6 Revisionist interpretations include Savage, William W. Jr., ed., Cowboy Life: Reconstructing an American Myth, rev. ed. (Niwot, CO, 1993)Google Scholar, and Savage, The Cowboy Hero: His Image in American History and Culture (Norman, OK, 1979)Google Scholar; Dary, David, Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries (1981; Lawrence, KS, 1989)Google Scholar; Frantz, Joe B., and Choate, J. E., The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality (Norman, OK, 1955)Google Scholar; Walker, Don D., Clio's Cowboys: Studies in the Historiography of the Cattle Trade (Lincoln, NE, 1981)Google Scholar; Branch, Douglas, The Cowboy and His Interpreters (New York, 1961)Google Scholar; Seidman, Laurence I., Once In the Saddle: The Cowboy's Frontier, 1866–1896 (1973; New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Murdoch, David Hamilton, The American West: The Invention of a Myth (Reno, NV, 2001)Google Scholar; Hine, Robert V. and Faragher, John Mack, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, 2000), 320–22Google Scholar; Paul H. Carlson, “The Myth and the Modern Cowboy” and Zeigler, Robert E., “The Cowboy Strike of 1883” in The Cowboy Way: An Exploration of History and Culture, ed. Carlson, Paul H. (Lubbock, TX, 2000)Google Scholar. These are examples of sources that have reexamined the cowboy as a member of the working class.
7 For example, Dee Garceau has examined close masculine friendships between bunkies, Peter Iverson has looked at cowboys who were Indians, and Louis Warren and Paul Reddin have described how the middle-class men who employed them manipulated and co-opted the cowboy image. Garceau, Dee, “Nomads, Bunkies, Cross-Dressers, and Family Men: Cowboy Identity and the Gendering of Ranch Work” in Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West, ed. Basso, Matthew, McCall, Laura, and Garceau, Dee (New York, 2001), 149–68Google Scholar; Iverson, Peter, When Indians Became Cowboys: Native Peoples and Cattle Ranching in the American West (Norman, OK, 1994)Google Scholar; Warren, Louis S., Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and The Wild West Show (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Reddin, Paul, Wild West Shows (Urbana, IL, 1999)Google Scholar.
8 See Dykstra, Robert R., The Cattle Towns (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Ty Cashion, A Texas Frontier: The Clear Fork Country and Fort Griffin, 1849–1887 (Norman, OK 1996)Google Scholar; and Haywood, Robert C., Victorian West: Class and Culture in Kansas Cattle Towns (Lawrence, KS, 1991)Google Scholar.
9 Cohen, Richard E. Nisbett and Dov, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder, CO, 1996), xv–xviGoogle Scholar, 4, 9. The seminal work on southern concepts of honor and their impact on southern culture and behavior is Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982)Google Scholar. See also discussion of Scots-Irish herder culture in the South in McDonald, Forrest and McWhiney, Grady, “The Antebellum Southern Herdsman: A Reinterpretation,” Journal of Southern History 41 (May 1975): 147–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McDonald and McWhiney, “Celtic Origins of Southern Herding,” Journal of Southern History 51 (May 1985): 165–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rowland Berthoff argues that geography played a greater role in herding practices than ethnicity and that such behavior is not exclusively Scots-Irish. Berthoff, Rowland, “Celtic Mist over the South,” Journal of Southern History 52 (Aug. 1986): 523–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, for our purposes it is the herding culture rather than its ethnic origins that is important.
10 Greenberg, Amy S., Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York, 2005), 13–14Google Scholar, 17.
11 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s–1890s (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001)Google Scholar. See also Herman, Daniel J., Hell on the Range: A Story of Honor, Conscience, and Culture in the West, 1880–1930 (New Haven, 2010), xi–xxiv.Google Scholar
12 Gorn, Elliott J., “‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch’: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” American Historical Review 90 (Feb. 1985): 22–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Historian Mark Carroll's current research on dueling in Missouri in the 1830s suggests that in the early to mid-nineteenth century, middle-class professionals were more likely to duel than aristocrats and did so both to defend against attacks on their virtue and to show their worthiness for political office. However, he argues that duels themselves were a civilized form of violence. The existence of dueling codes ensured that participants would exhaust all efforts to avoid violence before engaging in combat and that they channeled passions away from more barbaric forms of fighting and rash impulses. Mark Carroll, “Bourgeois Dilemma: Morality, Politics, and the Affair of Honor in Upper Louisiana and Missouri, 1804–1860,” paper given at the Mid-America Conference on History, Springfield, MO, Sept. 25–27, 2008.
13 Ayers, Edward L., Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York, 1984), 19–26.Google Scholar
14 Foote, Lorien, The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (New York, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 Lea, Tom, The King Ranch (Boston, 1957)Google Scholar, 1:327–28. Interestingly Historian Lewis Atherton describes the fight as restoring “a sense of harmony and good will, as well as increased respect on both sides,” which was more of a working-class interpretation of its role. Atherton, Lewis, The Cattle Kings (Bloomington, IN, 1961), 121.Google Scholar
16 Walter W. Meek to Eliza Duis, Aug. 1, 1887, Meek Letters, 81–82, bound typescript, box 516A, A1989-021.002, Walter Meek Family Papers, South Texas Archives, Texas A & M University at Kingsville, Kingsville, TX.
17 Fort Griffin Echo, June 14, 1879.
18 Murdoch, The American West, 52–54.
19 See for example Texas v. Anastacio Arretta, Mar. 1891, and Texas v Edward Fletcher, Mar. 1896, in [District Court Minutes 1], Jan. 13 1885–Sept. 8 1898, 31–32, 217–18, District Clerk's Office, Reeves County Courthouse, Pecos, TX. Nonetheless the court typically dismissed most cattle and horse theft cases as well, or the jury found the defendants not guilty, a fact that indicates a different interpretation of law than in the early twenty-first century, when the vast majority of criminal court cases resulted in convictions.
20 For example, of the four murder indictments in Gonzales County in spring 1870, the judge dismissed one and the jury found the other three not guilty. Juries declared the defendants not guilty in three of the four murder cases that came before the same district court in spring 1874, and the judge reduced the fourth charge to manslaughter. In May a jury found one murder defendant not guilty, and the judge dismissed charges in the other case. Criminal Docket, District Court B, Spring 1870, Feb. 1874, May, 1874, Gonzales District Clerk's Office, Gonzales, TX. In the late 1880s, the Reeves County District judge either dismissed charges or changed venue for three murder cases, a shift that often resulted in shuffling cases around without trial. [District Court Minutes 1], Jan. 13 1885–Sept. 8 1898, 64, District Clerk's Office, Reeves County Courthouse, Pecos, TX. Other examples of violent incidents going unpunished other than the ones cited in the next few notes include State of Texas vs. R. M. Moore, Apr. 15. 1895, #195, District Criminal Court, County Clerk's Office, Armstrong County Courthouse, Claude, Texas; and the various charges vacated in Criminal Minutes 1 Guadalupe County, 111, 160, 168–69, 173, 184, District Clerk's office, Guadalupe County Courthouse, Seguin, TX.
21 District Court Minutes 2 Uvalde County, 187, District Clerk's Office, Uvalde County Courthouse, Uvalde, TX. This is the only duel I found explicitly mentioned in the court records, which suggests either that such charges were rare or that duels were disappearing in a formal sense in Texas after Reconstruction.
22 Hale, Will, Twenty-Four Years a Cowboy and Ranchman in Southern Texas and Old Mexico: Or, Desperate Fights with the Indians and the Mexicans (Santa Barbara, CA, 2001)Google Scholar, 82, 85.
23 See for example the large number of unprosecuted murder cases for the 1887 session, Minutes of the District County Court, 286–87, Civil Record No. 1 District Court of Donely County, County Clerk's office, Donely County Courthouse, Clarendon Texas.
24 Gorn, “Gouge and Bite,” 21–23. For examples of typical cowboy bets on the ranch, see Rollins, Philip Ashton, The Cowboy: An Unconventional History of Civilization on the Old-Time Cattle Range, rev. ed. (1936; Norman, OK, 1997), 174–75Google Scholar, 180–84; Dary, David, Seeking Pleasure in the Old West (Lawrence, KS, 1995)Google Scholar, 126.
25 Gorn, “Bite and Gouge,” 36, 43.
26 Hale, Twenty-Four Years, 89–91.
27 Siringo, Charles A., A Texas Cowboy: Or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony (1886; New York, 2000)Google Scholar, 187.
28 William A. Preist Narrative, 14, Texas, WPA Federal Writers' Project Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/txcat.html, (accessed Oct. 10, 2005) (hereafter “WPA Life Histories”). The Library of Congress has digitized most of the WPA Life Histories and posted them online as part of their American Memory Project. The web address is the introductory page for the Texas narratives, of which there are 445 total. Anyone wishing to access these accounts should go to the Texas page and then link to the list of all Texas narratives. They are in alphabetical order, not by last name but by first letter of the entry. Jim Smith is therefore under “J” not “S”.
29 Brook Campbell Narrative, WPA Life Histories, 7.
30 Collinson, Frank, Life in the Saddle, ed. Clarke, Mary Whatley (1963; Norman, OK, 1997), 125–26.Google Scholar
31 Hale, Twenty-Four Years, 15. He reports a similar situation occurring later. Ibid., 32.
32 Fort Griffin Echo, May 29, 1880.
33 “Memoirs of H.G. Bedford,” 28, typescript, 1926, Hilory G. Bedford Reminiscences, box 2Q435, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, (hereafter CAH-UTA).
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37 George Owens to J. Evetts Haley, Jan. 10, 1927, manuscript interview, JEH II, J-1, J. Evetts Haley Memorial Library and Historical Center, Midland, TX (hereafter JEH-MLHC).
38 Cashion, A Texas Frontier, 287, 291.
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41 Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat, 42.
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46 El Paso Lone Star, Jan. 10 1883. Found in “History of Grazing in Texas: Excerpts from Newspapers, 1880–1884 Vol. II,” box 2R 333, Grazing Industry Papers.
47 Fort Griffin Echo, Mar. 12, 1881.
48 Charles Goodnight and D. H. Snyder banned alcohol on the ranches, and William Lewis confessed to never really drinking very much, even when in town with fellow cowboys. Moore, Cow Boys and Cattle Men, 81–82; and Lewis, Willie Newbury, Tapadero: The Making of a Cowboy (Austin, TX, 1972), 98–99, 104–05.Google Scholar
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57 “W. E. Oglesby,” in Lanning, Jim and Lanning, Judy, Texas Cowboys: Memories of the Early Days (College Station, TX, 1984)Google Scholar 8.
58 Abbott, We Pointed Them North, 220.
59 George W. Arrington to Adjt. General J. B. Jones, Dec. 15, 1880, in “The Arrington Papers,” ed. L.E. Sheffy, typescript, folder 1, George Washington Arrington Papers, PPHM.
60 Rotundo, E. Anthony, “Boy Culture: Middle-Class Boyhood in Nineteenth-Century America” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Carnes, Mark C. and Griffen, Clyde (Chicago, 1990)Google Scholar, 24.
61 Gorn, “Gouge and Bite,” 19, 20, 23.
62 “Artists of the Roundup Old Time Texas Cowboys Vastly Different from Those of the Present Day,” San Antonio Daily Light, Jan. 24, 1894, found in “History of Grazing in Texas: Excerpts from Newspapers 1890–1894 Vol. V,“ box 2R334, Grazing Industry Papers.
63 Bruce, Dickson D. Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin, 1979), 98–99.Google Scholar
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65 Moore, Cow Boys and Cattle Men, 64–66, 126–27, 130–36. Of course racial hierarchies counteracted this emphasis on equality, but at times friendships and loyalties even cut across racial barriers.
66 Duke and Frantz, 6,000 Miles of Fence, 187.
67 Carrigan, William D., The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana, 2004)Google Scholar, 12, 110–15.
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71 D.D. Singleterry to J. Evetts Haley, Sept. 22, 1927, 71, JEH J-I, JEH-MLHC. Singleterry also boasted that Bat Masterson had asked for the hat, and they had refused him, but this is likely an embellishment. Robert Haywood argues that black-on-black violence was more common than black-on-white in Dodge City. Haywood, Robert C., “‘No Less A Man’: Blacks in Cow Town Dodge City, 1876–1886” Western Historical Quarterly 19 (May 1988): 161–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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74 Whitlock, V. H., Cowboy Life on the Llano Estacado (Norman, OK, 1970)Google Scholar, 193. See cases between 466 and 517, especially assaults against Lo Si and Lung Foo, County Court Cases and Criminal Cases 361–530, Mar. 1893–June 1897, County Clerk's Office, Reeves County Courthouse, Pecos, TX. In case 489, three Chinese witnesses testified against the defendant in the assault of Pedro Garcia.
75 El Paso Herald, Nov. 9, 1881.
76 Shaw, James, “From Texas to Warbonnet” in The Best of the American Cowboy, ed. Adams, Ramon F. (Norman, OK, 1957), 221–22.Google Scholar
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78 Villareal, Roberto M., Vaqueros de Sarita (Riviera, TX, 2006)Google Scholar, 108, 109.
79 Durham and Jones, Negro Cowboys, 58.
80 Bill Oden to J. Evetts Haley, July 9, 1947, JEH II J-I, JEH-MLHC.
81 Todd, Bones Hooks, 28.
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86 San Antonio Light, Mar. 4, Sept. 29, 1885.
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88 Ibid.
89 Bullis's narrative is one of a number of “unexpurgated” accounts of a bawdy and salacious nature collected by historian J. Evetts Haley and shared among a select circle of friends. A number of these manuscripts are in the Earl Vandale Collection, and undoubtedly there are others in similar collections.
90 Abbott, We Pointed Them North, 108–10.
91 West, Growing Up, 152–53.
92 Carroll, Mark, Homesteads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race and the Law in Frontier Texas, 1823–1860 (Austin, 2001), 87–88.Google Scholar
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94 Kimmel, Michael, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 1996)Google Scholar, 86; Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1996) 61–62, 75–76.Google Scholar
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96 Montejano, David, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin, 1987)Google Scholar, 79, 80–81.
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99 Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 118–123.
100 G. W. Scarborough to B. H. Campbell, Nov. 13, 1886, Letter B. H. Campbell from various persons, 1886, E.2B, D.3, XIT Ranch Records, PPHM.
101 Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 123.
102 Abbott, We Pointed Them North, 28–29.
103 Hilory G. Bedford, “Bring up the Past to Enjoy it at the Present,” typescript, box 2Q435, Hilory G. Bedford Reminiscences, CAH-UTA.
104 S. A. Wright, “Adventures of a Texas Cowpuncher,” box 2R312, CAH-UTA.
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106 Mead, Robert A., “Ambivalence and Myth in the History and Literature of the Southern Plains,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 30 (Spring 2007)Google Scholar: 59, 62.
107 In some less settled areas of Texas, frontier conditions prevailed longer, as did vigilante justice and jury predilections to dismiss charges. Former criminal lawyer Bill Neal places the final transition from lawlessness to civilized legal institutions around World War I. Neal, Guns to Gavels, 276–78.
108 State of Texas vs. W. D. Browning, May 15, 1891, #23, District Criminal Court, County Clerk's Office, Armstrong County Courthouse, Claude, Texas.
109 J. N. Browning to Fred Horsbrugh, July 30, Aug. 14, 1902, folder 15, box 2, J. Earle Hodges to Fred Horsbrugh, Sept. 17, 1902, folder 16, box 2, J. N. Browning to Fred Horsbrugh, Aug. 30, Sept. 19, 1902, folder 3, box 3, Espuela Land and Cattle company Records, Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX (hereafter SC-TTU). Characteristically, the Spur disputed paying the doctor's and hotel bills for the sixty-seven days Lindley lingered before his death. Eventually the doctor, noting that the expenses were very high and had been largely “borne by the friends of the poor boy who have manifested such noble traits of character,” reduced his bill by $50, but three months after Lindley's death the bill was still in dispute. Quotation: J. D. Stocking to Fred Horsbrugh, undated, folder 4, box 3, ibid. See also J. H. Pirtle to Horsbrugh, Sept. 17, 1902, and W.H. Patrick to Horsbrugh, Oct. 3, 1902, folder 3, box 3, and T. W. Carroll to Horsbrugh, Dec. 30, 1902, folder 15, box 2, ibid.
110 Bruce, Violence and Culture, 99, makes this distinction.
111 Lea, King Ranch, 2:482-83.
112 On the rise of the concept of physical manhood and the importance of organized sports as a way to build up manhood, Dubbert, Joe L., A Man's Place: Masculinity in Transition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1979) 163–75Google Scholar.
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121 Savage, ed., Cowboy Life, 110.
122 Quoted in Abbott, We Pointed Them North, 43.
123 Texas Livestock Journal, Sept. 12, 1885.
124 San Antonio Light, Mar. 26, 1884.