Richard W. Slatta - The cowboy encyclopedia

Cover

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The Cowboy Encyclopedia

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Richard W. Slatta

Santa Barbara, California

Denver, Colorado

Oxford, England

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Copyright 1994 by Richard W. Slatta and ABC-CLIO

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Slatta, Richard W., 1947

The cowboy encyclopedia/Richard W. Slatta.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. CowboysAmericaEncyclopedias. 2. CowboysWest (U.S.)Encyclopedias. 3. Frontier and pioneer lifeAmericaEncyclopedias. 4. Frontier and pioneer lifeWest (U.S.)Encyclopedias. 5. AmericaSocial life and customsEncyclopedias. 6. West (U.S.)Social life and customsEncyclopedias. I. Title.

E20.S56 1994 978.003dc20 94-19824

ISBN 0-87436-738-7

00 99 98 97 96 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

Cover illustration: Bronco Buster (ca. 1905) by William H. Dunton. The Rockwell Museum, gift of William C. Whitridge.

ABC-CLIO, Inc.

130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911

Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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For Zoya Maxine Atkinson and Jerome David Slatta, my favorite saddle pals

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Contents

Preface, ix

Acknowledgments, xiii

The Cowboy Encyclopedia,

Appendix A: Film and Videotape Sources,

Appendix B: Museums,

Appendix C: Periodicals,

Appendix D: Western Cultural Happenings,

Bibliography,

Index,

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One of the goals of this book is to refute generations of pundits who have been declaring the cowboy dead, dying, or disappeared for more than a century. Charles Moreau Harger, writing in Scribners Magazine (June 1892), pronounced one of many such epitaphs: The cow-boy, with his white, wide-rimmed hat, his long leathern cattle whip, his lariat, and his clanking spur is a thing of the past.

Some aspects of cowboy life have certainly changed. This encyclopedia reminds us, however, that cowboys and their culture are alive and well in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. Just visit any of the hundreds of cowboy songfests, poetry gatherings, chuck wagon cookoffs, ranch rodeos, collectibles shows, and other western happenings. Youll find plenty of living cowboy culture.

This book is the first and only major reference work to focus on the essentials of cowboy history, culture, and myth for both North and South America. I hope the book entertains and enlightens readers. Ive tried to include something for students of cowboy life and lore, fanciers and collectors of western Americana, rodeo buffs, and armchair cowpokes. If you enjoy rodeoing, dude ranching, real ranching, or visiting places such as the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, and other cowboy sites, this book is for you. Its written for a general audience, but I wont mind if other historians and frontier scholars take a look too.

A word about this books organization and approach. I have tried to integrate rather than fragment information. I chose to present information in longer, topical entries rather than to break the book into short, disparate bits and pieces. For example, saddles are covered in a single essay. The entry traces Spanish influence on the western stock saddle and also covers the recado, the saddle of the Argentine gaucho. If you look up the term recado, you find instructions to See Saddle. These longer entries have subtopical headings to speed the locating of specific information.

This integrated approach often places Latin American material less familiar to most readers within a comparative North American context. About two-thirds of the text focuses on the American West. The remaining one-third covers Canada and Latin America. I mean no slight to our neighbors north or south of the border. The proportions simply reflect my estimate of the interests of readers and the relative size of the different reading markets.

Interests in cowboy history and culture are as varied as old ranch hands. I cover cowboy equipment and dress, work and play, cultural imagery in pulps and other fictional literature, films, western music and singers, historians who have studied the cowboy, Native-American and African-American cowboys, women, rodeo (stampedes in Canada, charreada in Mexico), the cowboys environment (plains, pampas, llanos), and locations such as museums, dude ranches, and historic sites.

This is not a general encyclopedia of the West or the frontier. The focused coverage is what makes this book unique. Vardis Fisher, for

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example, is certainly an important western literary figure, but his work did not focus on the cowboy, so he is not included.

I do not include entries on famous or infamous lawmen, gunfighters, or outlaws; military history, forts, and battles; farming and sheep raising; natural history; non-equestrian Indian cultures; cities, other than cow towns; mining; the fur trade; mountain men; or the oil industry. Frontier religion gets little attention for the simple reason that most nineteenth-century cowboys had little time or use for organized religion or church-going.

To help you understand and appreciate this books lineage, I would like to share some behind-the-scenes comments about how I conceived and wrote it. To criticize the Eisenhower administrations lack of aid to Latin America, Colombian President Carlos Lleras Restrepo told a story about a fish seller. A man opened a fish stand and put up a sign that read: Fresh Fish Sold Here. A friend came along and said, Your sign is too long. Obviously no one sells rotten fish. Your sign should read: Fish Sold Here. A second helpful compadre stopped by and opined, Its obvious