Robb Walsh - The Texas Cowboy Cookbook: A History in Recipes and Photos

Thanks to all the Texas cowboys and cowgirls who provided the recipes, photographs, and stories that appear in this book.

Thanks to my daughter, Katie Walsh, for the recipe testing, sourdough oversight, and pie-eating help.

Thanks to my daughter, Julia Walsh, for lending her photography, typing, and kitchen-cleaning skills.

Thanks to my wife, Kelly Klaasmeyer, for her love and support.

Thanks to my agent, Nina Collins, and my editor, Jennifer Josephy, for making the project possible.

Thanks to Erin Mayes and the Em Dash design team in Austin for all the great ideas.

Thanks to Anna Ossenfort for her editing help.

Thanks to archivist Tom Shelton at the University of Texas at San Antonio's Institute of Texan Cultures for his tireless assistance in finding images.

Thanks to Cliff Teinert and Tom Perini for all the Dutch oven tips.

Thanks to Western history scholars Sara Massey and Patrick Dearen for their advice and suggestions.

Thanks to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, the Texas State Library, The LBJ Library, and the Ransom Center in Austin for research assistance.

Thanks to the Houston Press and Village Voice Media for a real job with dental insurance.

Picture a bunch of cowboys sitting around a campfire eating from tin plates and drinking black coffee from tin cups. Beside them is the iconic horse-drawn kitchen called the chuck wagon, stocked with everything they will need to eat for several months. This is the image of cowboy cooking that became a part of the history of Texas and the Old West. Modern scholars have pointed out that much of what we

mistake for history is actually part of the myth of the West. a jumble of fact and fantasy derived from pulp fiction, Wild West shows, television westerns, and cowboy-and-lndian movies. The reexami-nation of cowboy history currently taking place in Texas colleges and universities is giving us some startling new views of cowboy culture.

Of course, there really were chuck wagons in the Old West. There really were gunfights at high noon and poker games played in saloons with swinging doors, too. It's just that these well-dramatized cliches were actually only a small part of a much more complex story.

After the Civil War, Texas was, in fact, a defeated slave state with a sizable minority population and a serious problem with the Comanches. But thanks to dime novels and Wild West shows, the rest of America thought of the Lone Star State as one big Wild West town populated entirely by white, pistol-packing cowboys.

The image of the Texas cowboy and cowboy cooking that is forever locked in the public imagination comes from the twenty-year heyday of the trail drives, between 1866 and 1886. The cowboys who rode the trail were a tough breed. They included former Confederate soldiers, freed slaves, and Hispanic vaquerosmen without a lot of other prospects at the end of the Civil War. For as little as a dollar a day, they were willing to risk the trip through Indian territory, protecting a herd of cattle.

Wild cattle that were free for the taking in the South Texas brush country could be sold for thirty or forty dollars a head in Abilene, Kansas, and other railhead towns that served the beef-starved northern markets. In a few decades, millions of longhorns were driven from Texas across the prairies.

Scenes from this short-lived cattle rush eraincluding the stampede, the Indian attack, the singing cowboy, and dinner around the chuck wagonbecame cliches as they were endlessly repeated in cowboy dime novels, and later in cowboy movies and comic books.

Dime novels were cheap booklets printed on newsprint. Their authors cranked them out by the dozen. The writers roamed the West looking for real-life heroes and villains to give their stories credibility. Two of the most famous good guys were Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack.

After they became famous in print, the real Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack made a lot of money by going east and blurring the line between fiction and history by playing their exaggerated Western characters in eastern theaters. Dressed in fanciful costumes, they told stories, threw lariats, and rescued damsels by killing dozens and dozens of savages onstage.

But the hokey battle scenes had a grisly basis in reality. Colonel William Buffalo Bill Cody was indeed a real Indian fighter. He took part in sixteen battles, including the Cheyenne defeat at Summit Springs, Colorado, in 1869, and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1872.