excerpts from
excerpt copyright (c) 1996 by Angel City Press. All rights reserved.
Not all the doubters were dudes. Cowboys and cowgirls themselves were surprised at the gold mine of love poetry that exists, spanning a century of Western literary culture. A personal chronicle of the working cowboys' lives, most cowboy poetry tells us how they work and play, how they relish the range and herd and brand the cattle, and their thoughts about their lives and chores.
Rarer are the love poems, but they're as vividly descriptive as the poets' other works. And you can kiss goodbye the stereotypical "macho" cowboy who handles emotions as stoically as he handles an Injun attack. America's most romanticized heroes were and are hopeless sentimentalists. Their poetry reveals life's rich pageant of emotions -- from bewilderment to anguish and joy -- as they sometimes unwillingly, open up their arms and hearts to the opposite sex. When they fall, it is with a mighty, momentous and often humorous thud. Whether told with levity or sorrow, their verses of love are as important to the whole picture of the American frontier people as odes to the land, horses, freedom and the sky above.
Cowboy poetry had its beginnings after the Civil War. During three- to six-month-long cattle drives from the rangelands of Texas and Kansas to shipping points in the plains of mid-America, cowboys entertained each other around the campfire at night by swapping verses they had learned or written. Sometimes they were poems clipped from western newspapers, fitted to a popular tune. Poems passed from one cowboy to another and, as performers saw fit, they added verses and changed words. But cowpokes were shy about sharing their words of love, often keeping them hidden in their saddlebags and maybe reciting them to their beloveds.
The cowboy's love poetry, from the start, was as unique as his other verses, and often displayed the same self-deprecating or boastful humor. It seems that cowboys -- who didn't earn much money or offer much stability -- were much luckier with their horses than with the ladies. They lived in a man's world most the time, staying in cow camps for months at a time, eating out of chuckwagons, rarely coming back to the home ranch or towns. As 87-year-old cowboy poet Slim Kite remembers, "You might see a girl once in a while, but it might be six months before you found out who she was."
When a swell-looking woman happened by -- say the foreman's niece from Boston or a new schoolmarm with rosy cheeks and twinkling eyes -- the smitten cowboys were apt to go bonkers, getting slicked every night, some even sneaking down to the creek to scrub up, situations E.A. Brininstool, among others, describes in several of his poems.
In "A Cowboy's Hopeless Love," by James Barton Adams, the lovestruck cowboy, moping around like a lost calf, cries out:
Much of the poetry reflects a "Don't Fence Me In" attitude about love, echoing the sentiment that romance is a trap designed to rob a man of his freedom. Still, as James Barton Adams writes in "A Cowboy's Worrying Love," a poem full of cranky sighs and irony, "I'm seein' it different now." And Charles "Badger" Clark in "The Tied Maverick," tells of one high-headed bronco sinner, corralled and caught, roped and tied with roses.
Such is the cowboy's special way of expressing his emotions. You'll find no hidden codes, no obscure imagery, references or buried meanings that require an English literature degree. Indeed, the verses are meant to be shared, read aloud with gusto. The images are simple, strong and memorable, just like the American cowboy.
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