Word: cowboy
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Lance Morrow's article "Smile When You Say That" [ESSAY, Oct. 28], describing how cowboy logic figured in the recent terrorist incident, was most accurate when it depicted Theodore Roosevelt as a good guy doing battle with bad guys. This image of frontier justice has been a long-standing and powerful one in the American consciousness. After all, when T.R. succeeded the assassinated William McKinley as President in 1901, anguished Republican Business Leader Mark Hanna remarked, "That damned cowboy is President of the United States!" William M. Wemple Fort Washington...
...chilly predawn darkness blankets the small cowboy camp called Twin Buttes, a cedar-covered knoll in the high desert of northwest Arizona. Another day of the fall roundup at the Double O Ranch begins as six sleepy cowpunchers stir from their bedrolls and head for the campfire's warm glow. Beyond the flames is the covered cook wagon, sides of beef hanging outside and a bag of flour sitting within. After wolfing down biscuits, meat and gravy, the six men pull on their chaps and walk slowly to the corral to saddle the horses and head...
Like the pickup truck and Interstate 40, Knox fails to fit Hollywood's western stereotype: he is a cowboy poet. Despite the apparent oxymoron, verse has its place on the range, and Knox and his fellow horseback balladeers capture well the cowboy's changing world...
After working some 30 jobs in nine Western states in the past 14 years, Knox understands the modern cowboy, and his poetry speaks the plains' truths. As he writes in a poem called The Dying Times: "Any man makin' a living by punchin' cows/ Will know what I mean when I say/ The good times that's been had are comin' to an end;/ Friends, we've about reached that day." His voice is not alone...
Research for a recent anthology, Cowboy Poetry: A Gathering, by Hal Cannon of the Western Folklife Center in Salt Lake City, turned up about 5,000 poems by contemporary cowboys (known in their slang as waddies) and ranchers. "If you got to talking to most cowboys, they'd admit they write 'em," says Knox. "I think some of the meanest, toughest sons of bitches around write poetry." The first poem Knox penned more than a decade ago describes a barroom brawl he lost, and he's been at it ever since...