The Myth of the Wild West Cowboy
A columnist deconstructs the romantic image of the 'blood-draggled' cowboy, revealing that the men who shot up town billiard parlors were often just farm-boys performing bravado.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A great many people wonder where the cowboy, with his abnormal thirst for blood, originated. Did this young Jesse James, with his gory record and his dauntless eye, come from a buffalo wallow at the ford of some rock-ribbed mountain? Careful research and cold, hard statistics show that the cowboy, as a general thing, was born in an unostentatious manner on the farm. I hate to sit down on a beautiful romance and squash the breath out of a romantic dream, but the cowboy who gets too much moist damnation in his system and rides on a gallop up and down Main street shooting out the lights of the beautiful billiard palaces would be just as unhappy if a moose ran up his pantaloon leg as you would, gentle reader. He is generally a youth who thinks he will not earn his $25 per month if he does not yell and whoop and shoot and scare little girls into St. Vitus's dance. I've known more cowboys to injure themselves with their own revolvers than to injure anyone else. This is evidently because they are more familiar with the hoe than they are with the Smith & Wesson.
“The cowboy who gets too much moist damnation in his system... would be just as unhappy if a moose ran up his pantaloon leg as you would, gentle reader.”
This 1884 editorial captures the performative nature of 'frontier' masculinity, suggesting that the rough-and-tumble image of the American West was as much a construction then as it is in modern media. The piece serves as a reminder that civic tensions over public rowdiness and the gun-toting behavior of young men in downtown Seattle have long historical roots.
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