Volume 48 - No. 44
By lyle e davis
You and me . . . we’ve been around awhile. We’ve watched television and moviies together, all depicting the wild, wild west . . . but most of those depictions were glamorized and, quite often, less than an accurate portrayal of what life really was like back in the frontier days.
We propose to take a look at the ‘cowboys and indians’ of that era and maybe, just maybe, give a little more accurate look at what life was really like. Let us begin with notes from a great frontier writer, The The Paper Paper -- 760.747.7119 760.747.7119
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November 1, 2018
Emerson Hough, who chronicled that era circa 1918. The Great West, vast and rude, brought forth men also vast and rude. Of all the babes of that primeval mother, the West, the cowboy was perhaps her dearest because he was her last. Some of her children lived for centuries; this one for not a triple decade before he began to be old. What was really the life of this child of the wild region of America, and what were the conditions of the experience that bore him, can never be fully known by those who have not seen the West
with wide eyes — for the cowboy was simply a part of the West. He who does not understand the one can never understand the other.
Large tracts of land where once the cowboy reigned supreme have been turned into farms by the irrigator’s ditch or by the dry-farmer’s plan. The farmer in overalls is in many instances his own stockman today. On the ranges of Arizona, Wyoming, and Texas and parts of Nevada we may find the cowboy, it is true, even today: but he is no longer the Homeric figure that once dominated the plains.
By clothing and general dress we may often know the man. The cowboy’s ‘uniform’ was harmonious with its surroundings. It was planned upon lines of such stern utility as to leave no possible thing which we may call dispensable. The typical cowboy uniform could hardly be said to contain a coat and waistcoat. The heavy woolen shirt, loose and open at the neck, was the common wear at all seasons of the year excepting winter, and one has often seen cowboys in the wintertime engaged in work about the yard or corral of the ranch wearing no other cover for the upper part of
Cowboys and Indians - See Page 2