Part Supernatural

These two books were not published for the regular “Westerns” market, or as “Western Americana” either. They seem, rather, to have been written for Ph.D. committees in graduate schools. Which is to say that college teachers, strange as this may seem to our most genuine and tireless cowboy addicts, are now studying cowboys.

Both books, accordingly, skip live cowboys to get at those more suitable for practical research projects. The pure, authentic form of cowboy, it seems, had a “short, but definite, life span, covering principally the years 1867 to 1885.” In 1867 Texas longhorns were first trailed to the new railhead at Abilene for shipment to Chicago. And, beginning then, the Texans, driving their open range cattle to the railroads and on up the Great Plains into the vast short grass country of the federal domain reaching to the Rockies, created the arche types of the American cowboy.

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Philip Burnham

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These two books were not published for the regular “Westerns” market, or as “Western Americana” either. They seem, rather, to have been written for Ph.D. committees in graduate schools. Which is to say that college teachers, strange as this may seem to our most genuine and tireless cowboy addicts, are now studying cowboys.

Both books, accordingly, skip live cowboys to get at those more suitable for practical research projects. The pure, authentic form of cowboy, it seems, had a “short, but definite, life span, covering principally the years 1867 to 1885.” In 1867 Texas longhorns were first trailed to the new railhead at Abilene for shipment to Chicago. And, beginning then, the Texans, driving their open range cattle to the railroads and on up the Great Plains into the vast short grass country of the federal domain reaching to the Rockies, created the arche types of the American cowboy.