More Than Cowboys , livre ebook

Title Page
MORE THAN COWBOYS
Travels through the History of the American West
Tim Slessor



Publisher Information
First published in 2012 by
Signal Books Limited
36 Minster Road
Oxford
OX4 1LY
www.signalbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2013 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Tim Slessor 2012, 2013
The right of Tim Slessor to be identied as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. e whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.





Preface
“Well, good luck, and mind you tell them that it was a whole lot more than just cowboys.”
He was an oilman. We were both checking in at a motel in Casper, Wyoming. He asked me what I - obviously a Brit - was doing in those parts. Perhaps he thought that I was an oilman too. I explained. So, while the desk clerk ran our cards through her swipe and then gave us our keys, we stood and talked for a few minutes. Then we picked up our bags, said goodnight and went off to our rooms. It was one of those brief, chance encounters. But moments later, I was struck by his last, over-the-shoulder advice. It had a satisfying ring; it made good sense too. After all, the West is “a whole lot more than just cowboys”. Maybe I had a title for my book.
***
I have some explaining to do.
First, everything in this book is true. And even if it isn’t, it could be. You will soon see what I mean...
Second, the chapters that follow are uneven and often partial. Given the enormous spread of the West, in both its geography and history, they could hardly be anything else. So please, don’t expect a narrative that is neatly systematic. There are all kinds of omissions, bumps, diversions and potholes along the way. But more than that, and for most of the time, my path heads towards the places (and their histories) that I have come to know. My enthusiasms go back to the days when, once upon a time, I lived and worked for a very happy year on the High Plains; later I was lucky enough to have a job making documentaries for the BBC that took me zigzagging across those parts, particularly across Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas. So, after a few broad-brush chapters, that is where we will be heading.
Third, you will ask how a mere Brit could have the nerve to write about something as quintessentially American as the West. That is a fair point and, 30 years ago, when I first started to write things down, I would have been too shy to attempt an answer. Indeed, I hid my early efforts in a bottom drawer for those three decades. But with increasing age, there comes a lowered embarrassment level - and I am now well into my dotage. Also, some of my American friends have suggested that I might have a different “take”, a foreigner’s angle, on certain well-worn subjects; it is encouraging of them to suggest that.
Fourth, who do I think I am writing for? Brits or Americans? The short answer is that I hope I am writing for both. But there is another possibility: maybe I am really writing for myself - putting together a sort of personal “thank you” to a people who, for nearly 50 years, have always made me welcome and whose history fascinates me. Therefore I have told my laptop that everything must be spelt/spelled in American. That task it has now learnt/learned, but of course it can’t cope with “usage”, which on one side of the Atlantic is sometimes different than/different from that on the other. So, Americans, please allow me occasional slips or perhaps some overly obvious perceptions. For instance, it is interesting for me to see that the Founding Fathers, when writing the Constitution, used the English spelling (originally from medieval Norman-French) for labour and defence . But if any of this is already familiar, please recognize/recognise that it may not be for many British readers.
Fifth, I make few claims for originality. Indeed, there is not much in this book that a diligent reader will not find in a good library. I don’t apologize/apologise for that; I am not trying to assert my credentials as a researcher. So, only rarely have I gone back to original sources, because by now all the usual archives have been so thoroughly plowed/ploughed over that they are unlikely to provide anything new, let alone revelatory. After all, most writers of history, if they are honest, have distilled the works of a whole slew of earlier literary explorers and pathfinders. How could it be otherwise unless they were actually “there” - at Fort Laramie, Sutter’s Mill, Wounded Knee, the Alamo or wherever? Even then, one will often read almost as many different eyewitness accounts of what took place (especially if the event was controversial) as there were people taking part. So it seems to me that, once past a few basic and unarguable historical facts (the Union won the Civil War, Colonel Custer most certainly did not win at Little Big Horn), one is quickly into the much more interesting background of a given event: what were its causes and, even more important (given that we may still be living with some of them), what were its consequences? At which point there is, as often as not, a divergence of opinion among the different commentators. In short, we have moved into interpretation. And that, surely, is what makes history so interesting. In other words, except in its most basic elements, history is seldom merely what happened; it is, more often than not, what different people think happened; or sometimes, even more pertinently, what they want to think happened. I am arrogant enough to hope it is my thinking , my occasional original opinions , that will interest the reader; but that of course is for the reader to decide.
Further, and in connection with that last paragraph, I am told that in the eyes of some professional historians a deficiency of detailed endnotes and source references labels one as someone of negligible legitimacy. So be it: I am resigned to being illegitimate. As already admitted, much of my information comes from a distillation of other people’s books and articles; I have listed around 200 of them in the Bibliography, and selected choice quotations for the chapter openings. Nevertheless, besides picking my way through other men’s literary flowers, I have driven many thousands of miles (and walked a few) across the West, and I have visited many (though certainly not all) of the places I write about. I have also talked and listened to people who know far more about these things than I do.
Lastly, although at the end of this book I acknowledge in some detail the help I have had at so many points in putting the whole thing together, I want to say another “thank you” at this early stage as well. So, I thank everyone who responded to my questions and who offered advice, encouragement or simple kindness: like that oilman in Casper, or the warden-historians at the Little Big Horn Battlefield, or the highway patrolman who pulled me over for speeding (and then let me off), or the Kansas farmer who stopped his pick-up on a back-country road to ask if I had a problem. When I explained that I had just pulled over to look at my map, I think he was mildly disappointed. I mention him (without even getting close enough to ask his name) because his concern was, and is, entirely typical of the hospitality one gets all over the West, from complete strangers.
Tim Slessor
Wimbledon, 2011





First Things First
We think so much of our state that if the Good Lord chooses it for His second coming, we’ll be pleased, but not much surprised.
A notice over the mirror in a Scottsbluff (Nebraska) barber’s shop
***
More than 45 years ago, being disappointed with my boss, I left my BBC job, or, to use the vernacular in which I soon found myself, I “up’n’quit” - to go and work for 12 months on the Great Plains of the American West. I had been there before; I have been back many times since. I was, and still am, fascinated by the place.
It is a well-worn cliché, but the West is much more than just an enormous spread of geography. As has often been observed, it is also a way of life, a state of mind, an attitude, a style, a way of saying and doing things. Westerners - the real ones, not the dudes - even walk, talk and smile a little differently than the rest of us. And, more often than not, they think a little differently too - sometimes a lot differently. So, above all, the West is its people, past and present. They have always been rather special, and, based on my hither-and-thither travels around the rest of the world, I can tell you that they are also among the most open and hospitable. And one other thing: even though many of them hardly recognize it, they are conditioned by an epic sweep of history; I am thinking of the facts, not the fiction - though, at times, the two are (satisfyingly) not too far apart. Yet, intriguingly, if any of today’s Westerners think about these things at all, their time-perspective is such that they are likely to regard “the taking of the West” (and much that followed) as having happened only a little this side of Magna Carta. Yes, I exaggerate. But not much.
After all, when the BBC first sent me filming “out west” in 1961, I found myself listening to an 82-year-old Sioux who told me how, as a boy, just after Christmas in 1890, he had watched the 7 th Cavalry (yes, the same 7 th that,