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“Them's Fighting Words”: Violence, Masculinity, and the Texas Cowboy in the Late Nineteenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2014
Abstract
Violence inevitably plays a part in discussions of the cowboy, historical or mythical. Traditionalists celebrated his manly fighting as what tamed the West and saved American manhood; revisionists have castigated the brutality with which he dealt with Native Americans and the environment. It is important, however, to consider what purpose violence served for the cowboy himself. To the working-class cowboy, violence could preserve social harmony, both through defending personal honor and through regulating social behavior of women and minorities. Its use was a clear marker of masculinity, as it allowed him both to show his equal worth with the men around him and to maintain social hierarchies that gave him an advantage over other people. The middle- and upper-class townspeople and cattlemen around cowboys, however, increasingly saw violence as counterproductive. Although parents encouraged aggression in boyhood, they thought that in order to become a real man, one should learn proper restraint and channel that aggression into socially acceptable activities. More and more, respectable ideas of maintaining social order left no room for violence, and consequently cowboys faced increasing social regulation of their masculine self-identities.
- Type
- Essay
- Information
- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 28 - 55
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2014
References
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88 Ibid.
89 Bullis's narrative is one of a number of “unexpurgated” accounts of a bawdy and salacious nature collected by historian J. Evetts Haley and shared among a select circle of friends. A number of these manuscripts are in the Earl Vandale Collection, and undoubtedly there are others in similar collections.
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101 Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 123.
102 Abbott, We Pointed Them North, 28–29.
103 Hilory G. Bedford, “Bring up the Past to Enjoy it at the Present,” typescript, box 2Q435, Hilory G. Bedford Reminiscences, CAH-UTA.
104 S. A. Wright, “Adventures of a Texas Cowpuncher,” box 2R312, CAH-UTA.
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107 In some less settled areas of Texas, frontier conditions prevailed longer, as did vigilante justice and jury predilections to dismiss charges. Former criminal lawyer Bill Neal places the final transition from lawlessness to civilized legal institutions around World War I. Neal, Guns to Gavels, 276–78.
108 State of Texas vs. W. D. Browning, May 15, 1891, #23, District Criminal Court, County Clerk's Office, Armstrong County Courthouse, Claude, Texas.
109 J. N. Browning to Fred Horsbrugh, July 30, Aug. 14, 1902, folder 15, box 2, J. Earle Hodges to Fred Horsbrugh, Sept. 17, 1902, folder 16, box 2, J. N. Browning to Fred Horsbrugh, Aug. 30, Sept. 19, 1902, folder 3, box 3, Espuela Land and Cattle company Records, Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX (hereafter SC-TTU). Characteristically, the Spur disputed paying the doctor's and hotel bills for the sixty-seven days Lindley lingered before his death. Eventually the doctor, noting that the expenses were very high and had been largely “borne by the friends of the poor boy who have manifested such noble traits of character,” reduced his bill by $50, but three months after Lindley's death the bill was still in dispute. Quotation: J. D. Stocking to Fred Horsbrugh, undated, folder 4, box 3, ibid. See also J. H. Pirtle to Horsbrugh, Sept. 17, 1902, and W.H. Patrick to Horsbrugh, Oct. 3, 1902, folder 3, box 3, and T. W. Carroll to Horsbrugh, Dec. 30, 1902, folder 15, box 2, ibid.
110 Bruce, Violence and Culture, 99, makes this distinction.
111 Lea, King Ranch, 2:482-83.
112 On the rise of the concept of physical manhood and the importance of organized sports as a way to build up manhood, Dubbert, Joe L., A Man's Place: Masculinity in Transition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1979) 163–75Google Scholar.
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121 Savage, ed., Cowboy Life, 110.
122 Quoted in Abbott, We Pointed Them North, 43.
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124 San Antonio Light, Mar. 26, 1884.