Are There Any Cowboys Left?

I’m serious: Are there any cowboys left?

It is sobering if I stop and consider it for more than a second.

My grandfather is gone now.

And he was the closest think to a cowboy I have ever seen or heard of.

I don’t mean one who wears a cowboy hat, or has some boots, and works at the feed store.

You know the kind I am talking about.

On the weekend he likes to try to ride bulls at the local rodeo.

I am not talking about him.

I am talking about a man who lives and works livestock on a ranch for a living – without the 8-5 city job to support it all.

The only people I know that live like that go by a different name: Bedouin

“I FIND it a little painful to be among cowboys now—of course, there are not very many of them to be among. Those who survive are anachronisms, and they know it. Most of them live in suburban hells, and yet are stuck with a style that lost its pith more than one hundred years ago. Many of the men who survive as cowboys now spend their lives being nostalgic for an experience—the trail drives—that even their grandfathers missed. Rodeo, the only part of that experience that is accessible to the public, is a kind of caricature of cowboying.”

–Larry McMurtry, Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen