Email
PrintCowboy Allure
Every child pretends to be a cowboy. many never outgrow the fascination.
Cayuse Western Americana sells collectible traditional Western boots, saddles, chaps and other gear of the cowboy culture.
(page 1 of 3)
Charles Goodnight is American legend, a hard-riding cowboy who showed up to make history. “Making the gather,” Goodnight rode in the storied statewide roundup of countless cattle that had roamed free across Texas during the Civil War. Pushing forward, he never reined in his horse for long.
Blazing trails through land short on water, but wide open to ambush by Indians and rustlers, Goodnight partnered with Oliver Loving and cowboyed with John Chisum to found the West’s now mythic frontier highways for moving cattle. He amassed a cattle herd totaling 100,000 head; a bison herd that survives to this day. He invented the chuckwagon, joining trail-weary cowboys downing campfire coffee under star-stippled skies.
“Most of the time we were solitary adventurers in a great land as fresh and new as a spring morning,” Goodnight observed, “…we were free and full of the zest of darers.”
Globally by the late 1800s, America’s cowboys personified for the intrepid and the dreamer alike the heroic self-reliance that breeds true liberation. Living by their wits and moxie, branded by the West’s unflagging, uncompromising, freethinking individuality, cowboys were archetypal risk-takers, men passionate enough to change the face of the frontier. Their lifestyles epitomized hope and challenge, independence and succor – forces powerful enough to keep great love affairs alive.
Whenever cowboys are mentioned, Cayuse Western Americana owner Mary Schmidt finds that what collectors of Western Americana imagine is “intensely visual.” They may envision sunburned faces, dust-pocked or wind-scoured, squinting to draw a bead on the horizon’s unknowns or conjure the flash of silver as a cattle drover spurs his horse, heading off a stampede, but whatever their image, it reflects the stirring timbre of the time.
The West was classless, broadly tolerant of individual differences: “Cowboys and cowgirls (Women disguised themselves as young men, working cattle drives or homesteading under the 1877 Desert Land Act.) were respected for what they could do,” Schmidt said. They lived by their convictions, rather than convention, their colorful plumage intact.
Smiling, Schmidt recounts how often clients “just naturally put on a swagger when they put on cowboy gear.” Donning vintage chaps or a frontier Colt .45; rubbing work-worn leather or handsome tooling on old saddles – the historic, indomitable spirit of cowboy equipment rubs off.
“It doesn’t have to be trappings from a famous artist,” admits Schmidt. “Holding what I call ‘Bunkhouse Art’ – maybe an old beaded or horsehair headstall, fashioned by an anonymous cowboy, passing time alone – is history in your hands!”
