John Cornyn

“The Texas horizon will forever include the silhouette of a lone soul, in a tall hat, sitting on a strong horse—helping lead cattle to market and moving Texas forward on the road to greatness.”

Nothing has done more to define the American character than the image of the Texas cowboy. In the world’s eyes, the cowboy is the personification of independence, grit, honesty, humility, geniality and straight shooting, all displayed in wide open spaces with an unerring sense of right and wrong.

Other states had their pioneers and frontiersmen, but the cowboy was largely a Texas creation. For 300 years, well before Texas joined the United States, Mexican vaqueros ran cattle on horseback across the region. That included a few longhorns, originally imported from Spain.

But as the nation began to heal after the Civil War, Texas’s first major industry was born. The bustling north needed beef. Texas had cattle. The trail drive phenomenon—moving herds across vast, unoccupied plains northward towards railroad loading points—was soon underway.

The cowboy’s heyday lasted only about one generation, from the mid-1860s until the late 1880s. But his impact on the popular imagination is permanent. It started almost immediately. Dime novels began circulating in the eastern United States and Europe during the 1870s, vividly dramatizing life on the open range.

Within a few years, Buffalo Bill Cody and others had created Wild West shows to exploit fascination with the frontier. And popular interest appears timeless. The cowboy is the central figure in an entire genre of literature, movies and television, the “Western,” that will never disappear.

The cowboy remains America’s most popular hero. One writer, William W. Savage, says the cowboy, “as a representative of an occupational group, has received more attention than any other workers in the world.” In the popular myth, the cowboy combined conservative, traditional social values with hard-fisted frontier justice.

Of course, in reality, life for a 19th century cowboy was hardly glamorous. The work was dirty, and often dangerous. Trail rides were long, and the pay was modest, from $25 to $40 per month for the average hand, up to $125 per month for a trail boss.

Newly-settled parts of the U.S. wanted to join the cattle industry, so trail drives went all over the West. “Lonesome Dove” by Larry McMurtry chronicles an epic journey from South Texas to the new territory of Montana. One significant route, the Goodnight-Loving Trail, started in Fort Concho and ended in Pueblo, Colorado.

But the main drive was the Chisholm Trail that started near Fort San Antonio and moved north through Austin to the Red River and on to railheads in Kansas. Altogether, some five million head of cattle were moved northward from Texas in the late 19th century. The era’s end came when barbed wire closed off the open range and railroad expansion into production areas made the cattle drives obsolete.

At his best, the cowboy displayed strong, traditional values—courage in the face of the unknown, respect for the land and a basic faith in ultimate justice. These values live on. The U.S. Congress has specified July 28, 2007, as the National Day of the American Cowboy.

In Texas, several churches are devoted to preserving those values and melding them with teachings of the Bible. In Atlanta, Texas, members of the Cass County Cowboy Church have a “western trade day” this month. In Crawford, Texas, parishioners of the Top Hand Cowboy Church are staging a “Boots for Bibles” campaign and other celebratory events.

In Fort Worth, at the historic stockyards, an all-day celebration is planned for July 28, including living history presentations, a small cattle drive and parade.

The cattle industry remains a thriving bulwark of the Texas economy today—even as increasing parts of our traditional grasslands are occupied by wind farms or residential subdivisions. Today’s cattle may well be herded by a cowboy flying a helicopter.

But the Texas horizon will forever include the silhouette of a lone soul, in a tall hat, sitting on a strong horse—helping lead cattle to market and moving Texas forward on the road to greatness.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a former Texas Supreme Court justice and Bexar County district judge, serves on the senate’s Armed Services, Judiciary and Budget committees. He can be reached locally at 600 Navarro, Suite 210, or at (210) 224-7485.