Cowboy Character: Cheerfulness
[Bose Ikard] never failed to answer me in the most cheerful and willing manner, [he] was the most skilled and trustworthy man I had.
Charles Goodnight
Cowboys are romantics. “Extreme romantics,” said Larry McMurtry, who grew up as a cowboy and whose uncles were some of the last men in Texas to drive cattle up the trail. “Ninety-nine out of a hundred of them are sentiment to the core. They are oriented toward the past and face the present only under duress, and then with extreme reluctance.” He was speaking of the cowboys of his childhood in the 1940s and 1950s. It was difficult for them to accept that the old cowboy way of life was dead.
Growing up on Idiot Ridge, outside of Archer City, on the western plains of North Texas, by the time McMurtry’s father began ranching the open range had been closed for a generation, crisscrossed with barbed wire. Cowboys no longer trailed large herds from Texas to railheads in Kansas or Colorado, or established ranches in Wyoming and Montana with Texas cattle. But not everything about being a cowboy was dead, especially their essential outlook on life.
Old-timers and new-timers might regret days gone by but as a whole they’re a cheerful bunch, even with the knowledge that their chosen way of life comes with a wagon load of privations and hardships. Troubles and tragedies are constant companions. And yet, they endure without complaint. They don’t let on when they’re tired, sick, or injured—unless it can’t be kept secret or they can’t do the job. Their instinct is to laugh at hardships and dangers other men cower under. This isn’t to say they wear rose-colored glasses, merely look at the sunny side of life, or whistle past graveyards. That’s not cheerfulness, nor reality. Cheerfulness in a cowboy is the ability to loop the horns of life and flash a toothy grin in spite of the grime and grit. Their attitude is that of Augustus McCrea’s: “It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living.”
As men of action, cowboys have little time to overly mourn frailties and fatalities. McMurtry captures this in Lonesome Dove. After Sean O’Brien, a young Irishman, dies from snakebites crossing the Nueces River, and the crew buries him, Augustus offers a word: “This was a good, brave boy . . . . He had a fine tenor voice, and we’ll all miss that. But . . . there’s accidents in life and he met with a bad one. We may all do the same if we ain’t careful. Dust to dust. Let’s the rest of us go to Montana.”
And that was that.
Because cowboys refuse to be glum they don’t grumble. They associate complaining with quitting—on yourself and on the outfit you work for. The cheerless (and complainers) usually don’t flourish in the profession and are unwelcome in the bunkhouse or cow camp.
No one wants to stomach a sourbelly.
Strive to be like Mose in the movie Open Range. After his murder, his friend and fellow cowhand Charlie Waite says a prayer over his grave: “Well, he sure as hell wasn’t one to complain. Woke with a smile, seemed like he could keep it there all day. Kind of a man that’d say ‘Good morning’ and mean it, whether it was or not.”
One of the most emotionally evocative scenes in Lonesome Dove is the death of Joshua Deets, the skilled and reliable Black tracker for the Hat Creek crew. Woodrow F. Call, the overly stoic trail boss, carves him a grave marker.
Josh Deets—
Served with me 30 years. Fought in 21 engagements with the Commanche and Kiowa. Cherful in all weathers, never sherked a task. Splendid behaviour.
As a Black man in Texas in the late 1870s, Deets had every reason to be a man filled with resentment. But he’s portrayed in the novel as a man of cheerful disposition—a man of easy smiles and jokes—as if it came naturally. There are men and women who seem to be born cheerful—almost childlike. The Cowboy President, Theodore Roosevelt, was one such man. Though born to wealth and privilege, and the ease with which accompanies such fortunes, TR happily set himself on the course of a “strenuous life.”
As a child, Roosevelt suffered with severe asthma, even to the point the family feared for his life. He had poor eyesight, which wasn’t discovered until he was thirteen. He figured a blurry world was just how the world was. As a young man, still in his twenties, he celebrated the birth of his first born, Alice. Two days later, he mourned the deaths of his mother, Martha, and his wife, Alice, on the same day, within the walls of the same house. They died on Valentines Day, 1884. He wrote in his diary, “The light has gone out of my life” and scrawled a large X across the top of the page. He retreated to the Badlands of the Dakota Territory and established Elkhorn Ranch, taking the same risks every cowboy takes working around rough stock and rough men. His scrapes included a bar fight with a gun-wielding thug and tracking down thieves. As a mature man, after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, he formed the “Rough Riders”—the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment—and fought in Cuba, leading the charge up San Juan (Kettle) Hill. As a middle aged man, while campaigning for the presidency, he was shot in the chest by an assassin. He refused treatment until he had delivered his speech, stating, “It takes more than [being shot] to kill a bull moose.” As a older man, while exploring a previously unexplored tributary of the Amazon River he severely injured his leg, contracted malaria, and nearly died in the jungle. His youngest son Quentin, a pilot in World War I, was shot down while fighting in France and killed. And yet, before his own death on January 6, 1919—at the age of sixty-one—Roosevelt said, “No man has had a happier life than I have led; a happier life in every way.”
Roosevelt said that with a bullet in his chest in 1912.
When Larry McMurtry drew the character of Josh Deets for Lonesome Dove his model was Bose Ikard, Charles Goodnight’s skilled and reliable Black hand. In fact, McMurtry based Deets’s epitaph on the one Goodnight erected for Ikard. Goodnight’s biographer J. Evetts Haley describes Ikard as a man who could perform any task required of him with competence and good humor. Ikard excelled as a bronc buster, night herder, and dough slinger (he knew his way around skillets and pans). According to Goodnight, Ikard “surpassed any man I had in endurance and stamina. There was a dignity, a cleanliness, and a reliability about him that was wonderful. . . .
We went though some terrible trials during those four years on the trail. While I had a good constitution and endurance, after being in the saddle for several days and nights at a time, on various occasions, and finding I could stand it no longer, I would ask Bose if he would take my place, and he never failed to answer me in the most cheerful and willing manner, and was the most skilled and trustworthy man I had.
Clearly, cheerfulness is a better way through life than cheerlessness. It’s the Bose Ikard way. It’s the cowboy way.
Sources:
J. Evetts Haley, Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949), 242.
Larry McMurtry, “Take My Saddle from the Wall: A Valediction,” In a Narrow Grave: Essay on Texas (New York: Liverright, 2018), 176; Lonesome Dove (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 158, 267, 330, 338, 703.
Open Range, directed by Kevin Costner (Burbank: Touchstone Pictures, 2003), blu-ray disk.
Theodore Roosevelt, “The Leader and the Cause,” speech at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 14, 1912, in The Essential Theodore Roosevelt, ed. John Gabriel Hunt (New York: Gramercy Books, 1994), 307.
Eugene Thwing, The Life and Meaning of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Current Literature Publishing Company, 1919), 222.
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Vaya con Dios, mi amigos. Dios y Tejas, y’all.
Derrick
Wonderful men, the likes of which are few & far between in this modern world. Salute to the cowboy spirit! 🤠 🙌