Cowboy Character: Devil-May-Care

Cattlemen at river crossing. Erwin E. Smith, c. 1908. Courtesy Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, bequest of Mary Alice Pettis.

The cowboy was . . . genuine and picturesque. He was the cock of the walk, who could eat centipedes for breakfast and barbed wire for supper without injuring his digestion.

Billy Dixon

Of all the dangers a cowboy encountered on the trail—and there were myriad—the one he feared above all others were river crossings. Many couldn’t swim and the prospects of a watery grave sent shivers of panic down many a spine. River crossings were always unpredictable because water was always unpredictable. The surface could be placid but undercurrents could, in the words of Andy Adams, be “sportive and angry.” River bottoms could be solid as stone or as spongy as quicksand. And there was no telling what a horse or a longhorn steer might do if caught in a current or bogged. Adams, who punched cattle from the southern tip of Texas to Montana recorded in his journal, the “boundary river on the northern border of Texas was a terror to trail drivers. . . .

That she was merciless was evident, for although this crossing [Doan’s Crossing] had been in use only a year or two when we forded, yet five graves, one of which was less than ten days made, attested [to] her disregard for human life. It can safely be asserted that at this and lower trail crossings on [the] Red River, the lives of more trail men were lost by drowning than on all other rivers together.

Adams did describe how a cowboy disappeared under the waters of another river—the North Platte. The man was found the next day “lying face upward, in about eighteen inches of eddy water.” He had lost two brothers to the Red River a few years before.

Of course, unless there was a Jasper Fant-like cowboy on the trail, most didn’t express their fears to their fellows. Screwing up their courage, they adopted an Augustus McCrae-like attitude. Before crossing the Nueces River Gus likened himself to the Hat Creek outfit’s lead steer, saying, “Old Dog’s like me.” “How’s that?” Gus’s partner Woodrow F. Call asked. “Lazy, you mean?” Gus responded, “Mature, I mean. He don’t get excited about little things” like crossing rivers. To which Call said, “You don’t get excited about nothing. Not unless it’s biscuits or whores.”

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This short exchange of witticisms highlights the cowboy characteristic of devil-may-care. Courage underlines the quality, but it’s expressed in an attitude of seeming reckless indifference to dangers and difficulties, in what Billy Dixon called, “the cock in the walk, who could eat centipedes for breakfast and barbed wire for supper without injuring [the] digestion.”

This attitude dominates the scene in Lonesome Dove where Gus and Pea Eye are ambushed by Indians in Montana. With two arrows in Gus’s leg, he and Pea Eye race for a thicket-laden creek, where they dig a shallow cave in the creek bank. In the relative safety of their cave, Pea Eye asks, “Which Indians is these we’re fighting?” Gus said, “They didn’t introduce themselves, Pea.” Later, when the Indians start to whoop and holler, which unnerved Pea Eye, Gus “listened with appreciation.” He then let out his own war cry: “I doubt they’ve ever heard Comanche up in these parts.” When Gus smells rain, he says, “Indians mostly don’t like to fight in the wet. Only white men are dumb enough just to keep on fighting no matter what the weather is like.” “We’ve fought Indians in the wet,” Pea Eye insists. “Yes, but it was us forced it on them. They’d rather do battle on sunny days, which is only sensible.” This struck Pea Eye as ludicrous: “Here they’re probably gonna kill us, and you take up for them.” Gus didn’t miss a beat: “I’m an admirer of good sense wherever I find it.”

When day turns to night and the rain floods the creek, Gus tells Pea Eye to use the swollen water to float downstream past where the Indians are hiding and hurry back to the herd and tell Call to come a-running. Pea Eye worries he’ll get lost. “Go south,” Gus tells him. “If you mess up and go north, a polar bear will eat you.” Pea Eye then complains, “that dern water looks cold. I was never one for cold water.” Gus says, “Well, I’m sorry we didn’t bring a bathtub and a cookstove. If we had we could heat some water for you, but as it is you’ll just have to rough it.”

It’s not that Gus is just witty—though he is—it’s that he’s faced many difficult and dangerous situation in his long life and developed a posture that kept things in perspective.

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A devil-may-care attitude is coolness under pressure, an inclination that refuses to be flustered. It’s confidence born of competence, which is born of surviving failure. I say surviving because in the context of the cowboy their labors were bone-grinding and soul-crushing. Their way of life was often deadly. Owen Wister, the author of The Virginian and a close observer of the cowboy way of life, wrote, “The cow-puncher’s play-ground in those first glorious days of his prosperity included battle and murder and sudden death as every-day matters.” Another close observer was cowboy history Ramon F. Adams. “The cowboy laughed in the face of danger,” he wrote, “laughed at hardships when laughing was difficult. Tragedy and its many possibilities were all around him, and his cheerfulness was an attempt to offset this. As a man of action, he had little time to mourn fatalities.”

Developing and demonstrating a devil-may-care attitude was necessary for every trail man, if for no other reason than to bolster his spirit from breaking under the weight of such heavy burdens. As one old Gus-like character said after he and a compadre survived a running battle with Indians and was asked if he heard the bullets:“Yes, we heard the bullets twice, once when they passed us, and again when we passed them.”

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That’s a demonstration of the devil-may-care point of view if there ever was one. Such an outlook isn’t the same as being blasé about dangers and difficulties. It isn’t an indifferent frame of mind that cares little about how things turn out. Rather, it’s looking reality square in the face, taking its measure without blinking, and smiling when you want to frown. It’s refusing to concede or surrender—and doing so with a wink. It’s an attitude that says with a lilt of the voice, “You might get the best of me, but I’ll get my licks in before I go down.”

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No one accused Charles Goodnight of being cavalier at the death of his friend and partner Oliver Loving, whose real life encounter with Comanche in New Mexico was the inspiration of McMurtry’s fictional encounter between Gus, Pea Eye, and a group of Montana Indians. Loving and Goodnight knew the risks they ran—and wouldn’t have had it any other way. They would have heartily agreed with Wister’s words: “Among these perils the cow-puncher took wild pleasure in existing. No soldier of fortune ever adventured with bolder carelessness, no fiercer blood ever stained a border.”

Thinking back on his days as a trail boss, Goodnight said,

All in all, my years on the trail were the happiest I have lived. There were many hardships and dangers, of course, that called on all a man had of endurance and bravery; but when all went well there was no other life so pleasant. Most of the time we were solitary adventurers in a great land as fresh and new as a spring morning, and we were free and full of the zest of darers.

Full of the zest of darers. There’s no better definition of the devil-may-care attitude all cowboys worth the saddle under them adopted. It’s not a bad attitude for non-cowboys to adopt, either.

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Andy Adams, The Log of a Cowboy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903), 121, 301.

Ramon F. Adams, The Cowman and His Code of Ethics (Austin: The Encino Press, 1969), 4.

William “Billy” Dixon, as told to his wife Olive King Dixon, Billy Dixon: His Life and Adventures (Corpus Christi: Copano Bay Press, 2021, reprint), 79.

Charles Goodnight, in J. Evetts Haley, Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949), 259.

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 259, 735, 737–9, 740.

Owen Wister, “The Evolution of the Cow-puncher,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (September 1895), 608, 614.

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