For those born and bred in this part of the West the long
manipulated cowboy myth is both a source of pride and a straitjacket. All
places and people are more than the archetypes we use to represent them, though
nowhere more so than here, where the hard drinking, mono-syllabic itinerant cow
herder has been crafted into a blazing emblem of a region, a lifestyle, a people and a young
country’s fierce individualism.
And yet! And yet for incomers such as ourselves, the cowboy
motif endures, rewarding further investigation with fables and yarns, skills
and traditions, all the more powerful in that they are depicted with earnest
rectitude, a bright foil to today’s pervading irony.
The myth was propagated by the country’s need for a
righteous symbol of its relentless push westward, then nurtured and sown abroad
by the showman W. F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody and artists Frederic Remington and
Charles Russell.
On a recent visit to Helena, the State Capital, we indulged ourselves in a couple of hours of deep cowboy in the Montana Historical Society museum. Here the haunting photographs of L.A. Huffman and Evelyn Cameron and the storytelling paintings of Charlie Russell are magnificent testimonies to these artists desire to document this landscape and people before the tide of inevitable change rolled over them. For Huffman and Cameron it is the sweep and scale of the scene, along with the dignity of the hounded indigenous people that is most evident: for Russell the humor and compassion in the small details of the interactions between men, women and animals in a harsh environment.
Cliché or not, these newcomers to Montana still can’t get enough of the cowboy
thing.
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