Top Shelf Ink

This article in appeared in The Horseman magazine, January, 2009

Country music sings his praises. His life inspires an entire genre of books, and his star still rises in various interpretations on the big screen. Women love him and little boys want to be him. He has his own style, an easy, relaxed self-assuredness that says, “I’m here. I’ll take care of it, no matter how bad it is or how long it takes.” He worships his Creator in the cathedral of the open range or perhaps in churches named for his lifestyle and heritage. I see him in Starbucks, black Stetson shoved low on his brow, spurs jingling while he taps his foot and orders a double shot espresso latte. He sat by me a few years ago at my daughter’s choir concert, and I hoped his spur would not poke me in the leg when he propped his foot on his knee. He lives the urban life we all live, but has never cut the umbilical cord to the heritage that birthed him. He is the cowboy, and he, together with his trusty sidekick the working horse, has romanced America for more than 150 years.

But long before he became an icon, the cowboy was just another hard-working dogie-chaser, who gritted out a dollar-a-day-plus-beans-and-coffee subsistence. Sometimes, he didn’t get the dollar-a-day. Take for instance the story of Frank Allee. Born in Denton County, North Texas on December 28, 1872, he was the oldest of several children. When he was 11, his father died, leaving him in the care of his stepmother. With the family farm failing, winter coming on, and his stepmother afraid of watching her children starve, Allee was encouraged to leave home and find work further south where it was warm. The story goes, as told by Allee’s son Bob in his latter years, that the frightened boy struck out, walking south as he had been instructed, and finally ending up on a ranch south and west of San Antonio. The rancher hired him to wrangle the ranch remuda for room-and-board. As Allee matured and showed horsemanship skills, the ranch hands taught him to rope and ride, and by his early teens, the youngster was riding herd on the ranch with the other cowboys. Before long, Allee was asked to help take the herds over The Great Western Trail, the western branch of the Chisholm Trail, to the railheads of Dodge City and Abilene, Kansas. Within a few short years, he had gone from barefoot, destitute Texas farm boy to capable cowhand, riding and roping, traveling the trail, guarding against stampede and rustlers.  That first herd he drove to Kansas numbered 600 head. It took four months of moving at the herd’s pace of about five miles per day, sleeping on the hard ground at night with his saddle for a pillow, eating biscuits and beans, beans and biscuits over and over, but the trip was successful and reportedly not a single head was lost. Laying his head on his saddle at night, surrounded by the lowing of steers and stamping of horse hooves while gazing at the star-studded western plains’ sky was a heady adventure for a young boy. Somewhere between South Texas and the Kansas plains, as the herd slowly snaked its way up The Great Western Trail, a passion snaked its way into Allee’s blood, and he was hooked.

After only a few years of making the drive, Allee decided it was time to establish his own herd. He had grown fond of the area in Roger Mills County, Oklahoma that today is Elk City. It was a place of stirrup-tall grass and plentiful springs back then. The Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, Kiowa-Apache and Comanche had control of much of the land through the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, and Allee had enough money for steers, but not land and steers. So the enterprising cowboy made a deal with the Cheyenne to pasture 600 head on their land. The tribe agreed. That spring, Allee drove his own herd to the Kansas rail yards for the first time. This Cinderella story doesn’t end with a castle, but it does end with Allee purchasing land that he later sold to the Townsite Land Company, which formed the town of Elk City, Oklahoma. He was then able to move his wife and first child from the one-room dugout he had built to a wood-frame house on his new ranch property located on the Washita River, the early site of the still prominent, family-owned A-Cross Ranch, a brand highly regarded in Western Oklahoma.

Allee’s story is only one among hundreds of young men who rode up the trail from Texas to Kansas, following the longhorns to market. Each of them has their own drama, their own lonely spirit, but collectively, they have come to be known as the symbol of the West. Even in their own day, city people, who perhaps longed for a freer, less hectic life, were falling in love with the cowboys. On December 17, 1872, 11 days before Frank Allee was born, Buffalo Bill Cody introduced the forerunner of his Wild West Show to the city of Chicago. He garnered a mixed review, but drew enough of an audience that he was encouraged to take the show on the road. The next year, he and Texas Jack Omohundro invited Wild Bill Hickok to join the show. By the late 19th Century, Buffalo Bill had refined the coarse tobacco-spitting, rough-talking cowboy into the Victorian-mannered, hat-tipping gentleman we recognize today. In 1887, the Wild West Show, featuring talented young cowboys and cowgirls who could ride, rope, shoot and do tricks in the saddle, was invited to England for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebration. At the urging of Mark Twain, Wild Bill crossed the “pond” with 121 steerage and saloon passengers, 97 Indians, 180 horses, 18 buffalo, 10 elk, 5 Texas steers, 4 donkeys, and 2 deer. His camp became a gathering place for the nobility of England, including the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII), and various members of parliament, as well as the prime minister.  The prince was so taken with the performance he viewed, that he asked his mother, Queen Victoria, to attend a show. A command performance was given, and an American cowboy was able to do what no one else had done, draw the queen to make her first public appearance since the death of her husband 25 years before. Critics loved the show, and it was credited with improving British/American relations.

The cowboys and cowgirls of Buffalo Bill’s show were so popular that in 1889 the troupe returned to Europe, this time performing at the Universal Exposition in Paris. Ten thousand people attended the opening performance to witness the cowboys reenact how the West was won. The troupe stayed on tour in Europe for three years, braving oversold arenas, influenza and small pox. When they returned home, the idea of the American cowboy was firmly implanted in the imaginations of thousands of Europeans for generations to come.

By 1910, Buffalo Bill’s show was drawing to a close. His stage manager had died and Annie Oakley, who paved the way for women to enter the rodeo arena, retired due to injuries she sustained in a train accident.  But Broncho Billy Anderson was already holding hands with Americans at the movies. Between 1907 and 1916, he made 146 short, silent western movies. The first cowboy movie star, he pioneered the genre that would next bring Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and eventually John Wayne into the hearts and homes of America. And of course, what is a cowboy without his faithful horse? The Roy Rogers/Dale Evans Museum gets 200,000 visitors a year in Branson, Mo. According to the museum director, Roy Rogers, Jr., most come to see Trigger, Roger’s dead horse. “We close at five and stop selling tickets at 4:30,” he said. “But people come after that and beg to get in for a few minutes. They drove 3,000 miles just to see Trigger. We let them in—and they go away, happy.”

Today, movies like Lonesome Dove, loosely based on the Goodnight/Loving cattle trail, and more recently 3:10 to Yuma prove that in the more than 150 years since he first came on the scene, the love affair between the cowboy and his lifelong sweetheart, America, has not diminished in ardor. The sold out crowds attending the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas, Nev. attest to it. But so do the Sunday afternoon play day crowds and the junior rodeo kids who work out with their mounts every day before and after school. The cowboys in the Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, along with the Cowgirls in their respective Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, call to a new generation of free spirits. Get on your horse. Ride the range. Cowboy up.