nge, it was the pony of the
American cowboy which squatted and wheeled under the spur and burst down
the straggling street of the little frontier town. Before that time, and
since that time, it was and has been the same pony and the same man who
have traveled the range, guarding and guiding the wild herds, from the
romantic to the commonplace days of the West.

Chapter IV. The Cowboy

The Great West, vast and rude, brought forth men also vast and rude. We
pass today over parts of that matchless region, and we see the red hills
and ragged mountain-fronts cut and crushed into huge indefinite shapes,
to which even a small imagination may give a human or more than human
form. It would almost seem that the same great hand which chiseled out
these monumental forms had also laid its fingers upon the people of this
region and fashioned them rude and ironlike, in harmony with the stern
faces set about them.

Of all the babes of that primeval mother, the West, the cowboy was
perhaps her dearest because he was her last. Some of her children lived
for centuries; this one for not a triple decade before he began to
be old. What was really the life of this child of the wild region of
America, and what were the conditions of the experience that bore him,
can never be fully known by those who have not seen the West with wide
eyes--for the cowboy was simply a part of the West. He who does not
understand the one can never understand the other.

If we care truly to see the cowboy as he was and seek to give our wish
the dignity of a real purpose, we should study him in connection with
his surroundings and in relation to his work. Then we shall see him not
as a curiosity but as a product--not as an eccentric driver of horned
cattle but as a man suited to his times.

Large tracts of that domain where once the cowboy reigned supreme have
been turned into farms by the irrigator's ditch or by the dry-farmer's
plan. The farmer in overalls is in many instances his own stockman
today. On the ranges of Arizona, Wyoming, and Texas and parts of Nevada
we may find the cowboy, it is true, even today: but he is no longer the
Homeric figure that once dominated the plains. In what we say as to
his trade, therefore, or his fashion in the practice of it, we speak
in terms of thirty or forty years ago, when wire was unknown, when the
round-up still was necessary, and the cowboy's life was indeed that of
the open.

By the costume we may often know t