iven the world. He
exists still and will long exist, though much changed from the original.
His fame derives from the past.

Romance, both genuine and spurious, has obscured the realities of range
and trail. The realities themselves have, however, been such that few
riders really belonging to the range wished to lead any other existence.
Only by force of circumstances have they changed "the grass beneath and
the sky above" for a more settled, more confining, and more materially
remunerative way of life. Some of the old-time cowboys were little more
adaptable to change than the Plains Indians; few were less reluctant
to plow or work in houses. Heaven in their dreams was a range better
watered than the one they knew, with grass never stricken by drought,
plenty of fat cattle, the best horses and comrades of their experience,
more of women than they talked about in public, and nothing at all of
golden streets, golden harps, angel wings, and thrones; it was a mere
extension, somewhat improved, of the present. Bankers, manufacturers,
merchants, and mechanics seldom so idealize their own occupations; they
work fifty weeks a year to go free the other two.

For every hired man on horseback there have been hundreds of plowmen in
America, and tens of millions of acres of rangelands have been plowed
under, but who can cite a single autobiography of a laborer in the
fields of cotton, of corn, of wheat? Or do coal miners, steelmongers,
workers in oil refineries, factory hands of any kind of factory,
the employees of chain stores and department stores ever write
autobiographies? Many scores of autobiographies have been written by
range men, perhaps half of them by cowboys who never became owners at
all. A high percentage of the autobiographies are in pamphlet form; many
that were written have not been published. The trail drivers of open
range days, nearly all dead now, felt the urge to record experiences
more strongly than their successors. They realized that they had been a
part of an epic life.

The fact that the hired man on horseback has been as good a man as the
owner and, on the average, has been a more spirited and eager man
than the hand on foot may afford some explanation of the validity and
vitality of his chroniclings, no matter how crude they be. On the other
hand, the fact that the rich owner and the college-educated aspirant to
be a cowboy soon learned, if they stayed on the range, that _a man's
a man for a' that_ m