To 25 Reasons to Be a Cowboy | #16: The Books
“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them; to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”– Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay was not a cowboy. He was an English writer, politician, and historian in the 19th century. But his idea of what makes books special hits home for any subject.
I think of a couple of books on my shelves: We Pointed Them North by Teddy Blue Abbott and The Son by Philipp Meyer.
In the first, I am able to converse with the dead. More than that, I can ride with the big herds going from Texas to Kansas before fences. I can head off stampedes and cross icy rivers without my pony falling or getting a cold. What’s more, I learn what that time was really like. Abbott was no historical revisionist, and some of the romance of cowboying fades with his stories—some is ignited anew.
On the other hand, with a book like The Son, I get to live amongst the unreal. The imagination of a historical fiction writer can take the reader places that never existed—but could have—and are often based on real-life events.
There are dozens of Western authors who have captured the reality and romance of the West. Larry McMurtry, Elmer Kelton, J. Frank Dobie, J. Evetts Haley, J.W.W. Williams, Fay Ward, Jo Mora, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas McGuane, and others.
The West in general and the cowboy, in particular, provide such a fertile field for storytelling that it’s no wonder there are some classics from the genre. Even authors that teeter on the edge of authenticity like Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey add to the appeal of the genre.
Further, just the idea that the life of a cowboy could inspire such a canon is something in which actual cowboys should feel honor. But living life with some sort of pride in the romance of your career is shallow. To truly dig in and appreciate the life of a cowboy is to know it from all angles—including the literary angle.
Mark Twain might have summed up this thought best: “The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can’t.”
No matter what kind of book you like, fiction, historical non-fiction, or instructional, the cowboy is the subject of them all. Read ‘em.