The Western’s popularity rises and falls, but has not gone away for at least a century and a half. The last big era for postcards coincided with an era that valued Westerns highly: they were still popular in cheap, kid-friendly movies (“oaters”), proliferated across radio (“Return with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear”), and were about to explode all over television (thanks to William “Hopalong Cassidy” Boyd’s perceptive investment in his own movies.)
During this decade, as in others, there were actual cowboys paying attention to all these phenomena. And one or two voices were always ready to rise and complain “That ain’t the way it was, by Ned!” The makers of mass-market westerns would respond that they were making mass entertainment, not trying to bring out the most historically accurate views of the Old West.
But postcards go back a couple of generations prior to the mid-century adoration of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, the Lone Ranger, Red Ryder, Lash LaRue, etc. So perhaps we can get a more accurate look at what the cowboy looked like. The hat, especially, was an important part of the mythos.
The problem is that the general myths go back even farther than that. In the late nineteenth century, writers like Bill Nye were complaining that cheap magazines had given the folks back East a picture of the cowboy that was romantic, adventurous, and hopelessly inaccurate. (Bill Nye claimed that the average cowboy, given a handgun, was more likely to shoot his own foot than anything else.) This postcard is a hundred and twenty years old, and looks…like a cowboy from the cover of a paperback romance. MAYBE some outfits expected their cowboys to shave every day, but how did he get to be a cowboy without any sign of a tan? (Some sage Native shaman selling an ancient potion called SPF-66?)
There ARE some postcards in inventory which show off drawings by Charles Russell, the great cowboy-turned-painter, so we can see what the nineteenth century cowboy looked like (perhaps modified by memory or the market? This chap also looks rather clean-shaven and pale-faced. Or am I just recycling someone else’s mythical construct of the stubbled cowboy with leathery hide?)
But however far away from reality, we can at least get some truth-adjacent observations on the cowboy’s hat. This cowpuncher’s hat seems a little small, but perhaps in a situation like…I forget what I was going to say.
The brim seems to be the most important part of the hat anyhow, to keep the sun off…yes, I know what I said about tans, but only a very few cowboys, mostly on television, wore hats broad enough to shade their arms.
Another part of the cowboy wardrobe that can be observed in both early and late postcards of the Wild West are chaps, those protective leggings you may have observed various cowpokes wearing in earlier parts of this column.
Their popularity on postcards, though, is due to another sort of joke which also goes well back before the mid-nineteenth century. She does have the right hat, though, and that’s what counts. (It doesn’t seem big enough to prevent a third degree suntan. Zorro never had to deal with these things.)
Blogsy Babbles 