Today’s consideration of fine old jokes takes us to the wild west, and the garment known as chaps. The word is short for chaparreras, which American cowboys shortened to chaps, at first pronounced shaps. They apparently start appearing in tales of the west in the 1830s, and were intended to keep a cowboy’s legsContinue reading “I See By Your Outfit”
Tag Archives: cowboys
Oh, a Cowboy Needs a….
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 ofContinue reading “Oh, a Cowboy Needs a….”
Hearts On the Plains
The romance of the Old West was established well before the West had gotten that old. Bill Nye, writing for the Boomerang in Cheyenne in the 1880s, liked to point out the difference between the West as it was lived and the West as people in the East liked to think of it. TheContinue reading “Hearts On the Plains”
Blogsy Babbles 