Cowboys Portrayed

    John Wayne was a popular American icon that was known for his role as a cowboy. Therefore Hollywood gave the public a perfect life of a cowboy, presenting him as a hero, the one who gets the girls, and the most respected person in town. But as Erwin E. Smith began to take pictures that documented the real life of a cowboy. Unfortunately, many people do believe this stories of the Wild West. The realities of the Cowboy life were full of managing cattle, living off land, and physical labor that would have physical and emotional impact on the cowboys. After all, Hollywood blocks out the many realities and impacts that Cowboys in the 1800's went through.

    Cowboys had to fulfill into a job because they had to leave their families to hopefully have a better life for themselves in the West. Many times cowboys had to befriend others to be successful in the job. Cowboys would be be in despair if they didn't befriend anybody at all. The spent most of the day working at the ranch, roping the horses, wrangling the cattle, and cooking dinner. They would have to listen to the Boss's instructions and from their begin there day. They would go to the deserts to ride in the range. Afterwords they would rope an outlaw steer, they would sometimes take hours to rope around horses and get them together. Cowboys would also have to train horses as part of their job. It was difficult for the cowboys to calm down the horses, because the horses don't like being touched by strangers. Many of these cowboys took many risks in their daily life. And cowboys began to be seen as an important travel transport because it would help them travel immense distances and it obviously helped out in the ranch. Having to endure the many hot desert days in the pants and long sleeve shirts made the factors that the cowboys faced more challenging then ever. The life of a cowboy was not clean, easy, or comfortable at all. They were subject to disease, lack of education, and there was no clear clean water.

        Many of Smith's photograph show the evident difficulty of being a cowboy. That came to be the emotional stress and how it impacted their life. In the movies they exaggerate on how heroic the cowboy is and how unhealthy the condition of a cowboy is. Loneliness is depressing and none of the cowboys wanted to go through but in the many hardships that they faced in the ranch, they began to stress. And so they began to have many issues in their life. It was really not an easy job. Dealing with wounds, Indian attacks, cattle stampedes, and the fear of revenge kicked in as the cowboys became more stressed. Not only did Hollywood portray cowboys differently, the struggles and realities that the cowboys faced everyday were even more challenging.

Image Source:
http://www.cartermuseum.org/collections/smith/collection.php?asn=LC-S6-197&mcat=5