Those Cowless Cowboys (1921) 🇺🇸

Pictures are so educational, aren’t they? You know, I always used to think in my artless Japanese way that cowboys really were on speaking terms with cows — that they were a bunch of hard-working guys that got up early in the morning, worked hard all day at cow-punching, and played cards at night for relaxation, drinking liquor, if any. But now I know differently. Cowboys probably wouldn’t know a bossy if they met one in the lane. Cowboys never work. They don’t have time. The hero keeps ‘em too busy.

by Grace Kingsley

And how sympathetic and interested they always are in the hero’s affairs! We wish sometimes when we are in trouble and things go wrong with us that we had a flock of sympathetic folks as devoted and helpful to us as that gang of cowboys always is to the hero. Take a William Russell picture I saw not long ago, for instance; when the boss of a mining engineer refused to give the hero more salary, the cowboys tied him up, gagged and bound him, and made him come through. Snappy service, I’ll say!

But when the hero’s girl gets lost or kidnaped — oh, boy! That’s when the cowboys have a chance to show the stuff they are made of. They never seem to have a girl of their own. They couldn’t! They’re too busy looking after the hero’s girl, for she has a natural genius for getting into trouble. And even if a cowboy gets him a girl, in a dance hall — or some place like that — it always turns out she’s really the hero’s girl, and he has to give her back to him. That’s how it was in a recent Tom Mix picture. Even after the cowboy had rescued Tom’s girl from a burning building, he never even got to hold her hand. Yes’r, heroism, not work, is the cowboy’s life job. I saw a bunch of cowboys at a round-up of cattle, all fitted up with lariats and things, in a Bill Farnum picture the other day, and I thought to myself, they really are going to work this time. Next minute, though, along came the hero and told the boys his girl had been stolen and his bank robbed, and — whoopee! off they rode. Those cows could go jump in the kike for all they cared. That ranch owner could just go whistle for his cattle. I wondered why he kept on paying the cowboys, but he did, judging from their handsome carved saddles and sombreros. Probably he was afraid of them.

But I will say for those cowboys they’re a clever bunch when they get to sleuthing. If ever I lose a mine or a relative, I won’t employ a detective. I’ll get a bunch of cowboys to trail the criminal. They’re so careless about where they go a-horseback, for one thing. They prefer tops of mountains in the sunset glow, for pictorial effect; but you will remember that when duty called the cow chaperons in one of Mix’s late pictures, the boys never hesitated — they rode right into a lady’s boudoir, and from there onto the stage of a theater. Attaboy!

When it is Mix or William Farnum or Duncan [William Duncan] or Hart or Carey, the hero himself is a cowboy. I’m not talking about the king-pin cowboys, but about the common or garden variety that hunts in packs and takes care of him. He’s such a reckless guy, that cowboy hero. I don’t know what would become of him if it weren’t for his faithful henchmen.

Why, that cowboy pack never seems to need food or sleep. They never seem to get their natural rest, at least in bed. Sometimes the hero lets ‘em drop down all exhausted on the ground with their boots on, after days of hard riding, as I saw in a William S. Hart picture the other day. But a cowboy gang never does know when it’s going to get its sleep out, because the hero does take the most ungodly times to find out that somebody has stolen his mine or that he has mislaid his girl. And as for food — away with it! The cowboys will start out on long trips across the desert in the hero’s cause without a bite to eat. I don’t know what keeps ‘em Up. Maybe their sense of duty well performed. Water they seem to take along in just sufficient supply so that one of their number can give his away and die nobly with his head on the hairy chest of Spike Robinson, who has a mother and five little sisters — pardner — and who doesn’t’ forget any of the family census, either, when he’s telling about it.

Cowboys, we learn from pictures, are natural ascetics. They never have any wives. And this is the more surprising as their paternal instinct is simply astonishing. Oh, how cowboys do love little children! I saw a Harry Carey picture not long ago, in which Carey had a perfect passion for adopting stray brats and bringing them up to charm the whole camp with their sweet, childish tricks, such as yelling out in the middle of the night and letting the Indians know where they were. One of the sweet little things drank up the supply of water when they reached the middle of the desert, playfully spilling in the hot sands what he didn’t drink. In real life these artless pranks might annoy a cowboy, but not on the screen. Carey just looked on with a fatuous smile and then went out and paged another kid to adopt.

Cowboys in pictures have three accomplishments. They can ride horseback, they can roll cigarettes with one hand, lighting matches with their thumb nails, and they can’ play the accordion — or the guitar. That accordion playing is one of the things that reconciles us to the silent drama being silent.

But, after all, picture cowboys have their rewards. Theirs is a free, workless, wild life. They don’t have to associate with the rich relatives of the hero who live in the great mansion on the hill with iron lions on the front lawn and a general look inside as if it had been furnished with trading stamps. They don’t have to be buttled by a film butler; they don’t have to wear b’iled shirts; they don’t have to meet screen vampires on tiger skins; and last, but not least, they don’t have to get tied up for life to the rag-doll heroine.

Another compensation a cowboy has: He can kill, whenever so minded, and the law never does a thing about it. He can kill a wifebeater or a story-telling drummer or a prohibitionist, and still keep on having his health.

Finally the noble fellow dies with his boots on, after giving that-ar hell-hound what wuz coming to him, surrounded by all his reverent fellow cowboys with their hats in their hands and with the sun going down over yon hill. They take up his guns reverently — kind, good guns, that never done no harm to nobody that was on the squar’, pardner — never killed more’n ten men. Burying him under the cactus he loved and cussed so well, they inscribe above the noble fellow’s grave:

“Here lies our pal, the killer of eight;

He mighta got more, but now it’s too late.”

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, April 1921