We were slowly cruising Highland Drive on a recent sunny morning, going past Swaner and all that big, open space, and listening to Joshua Ray Walker, one of the talented Country performers who emerged in the last few years. We almost said “alt-country,” because there’s a need to distinguish someone like Walker from the musicians on Country hit radio who are forever singing about trucks and painted-on jeans — not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. Possibly the greatest slant couplet in the history of recorded music — “That ain’t my perfume/I bet she had a curfew” — occurs in an otherwise forgettable hit Country song in 2011. Still, performers like Walker, and Orville Peck, the semi-masked singer who rivals Roy Orbison, and Charley Crockett are our Country & Western ideals these days. And if you want outlaw Country, what can ever surpass Steve Earle’s “F the CC“?
So there we were, driving in Utah, listening to “Cowboy,” by Walker, a pale mountain of a Texan who has the twang and sometimes wears the hat, and thinking about cowboys and outlaws. That led us right to Butch Cassidy, that Utahn, born in Beaver in the Territory in 1866, into a “welter of hatred, violence, fear and stupidity,” says one biographer.
Cassidy was a first-generation American, son of Mormon immigrants from England. He was birthed when the transcontinental railroad was new and rapidly erasing the age of cattle drives, and cowboys along with them. Cassidy just couldn’t fit in the West until he started robbing banks and trains — and not even then. One of the more charming and modern things about him is that when he was on the run, between robberies, he wrote letters to the newspapers complaining about their coverage of him. It also seems to be a matter of record that on at least one occasion, when Cassidy and the Wild Bunch wore masks to rob a train, they were not bandanas. They were napkins they’d stolen from a Harvey House, the nation’s first chain restaurant, which was begun along Western rail lines in 1878. It was a like robbing a car dealership in Ronald McDonald disguises.
These cowboys outlaws were never operating in the mythical West of wide-open spaces where a white man could slip the bonds of wage labor because it never existed. “That cowboy crap gets old fast,” writes Charles Leerhsen in his Cassidy biography “The True Story of An American Outlaw.” “Most of the trusting souls who followed the false advertising out West after the Civil War … struggled to feed even their own families.”
When the Wild Bunch weren’t working on a holdup, which could take weeks, they were working months as ranch hands, for lowly pay on big spreads that were typically controlled by capital from back East or Europe. For them, robbing banks was a futile way to try to escape the equivalent of factory life.
The late English historian Eric Hobsbawm was also clear in his views of the Old West. Its traditions were invented, he wrote in 2013, to feed the myth: “Who, after all, cares that the total number of deaths by gunshot in all the major cattle towns put together between 1870 and 1885 – in Wichita plus Abilene plus Dodge City plus Ellsworth – was 45, or an average of 1.5 per cattle-trading season, or that local Western newspapers were not filled with stories about bar-room fights, but about property values and business opportunities?”
In Britain, Hobsbawm explained, the word “cowboy” had taken on a different meaning at some point after the 1960s. “… a fellow who comes in from nowhere offering a service, such as to repair your roof, but who doesn’t know what he’s doing or doesn’t care except about ripping you off: a ‘cowboy plumber’ or a ‘cowboy bricklayer.’ … In this version, what a man’s got to do is to fleece us and disappear into the sunset.”
The American cowboy myth, Hobsbawm believed, was derived from the anarchism of American capitalism, and the ideal of an individual uncontrolled by state authority. “In many ways the 19th-century U.S. was a stateless society,” he wrote. “Compare the myths of the American and the Canadian west: … one is … of a Hobbesian state of nature mitigated only by individual and collective self-help: licensed or unlicensed gunmen, posses of vigilantes and occasional cavalry charges. The other is the myth of the imposition of government and public order as symbolized by the uniforms of the Canadian version of the horseman-hero, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”
If there was one Country & Western artist who perfectly braided the American myths of the cowboy and the outlaw, it was Merle Haggard, a child of the California oil patch who, like Cassidy and everyone else in that line, tried and failed to make it as a robber. Yet Haggard held on to his anarchist dreams. We were driving into Montana from the east one morning a few years back when his “Big City” came on the radio. There was such power in hearing these lines outside Glendive, in the spring sun, under a yawning sky:
Turn me loose, set me free
Somewhere in the middle of Montana
And give me all I’ve got coming to me
And keep your retirement
And your so-called Social Security
Big city turn me loose and set me free.
It was so powerful that we forgot to wonder what was going to become of the speaker in the real American West, with no retirement and no Social Security — but we guess in that mythical West, no ever one gets old, either.