THE OUTFIT
The following appeared in the November 1996 edition of Western Horseman Magazine. This introduction will be included in a new edition of The Outfit soon to be published.
The Outfit was written in 1969 just after I finished a season gathering maverick cattle for a big outfit in Nevada. The people and animals on that outfit made this book.
Now, twenty-six years later, only me and the person who was called Maudy in the book and the men who ran the outfit's front office can still be called a merchantable remnant of that season. Old Dobie died of old age, God Bless him. Wilson died the way he did in the story as did old Tom. Gene Cunningham died of cancer in 1980. He suffered awfully for two years and left a beautiful example of courage and heart and never lost the style in his walk, never knew a shamble. Stacy put himself afoot and walked away into other jobs and none of us who survived that season ever heard from him again. Bonnie disappeared. Old Roller and all the rest of that remuda are dead and gone away in pieces out the back door of a slaughterhouse.
The outfit is still the same, though, and it will probably remain the same at least another thousand years. A few years ago a friend and I went back and spent several days visiting the country, wells and camps I wrote about in The Outfit. In less than a week we counted 1,300 mavericks. The place was still unfenced. We saw a lot of the same kind of big, roan cattle that were there when I was there. The cowboys were having the same trouble gathering Dobie's "runnygades." I came away happy. The place is still so lonesome the sun sets between headquarters and town.
After that season on the outfit, I did not think I would ever go back. I wrote the book called The Outfit to have a record of working that country. I had to write it because it was a dream country for any cowboy who loves his work and I knew I was not going back. The men who owned it did not have the same objectives for it as the creatures who made a living on it did. The men in the front office were going to use it the way they wanted without husbanding even one saddle horse and that was all there was to it. That was like seeing your sweetheart married to Hitler. You couldn't have her back, even if you wanted her.
I've always laughed when I heard people say cowboys are extinct. People will look a cowboy right in the eye and tell him cowboys are extinct. I ain't extinct and I know a lot of good cowboys my age and a lot of damned good young ones coming up. I would rather hire a cowboy who is over fifty, but so have all over fifty cattlemen for all time preferred to have steadier, more experienced men handling their cattle.
I knew the shoot'em up cowboys were all dead long before most people did. They killed themselves off in the big shootouts Hollywood staged over and over and over again. The Hollywoods tried to revive them with Boo Hoo Kiss Kiss The Cowboy Died movies, but those cowboys died with their hats on wrong, wearing trousers too short, still packing baby fat, and nobody cared.
After the Hollywoods stopped making westerns people got to thinking cowboys were extinct because they couldn't see them anymore, not realizing real cowboys still do their work partnering with the sun, at the pace of a saddle horse, way out where no one can see them. Cowpunchers don't have time for pictures and they don't have time to do themselves up between takes to please an audience. Tight as money is for cattle, they only have time to work while the sun is out and a little longer by lantern light before they drop, and they can't be caught standing still for pictures.
I've known five generations of cowboys and cattlemen in my own family in one spot in Southern Arizona. That doesn't count the generations I never got to know before them. They have never been threatened with extinction, only a poor beef market and bad gambles on the market, weather, bloodlines, poor help, and dry country. The ranches they lost, or worked until they died, are still being worked.
Thousands of cattle ranches in America's west, northwest, midwest, south, southwest, and even the southeast are producing cowboys. Cowboys and cattlemen will only become extinct when there is no country left in which they can go out horseback and help the bovine produce a cheap pound of beef. When the American people find themselves subscribing for their protein the way they subscribe to Newsweek magazine, they'll know there's not one cowboy left working to cheapen the cost of beef.
I started writing about cowboys, horses and cattle because nothing was being written about the work. Real cowboys have not endured in literature because they had too many writers like Zane Grey and not enough writers like Will James to write about them. They have survived in real life only because there is still work to do horseback with cattle. Media disinterest might kill myths, but not a cowboy's work.
I started writing about cowboys when I decided people should know the real animals, men, and women who make their living with horses and cattle and the artful lives they create for themselves with no audience, no background music, and no ticket sale. Even if cowboys do not need to be watched to survive in their work, people ought to be given a new concept of the cowboy if he is to survive in letters. That's why I called my second book, The Outfit: A Cowboy's Primer.
