Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries by David Dary

Abstract

Reviews 373 this “precious land, their Future, their shot at a Real Start, their commit­ ment to a Time, to a Place, and to a Way of Life.” However, with characteristic lack of scruple, foresight, or insight, Joe has chosen an immoral means to accomplish these moral ends. He expects to sell five pounds of uncut cocaine to make the $60,000 needed to buy the land. Yet, as the morality plays unfailingly point out, corrupt means not only produce destruction, but compound the evil. In a comic-ironic vein, most of the novel explores the ramifications of Joe’s corrupt decision, as he plunges ever more deeply into the degradations of sex and violence. Joe’s greed for ill-gotten gains hastens his metamorphosis from a cheer­ fully monogamous family man to an inept sexual stud. During the novel’s six-day span, he returns again and again to a parody of domestic sex with a monkey-w'orshipping divorcee, punctuated by two unsatisfactory interludes in a tent with a sexy classics scholar, and some kinky and brutal encounters with a visiting New York journalist. Every time Joe goes home to try to make amends, things get worse. Conversations, civilly begun, degenerate into strings of obscenities and often end in physical battles. The machinations of getting instant, illicit riches corrupt Joe’s human relationships absolutely, as he suspects his wife and partners of double-crossing him, and they engage in other forms of betrayal, including threats on his life. He in turn betrays them all. Yet this increasingly barren landscape is populated by a comical cast of candidates for Fellini’s Satyricon, including Nick Danger, a sinister shyster toting a secret suitcase of inflatable pornographic dolls; and Rimpoche, the omnipresent dog who collapses “in a sort of Uriah heap.” Nichols’s cautionary tale makes us yearn for heroes, saviors of the land, preservers of stability, natural beauty, integrity of human relationships. But only Eloy Irribarren responds, and his aged shoulders are too frail to bear this burden, as we head full-tilt toward the once golden land, now paved over and strewn with the “transient, unrealized tatters of our dreams.” LYNN Z. BLOOM Virginia Commonwealth University Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries. By David Dary. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1981. 384 pages, $17.95.) Cowboy Culture has numerous virtues: broad scope, beginning in 1494 when Columbus landed the first horses and cattle in the Americas; steady dependence on primary sources, especially the heretofore underutilized news­ papers of 1850-1900; a ten-page “Bibliography for the General Reader,” with handy division into thirteen categories; extensive notes that supplement the bibliography as guides to further reading; a clear, uncluttered style; 374 Western American Literature nearly a hundred well-chosen, useful illustrations; lively illustrative anec­ dotes, often with the hide, hooves, and horns intact. Finally, Cowboy Cul­ ture is handsomely-designed, printed, and bound, as one always expects with books published by Knopf. Despite its many strengths, though, Cowboy Culture has several flaws worthy of comment. Although his book is notable for its basis on primary sources, Dary unaccountably ignores completely Joseph Nimmo’s Range and Cattle Traffic (1885), one of the so-called “Big Four” cattle industry classic sources (with McCoy, Cox, and Freeman). At the other extreme, he seems unaware of the work of three modern academic scholars, all relevant to his study: Sandra L. Myres’s on Hispanic influences on cattlehandling practices, Terry Jordan’s on the colonial Carolinas’ influence on Texas cattlehandling practices, and Don Walker’s on the factual flaws in such so-called “scrip­ tural” primary sources as Hunter’s The Trail Drivers of Texas (which Dary often cites). Readers of this journal will want to know that Dary pays scant atten­ tion to western literature other than to decry its contribution to false images of the cowboy. Further, he is inaccurate in asserting the full integration of cowboys into popular literature by the 1870s; here Daryl Jones’s The Dime Novel Western (1978) is an overlooked recent study. In fact, the fictional cowboy hero first appeared late in the decade, when Captain Dick led a cattle drive to Ellis, Kansas, in Thomas...