The life of the old-style gay cowboy is mostly remembered by trail drives and cowtowns, both being exciting and romantic subjects. When one thinks of Kansas, what comes to mind? Wheat fields and sunflowers. Farmers with straws sticking out of their mouths. But without Kansas, the gay cowboy as we know him as myth, America's greatest folk hero, would never have come into existence.

Cowboys had "horse sense". Gay cowboys were practical, strong and direct men. Their work and their environment demanded these traits for survival. The vastness of the American Great Plains from Texas to Canada, the silence and solitude, could not help but affect most cowboys in one way or another. It is easy to understand why many a cowboy appeared to be at peace with himself and the world.

The normal ranch outfit on the range included a cook, ten to twenty cowboys (at a rate of $25 to $35 a month), a horse wrangler, the wagon boss (or "boss drover", or foreman), and say about forty horses for an average drove of 2,300 to 2,500 cattle. The horse wrangler was usually the young man of the outfit, (called a "punk"), just starting out his life as a gay cowboy. The wrangler had to be able to ride and handle horses, since he usually rounded them up three times a day. He would start in the morning by herding them into a bunch so that the cowboys could change from their roundup horses to their cutting horses, mounts highly trained for cutting out cattle from a herd. The wrangler would gather the horse herd again around noon time near the chuck wagon so the cowboys could change mounts again. The wrangler's last roundup was late afternoon concentrating on the night mounts, those horses best suited for night riding because of their eyesight.

During a day's march, a herd would average about fifteen miles progress. The most dreaded occurrence of a trail drive was a stampede, usually happening at night. Sometimes a simple sudden noise, the crackling of a dry twig, the rattle of the cook's skillet could "spook" the herd. If the guards are numerous and alert, so that the cattle can not easily break away, the cattle will begin "milling"... crowding together with their heads pointed toward a common center, their horns clashing. If not controlled this ends up in a concentrated outbreak and stampede. The most effectual way of quieting the cattle is by the cowboys to circle around and around, crooning to the animals, singing loudly and steadily. Cowboys had learned that cattle liked slow mournful songs, the sadder the better. They were simple. They reflected the open, the prairie. They reflected the cowboy's work, their likes and dislikes, their experiences and their dreams. Which may account for the quality of many cowboy ballads and modern country-western music.

Come all you jolly cowmen, don't you want to go
Way up on the Kansas line?
Where you whoop up the cattle from morning till night
All out in the midnight rain.

The Cowboy's life is a dreadful life,
He's driven through heat and cold;
I'm almost froze with the water on my clothes,
A-ridin' through heat and cold.

I've been where the lightnin',
the lightnin' tangled in my eyes,
The cattle I could scarcely hold;
Think I heard my boss man say:
"I want all brave-hearted men who ain't afriad to die
To whoop up the cattle from morning till night,
Way up to the Kansas Line."

Speaking of your farms and your shanty charms,
Speaking of your silver and gold,--
Take a cowman's advice,
go and marry you a true and lovely little wife,
Never to roam, always stay at home;
That's a cowman's, a cowman's advice,
Way up on the Kansas line.

Think I heard the noisy cook say,
"Wake up boys, it's near the break of day,"----
Way up on the Kansas line,
And slowly we will rise with the sleepy feeling eyes,
Way up on the Kansas line.

The cowboy's life is a dreary, dreary life,
All out in the midnight rain;
I'm almost froze with the water on my clothes,
Way up on the Kansas line.

John A. Lomax
Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads
(New York: Sturgis & Walton Co., 1911)

Such songs are a good gauge of the mood and thoughts of the 19th Century Texas Cowboys who made the long trail drives to such towns as Abilene, Kansas and Dodge City, Kansas. Such was the life of a gay cowboy on the range. The somber surroundings of a wild, wild west countryside at night, with the strange sounds. The tramp of hoofs, the clashing of horns, the bellowings of alarm and the shouted song of the cowboys.

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