We pass today over parts of that matchless region, and we
see the red hills and ragged mountain-fronts cut and crushed into
huge indefinite shapes, to which even a small imagination may
give a human or more than human form. It would almost seem that
the same great hand which chiseled out these monumental forms had
also laid its fingers upon the people of this region and
fashioned them rude and ironlike, in harmony with the stern faces
set about them.
Of all the babes of that primeval mother, the West, the cowboy
was perhaps her dearest because he was her last. Some of her
children lived for centuries; this one for not a triple decade
before he began to be old. What was really the life of this child
of the wild region of America, and what were the conditions of
the experience that bore him, can never be fully known by those
who have not seen the West with wide eyes--for the cowboy was
simply a part of the West. He who does not understand the one can
never understand the other.
If we care truly to see the cowboy as he was and seek to give our
wish the dignity of a real purpose, we should study him in
connection with his surroundings and in relation to his work.
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