Analyzing Primary Sources ActivityName: ______

Settling the West, 1865-1890

US History

Two Accounts of Life on the Open Range
Background
The cowboy has long captured the imagination of Americans, and his story has been celebrated in books and movies. Cowboys were rugged individualists. With little more than a gun, a horse, and a rope, each carved out a life on the open range, rounding up cattle and driving them to the railroads that would take them east.
The life of the cowboy has often been romanticized—the chiseled hero riding his horse into the sunset after having vanquished the bad guys and saved the young woman in distress. However, as the following excerpts attest, that is not the whole story of life on the open range.
Directions:In this first excerpt, Nat (pronounced “Nate”) Love offers his take on life in cattle country. Read Nat’s account, and then answer the questions that follow.
Primary Source Reading
Some men I met in the cattle country are now known to the world as the baddest of bad men, yet I have seen these men perform deeds of valor, self sacrifice and kindness that would cause the deeds recorded as performed by gentlemen in “ye olden time when knighthood was in flower” to look insignificant in comparison, and yet these men lay no claim to the title of gentlemen. They were just plain men.
Others who are equally famous but in another way are the James brothers, Jesse and Frank. I met them often in the old days on the range, and became very well acquainted with them and many others of their band. Their names are recorded in history as the most famous robbers of the new world, but to us cowboys of the cattle country who knew them well, they were true men, brave, kind, generous and considerate, and while they were robbers and bandits, yet what they took from the rich they gave to the poor. The James brothers band stole thousands of dollars; yet Jesse was a poor man when he fell a victim to the bullet of a cowardly, traitorous assassin, and Frank James is a poor man today. What then did they do with the thousands they stole? The answer is simple, they gave it away to those who were in need. That is why they had so many friends and the officers of the law found it so hard to capture them.
—fromThe Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as “Deadwood Dick,”by Nat Love, 1907
Critical Thinking
  1. Why do you think Love is so insistent that criminals like the James brothers, as legend would have it, were “just plain men”?
  1. Love’s story of the James brothers echoes a well-known British tale. What do you think it is and why?
  1. How has Love romanticized the West?
  1. What do you notice about the kind of language Nat Love uses in his writing?

Making Comparisons
Life on the open range was not always as Nat Love pictured it. In the following excerpt from a memoir by E. C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott, a much different picture emerges. Read the excerpt and then answer the questions that follow.
Primary Source Reading
Those first trail outfits in the seventies were sure tough. It was a new business and had to develop. Work oxen were used instead of horses to pull the wagon, and if one played out, they could rope a steer and yoke him up. They had very little grub and they usually ran out of that and lived off of straight beef. They had only three or four horses to the man, mostly with sore backs, because the old-time saddle ate both ways, the horse’s back and the cowboy’s pistol pocket. They had no tents, no tarps and damn few slickers. They never kicked, because those boys was raised under just the same conditions as there was on the trail—corn meal and bacon for grub, dirt floors in the houses and no luxuries. In the early days in Texas, in the sixties, when they gathered their cattle, they used to pack what they needed on a horse and go out for weeks on a cow hunt they called it then. That was before the name roundup was invented, and before they had anything so civilized as mess wagons. And I say, that is the way those first trail hands were raised. Take her as she comes and like it. They used to brag that they could go anyplace a cow could and a stand anything a horse could. It was their life.
—fromWe Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher,by E. C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott, 1939
Critical Thinking
  1. What picture of life on the open range emerges in Abbott’s memoir?
  1. What does Abbott mean when he says, “It was a new business and had to develop”?
  1. Do you think Nat Love experienced life on the open range as Abbott did? Explain.
  1. Which account do you think is closer to the actual experience of life on the open range? Why?