You all are of course familiar with my grievances with western fiction as a genre but I Do think it's kind of funny how "cowboy" has gone from describing a profession to essentially any guy in a hat on a horse. Cowboy is a state of mind at this point. If you want to be a purist he's a cowboy if he's a cattle rancher and if he's like, robbing a train, that's an outlaw. Two different guys. But who gives a shit
"cowboy" used to be some random mexican guy doing basically the 1800s equivalent of long-haul trucking and then people were like "okay but what if he's actually white and also a Cop" as if usamerican history isn't absolutely SWIMMING in types of guys who are just "White Guy Hurts Minorities For Fun And Profit"
I see your point about western fiction being extremely whitewashed but I cannot stress enough that cowboys very much did hunt minorities for fun and profit in real life
*author's note this is my mutual don't tear elijah limb from limb please this is just a peeve of mine and I don't want this version of the post going around
that's fair, i didn't mean to imply that cowboys weren't still an arm of manifest destiny, even if they were a significantly less privileged arm than most people think. my point was less of "cowboys were good guys because they weren't actually cops" and more "it's weird how people think cowboys are cool when they were random working class guys doing a really demanding and dangerous and usually not-glorious and unfulfilling job for minimal pay". cowboys definitely hurt people, but recreationally rather than professionally, they weren't organized and it usually wasn't their primary objective, which doesn't make it less damaging but it is why it's odd to me that people latch onto them when the entire history of the united states is full of guys who were specifically paid to kill minorities, but i do see how it ended up looking like i meant to excuse them of their actions. honestly i forget that other people aren't historians and despondently resigned to the fact that history is disappointing because everyone is treating each other terribly. most of the history of the united states falls into one of two categories, which are either "white people killing minorities for fun and profit" or "minorities killing each other for fun and profit without realizing they're in the crab bucket" and every story is people being ingroup-y and shortsighted and ruled by fear and history is horrible. the lack of a pervasive power structure in the wild west gave minorities the ability to hunt each other in a way they didn't normally have the privilege of, and the whole thing is a crab bucket of absurd proportions, so i lose track of the fact that the shittiness of it all is NOT as obvious or well-known to most people as it is for me. for me, i find the idea of the historical reality of the cowboy interesting BECAUSE it's a really stark example of disenfranchised people trying to wield power in any way they can, striking out at the only people below them on the power structure, which is why i get frustrated by the mythologized cowboy boiling the complexity of it down to "superman with a texas accent". i sometimes forget that most people go into learning history with the mindset of someone reading a book or watching a movie, attempting to find someone to root for, trying to contextualize victims as "good guys" instead of real, fallible people who inevitably fucked some things up. this response is super long because i have a LOT of thoughts on the intersection between history, narrative, and bias, but i'm trying to keep it from being even longer because tumblr is not a meeting with a thesis advisor and social media is not an environment that fosters the nuance that this topic needs
