Free Response: Cowboys

Cowboys today are known as free, independent men that would ride around the west on their horses and would fight, and usually beat, the Indians whenever they came across them. In reality, this is not true. Cowboys were low-paid workers that would watch the cows all day. This job was not something that a person would usually be proud of. Cowboys also were not the ones to get into bar fights to impress women, basically if a women knew you were a cowboy then your chances were over. Cowboys also ran away from the Indians. Cowboys were only interested in watching the cows and that was it. No part of them wanted to get into with an Indian. If and when they saw an Indian they would run, and if they got caught by the Indians their reaction was not to fight them, it was to play dead and hopefully they would go away.

People think that they know everything about the history of the west just because they seen a movie with a cowboy in it. The west was not the same as the way it was portrayed in the movies and Buffalo Bill shows. One thing that was different was really the only people that fought the Indians were the United States army. Random cowboys would not go out and take out a whole community of Indians with a couple buddies, that just never happened.  Another thing that the movies are very good at is making the West look like a desert. Some parts of the west were desert but not all of it. The west also included mountains and forests. Some movies with cowboys in them get some things right, but a lot of it is staged and made up to picture the west as something it is not.

 Reasons why cowboys got their image of being courageous and independent was mainly because of the Buffalo Bill shows that were shown all throughout the United States. In his shows he would have bar fights and the cowboys fighting Indians. Later his shows inspired movies and shows that came out, which all of them influenced the way people saw cowboys, and that is why people have such a wrong vision of the west. Both movies and the Buffalo Bill shows were guilty of giving off the false impression of cowboys and everything that came with them.