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Background Knowledge

    1. Cowboy: A cowboy is a hired man, especially in the western United States, who tends cattle and performs many of his duties on horseback. The American cowboy, who was the product of the opening up of the vast central plains of the U.S. after the Civil War, has become a legendary folk hero, celebrated in many films and novels. The sometimes mournful cowboy songs are also very popular in the United States.

    In areas such as Texas in the early 1800’s, the American settlers took over the Spanish practice of using the plains for grazing cattle. At the same time they borrowed from the Spanish cattle herders their typical equipment such as the broad-brimmed hat, the bandanna ([bAn5dAnE] 大领巾) worn around the neck, the high-heeled riding boots and the leather chaps ([tFAps] [美]牧人穿的皮护腿套裤) to protect the legs.

    The cowboy was really created by the ‘long drive’. As the frontier moved westward after the Civil War and the Plains Indians were driven off the open lands, cowboys began to drive large herds of cattle every year from the southern plains to the new railheads in the north central plains. By the 1800’s and 1890’s the settlement of the central plains and their enclosure with barbed wire put an end to the long drive, but the cowboy continued to be employed in ranch work.

    The modern cowboy is more likely to be equipped with a walkie-talkie and a jeep, but the romantic, legendary figure of the cowboy —a tough, silent, independent, hard-working man who leads a lonely life battling the bad weather — has also persisted, thanks to the ‘western’ films and to the popular novels.

    2. Westerns: There is a genre of literature called “Westerns”. A Western is a story about the early west in America during the period of the cowboys. This period began around 1860, right after the Civil War between the Northern and Southern States.

    Most of the popular Western novels sold today are fictional tales about the life of ranchers and the cowboys who worked for them. These stories involve wars between competing ranchers, stories of crooked gamblers, wild women, romance, and exciting “shoot outs” between the good and the bad cowboys. The special name for “bad” cowboys is “outlaw”. They broke the laws of the land and thus lived “outside” the law.

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Summary of the text

    This text presents us one aspect of the life cowboys lived — getting the cows from ranges to the market. The journey was long and dangerous: cows might fall sick and die; the weather was bad and changeable; Indians sometimes attacked; and the greatest danger was that the cows might stampede and cowboys would be hurt or even killed if such a thing took place. So the cowboys lived a very hard life on the journey. When railways were built, they took the place of cowboys. They took the cowherd to the market very quickly, and saved the cowboys a long, insecure traveling to town.

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