Cows and Romance
What on earth do cows have to do with Romance? If you look on the cover of my latest
novel, Fool for Love, you’ll see a
beautiful picture of cows in a pasture along with a handsome couple. It’s a pretty, pastoral scene, but
cows? Not exactly romantic, eh?
Actually, cows have played a major role in one of the most
famous and romanticized professions of the Old West, the cowboy. Romance novels abound with
cowboys. What could be more
romantic than a rugged young man living his life on the open range, embracing
freedom and independence, complete with well-formed muscles, deeply tanned
skin, and a dazzling smile that would melt the heart of any heroine. There is a whole mythos surrounding the
cowboy that tickles our fancy.
The hero of Fool for
Love, Eric Quinlan, was a cowboy.
He’s got everything your classic cowboy could want: good looks, an
independent spirit, and a love for the outdoors and his cattle that lead him
into some pretty dicey situations.
And the hat. Eric
definitely has the hat. But wait a
minute, didn’t I just say he was a
cowboy? What happened? Isn’t he still roaming the open ranch,
rustling cattle and driving them to market?
Well, the story is set in 1896. As Eric mentions to one of the other characters, he used to
participate in long cattle drives in his youth, but the days of the open range
are long over. Yep, Eric is a
cowboy at the end of the Age of Cowboys.
But how exactly did the Age of Cowboys start and why did it end?
When the American West opened to settlers beginning in the
late 1840s it was – to the white man’s eyes – a vast, open land full of wild
country, perfect for grazing. This
was before the territory was organized into states. It was the perfect place to raise livestock with which to
feed the growing population back east.
Entrepreneurial ranchers from Texas to Montana saw the opportunity and
jumped on it. They brought herds
of all sorts of cattle out west to grow, fatten, and reproduce.
These herds would roam the untamed land, the open
range. They would be marked by
their owners and rounded up when the time was right by cowboys. It was the cowboy’s job to gather their
boss’s cattle and to drive them to one of the few railheads for transportation
back east. It was a business that
was as lucrative as mining.
Granted, the ethics of the practice could be questioned as the land
wasn’t really “free and open”, but rather the ancestral territory of the Native
Americans. But for the purposes of
this post, I won’t open that can of worms. (But boy will it be opened with the
next book in my Montana Romance series, In
Your Arms!)
But as I mentioned, by the time Eric Quinlan is facing the
struggles to keep his ranch in Fool for
Love, by the 1890s, the era of the open range was over. There was no more need to let cattle
roam freely and then have them driven to railheads by cowboys. By the 1890s that way of thinking was
obsolete.
A few factors led to the end of the Age of Cowboys. As the railroad expanded, there were
more railheads at which cattle could be loaded onto trains and transported
east, or even west to California.
With the railroad so close by, there was no need for the long cattle
drives that cowboys had traditionally overseen. At the same time, the once unorganized territory of the west
was being divided, administrated, and granted statehood. Montana itself became a state in
1889. With more and more of the
land being owned by states or individuals, what was once free grazing for
cattle became trespassing.
But the biggest change that ended the open range was a
revolutionary little invention in the 1880s that we take for granted: barbed
wire. Yes, a few little twists of
metal brought about the end of cowboys.
Barbed wire was cheap and easy to produce and erect. It made it possible for ranch owners to
enclose their territory and mark it apart from the territory of their
neighbors. Suddenly cattle no longer wandered indiscriminately on the untamed
land. Now they lived and graze in
carefully marked areas belonging to their owner.
Granted, cowboys didn’t disappear. What a travesty that would have been! Instead they became as enclosed as the
cattle they looked after. Like
Eric, they became ranch owners, concentrating their efforts on their own herds
on their own land. Or else they
became the men who worked for industrious ranchers like Eric. But life wasn’t always easy and ranches
weren’t always secure, as Eric finds out in Fool
for Love. But I’ll leave you
to read about that yourself.
Links to Merry Farmer:
Social Networking links:
Website: http://merryfarmer.net
Twitter: @merryfarmer20
Facebook: www.facebook.com/merryfarmerauthor
Amazon Page: http://www.amazon.com/Merry-Farmer/e/B006RATLFC/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1366067537&sr=8-2-ent
Book links:
The Loyal Heart
Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005R4K75W
Amazon UK - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005R4K75W
Smashwords - https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/92993
The Faithful Heart
Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006PUDD44
Amazon UK - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B006PUDD44
Smashwords - https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/117240
The Courageous Heart
Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009Z1AATQ
Amazon UK - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B009Z1AATQ
Welcome to CK, Merry! I'm always amazed that the culture of the cowboy was strong for only about 40 years, but wow, did he ever rope us in! There's still open range in the county where I'm from, Owyhee (in Idaho), and yes, there are still cowboys--but now they all have iPhones and ATVs. Still have the hats and chaps, though. :)
ReplyDeleteWelcome to Cowboy Kisses. I've already seen your appearance here tweeted several times by my tribemates on Triberr. Tomorrow, I'll be able to tell you how many views you got here. We usually average a couple hundred a day, but very few take the time to comment. I hope the promo is positive for your great works.
ReplyDeleteMerry, welcome to Cowboy Kisses. Your books sound wonderful, so now I have a new-to-me author whose books I'll add to my TBR on Kindle.
ReplyDeleteWelcome to our campfire, Merry! Nice to see you here. Cows and their cowboy wranglers are such a huge part of our American psyche. It's hard to imagine what we'd be without that colorful period in our history. What would we gals do without our western heroes?
ReplyDelete