Cowboy

Cowboy, name given during the Revolution to lawless marauders who pillaged neutral territory and were supposedly favorable to the English. Those who favored the rebels were known as Skinners. Both figure in fiction about the Revolutionary War, particularly Cooper's The Spy. The term “cowboy” has since been applied, particularly in the West, to cattle herders, and there are distinctive cowboy ballads and tall tales. Popular romancing about the cowboy dates back to dime novels and other pulp fiction beginning in the 1870s, preceding infrequent realistic reminiscences like A Texas Cowboy (1885) by Charles Siringo. Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) became the classic handling of the type, far surpassing in popularity the literary works of writers who had more experience of cowboy life, such as Andy Adams's The Log of a Cowboy (1903) and E.M. Rhodes's Good Men and True (1910). The mythology of the masculine and heroic cowboy has been continued in a large body of fiction from the time of Clarence E. Mulford (Hopalong Cassidy, 1910), Zane Grey (Riders of the Purple Sage, 1912), and Max Brand (Destry Rides Again, 1930) to modern paperback publications of Louis L'Amour. The works of these authors and others in their vein have been further popularized in numerous film versions by stars who have included William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and John Wayne. Cowboys have also been the subject of television programs.