This isn't a scene from the past or from a Hollywood set; its an annual event to celebrate the culture of the West and those who won it. Every May at the bottom of Persimmon Hill in Oklahoma City, the Chuck Wagon Gathering provides visitors a chance to sample cowboy cooking, immerse themselves in cowboy culture, and try their hand at cowboy crafts like rope-making and leather stamping. While much of the event is geared toward the little buckaroos, the limitless free samples of stew, beans, sourdough biscuits, cornbread (which cowboys did NOT eat, as one rancher informed me), peach cobbler, and bread pudding are enough to entice even the slickest of city slickers. All of the food is authentically prepared in large dutch ovens and cauldrons. There's even a cooking demonstration, complete with a couple of plump, microphone-wearing frontier women to show you how to get your cabbage patch stew just right and how to properly clean your dutch oven. And, in case you were wondering, yes, they do have a cookbook for sale (the latest in their three part series on cowboy cooking).
The food alone is worth the trip, but the entire event, while not terribly large or extravagant, stirs more than just the stomach. I was treated to a flood of memories from the Westerns that I so loved as a kid, the way most American males experience cowboy culture in their youth. I was reminded of scenes from Young Guns, Tombstone, and Wyatt Earp - those were my favorites (sorry John Wayne). I remembered playing fort with my cap gun pistols, pretending my bike was really my trusted horse, and visiting the ghost town in Calico, CA. Perhaps I liked cowboys just because I grew up around horses until I was 8 years old, or because my father still thinks that he's a cowboy, but its hard to imagine the life of an American male child without cowboys. The western genre may be losing ground to the likes of Pokemon and Star Wars (which has been described as a space western), but the Hollywood image of the cowboy has undoubtedly left an indelible mark on American culture.
Up the hill, surrounded by a colorful garden sits the gargantuan National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. If the National Mall in Washington, D.C. was in a pinch and needed a new Smithsonian Museum, they could probably plop this one down and it'd do the trick. Dramatic and over-sized sculptures abound and local square dancing groups perform in the lobby. There are several art galleries filled with romantic images of American frontier life, including paintings by Albert Bierstadt and sculptures by Frederick Remington. There's a mini frontier town, called Prosperity Junction, that aims to recreate the ambiance of a turn-of-the-century railroad town just after dusk. There are excellently constructed galleries of cowboys in film, the history and development of the American cowboy, and the importance of the rodeo. One can also peruse an impressive collection of guns from the late 19th century, a Native American showcase, and a frontier hunting exhibit. If cowboy culture were a religion, this would most certainly be its Vatican.
While the museum certainly indulges in romanticized images of cowboy life, it also depicts much of the grueling and monotonous work from both the past and the present. Cowboys were and continue to be hired help, a kind of specialized shepherd. They have to castrate calves and chase down stray cattle in freezing blizzards. They have to spray the herd with special medical solutions to prevent parasite infestations and spend long hours under the unforgiving sun. As one quote from the museum put it, "this ain't inside work." Which leads me to wonder, why all the glamor? Why has the cowboy become the iconic symbol of masculine American identity, much like the Medieval knight is to Europe, and the Samurai is to Japan? The image is so powerful that several Presidents (Roosevelt, Reagan, and Bush II, off the top of my head) have tried to incorporate the image of the cowboy into their own political identity. Much as in stories of knights and samurai, cowboy stories from Hollywood and literature are morality tales at their core.
Every culture has its myths that communicate and preserve its values, usually through a tale that follows the arc of the "Hero's Journey," as described by the late Dr. Joseph Campbell. Great myths are almost always stories of an individual's journey and the personal growth that occurs along the way. While in reality cowboys rarely got into scuffles with Native Americans or had to chase down evil bandits to rescue honorable ladies, their lonely lives on a dangerous frontier had the makings of an archetypal adventure onto which a young and growing nation could project its ideals of individual morality. Other defining national events such as the Civil War were fraught with divisive sentiments, and the West had always been a kind of release valve for the nation's tensions (Frederick Jackson Turner's classic thesis). For a society so focused on westward expansion, the long cattle drives of the late 19th century formed the perfect setting for a national myth (as opposed to the environment of continual political struggle which defined feudal Europe and Japan).
While the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum cherishes the substance and spirit of the old West, the enduring and idealized image of the cowboy is not preserved in authentically prepared peach cobbler or in highly decorative leather saddles. The cowboy life isn't so much the embodiment of our national culture as it is a vessel for us to communicate our social values. Some ardent aficionados of cowboy culture might want to believe otherwise, but as the Outlaw Josey Wales put it, "That's just the way it is."
