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Author challenges myths about theBY Charles Salter Jr.The News and ObserverRALEIGH (AP) — The cowboy in Richard W. Slatta ismomentarily hiding.He wears glasses that befit a college professor, along with white socks and black Reeboks. No six-shooter or soft-leather saddle for him. And something about his lair — an office at N.C. State University with rows and rows of books and a glowing computer — says this is the last place to find a cowboy. It smells more like a library than a camp fire.Then the gregarious fellow dons a Stetson and everything changes.With his wide-brimmed gray hat angled just so, Slatta — all 6-feet-2-inches of him — sits tall in a swivel chair at his desk, looking every bit the cowboy professor that he is. In his latest book, “Cowboys of the Americas’’ (Yale University Press), he blazes a new trail in a gritty comparison of cowboy cultures that challenges the mythology of the Wild West hero.“I reject this notion of the uniqueness of American history,” says Slatta. “I want to show readers that there have been lots of other cowboys and frontier experiences.”Among them are the Canadian rancher, Argentine gaucho, Chilean huaso, Venezuelan llanero, Hawaiian panioto and Mexican vaquero,“Basically the vaquero either taught the American cowboy everything he knew or the cowboy learned from watching him,” saysSlatta.The book, admits its author, isbound to turn some historians against him, like a posse after an outlaw. Since his comparative study is the first of its kind, he expects it will be heavily scrutinized. But he’s ready for trouble. A specialist in Latin American studies and a North Dakota native, he is confident that once again his aim is true.That was the case with his 1983 book, “Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier.” At first, he says people asked, ‘How could a gringo possibly write about gauchos?’ But favorable reviews from Argentine historians silencedthe criticism.Well, if anyone identifies with cowboys, Richard Slatta does. The cowboy in him has taken different forms over the years. In his youth, he was a long-haired free spirit who hopped on a motorcycle and roared through life without a care.These days, the balding 43-year-old is a history professor who long ago gave up bikes and can’t ride a horse without feeling it for days. When he narrated a segment on cowboys for a PBS documentary, he rode for five miles of a 30-mile cattle drive. “It about killed me,”he says.He’s more comfortable in the role of professor, which he approaches with the vigor of acowboy. For him, research is the wide open and unexplored frontier, where acquiring documents can be as hard as rounding up wildhorses.That’s especially true with new social history, which attempts to fill in gaps left by previous historians.“It’s an interesting historical problem, because you’re after different kinds of sources than if you were researching a president or a king,” Slatta says. “LatinAmerican cowboys were virtuallyilliterate, so you don’t have anyfirsthand written accounts.”He traveled to Venezuela to comb through whatever 19th-century material he could find on llaneros, the cowboys who had to survive the severe weather of thetropical plains, torrid temperatures in the dry season and tremendous floods in the rainy season. When he got to the regional archives, he discovered it was often the documents themselves that didn’t survive. If floods didn’t get them, insects did.“In tropical areas, you’ll be reading along and turn the page only to find half of it eaten away by bugs, he says. “It’s worse in the frontier areas, because a lot ofarchives literally floated down the river. It’s lost history.”Not every country posed such problems. In Canada, he gathered in five weeks material that would have taken six months to a year to find in Latin America.In the end, he found that behind the mythology of the heroic cowboy as a rugged, trustworthy and polite figure (always tipping his hat to women) was a wanderer short on cash and class. The cowboy was hardly an environmentalist.“Ranchers thought the land was inexhaustible,” says Slatta. “They had a slash-and-burn mentality.”Contrary to the depiction of cowboys in popular culture in this and Latin American countries, he wasn’t always white, either.“In Argentine mythology, the gaucho is white, which is totally erroneous,” he says. “But when you get a new national hero in a racist time, he becomes white.”Another bit of lore depicts the frontier as an egalitarian legion, when in fact it wasn’t. The class structure was based on land ownership, and cowboys werelandless men who foundthemselves at the bottom.“From the outside, they certainly look oppressed, going months without a job when the season changes, and some cowboys felt oppressed,” says Slatta. “But 1 found a large number of cowboys who loved the way of life. They weren’t tied down, and they enjoyed t he freedom.“I hope maybe people will take the cowboy a little more seriously as a result of what I consider a serious academic work. This is nota retelling of history. It just raisesthe ante.”
Newspaper Details
New Bern Sun Journal
New Bern, North Carolina, US
Sun, Dec 23, 1990
Page 17
Full Page
Clipped by
North C.
NC, USA 28 May 2020
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