Wyoming Almanac and History of Wyoming



Equality State or Cowboy State--and What About the Miners?: An Essay

By Phil Roberts

(Revised Version, 2014)



Over the past few decades, this Wyoming native has noticed a major change in the way we refer to our state.  The “Equality State” is the official nickname—recognizing the role the first territorial legislature had in decreeing that their new territory be the first in the nation to grant women equal rights, and extending that sentiment to include a broader equality of race, ethnicity, and class.  But, today, even though it is more generic and less specific to Wyoming, the nickname “Cowboy State” seems to have supplanted the earlier, official label.

Rather than emphasizing the equality aspirations set forth by the earliest Wyoming lawmakers, many seem to take greater comfort today in the nickname, “the Cowboy State.” And it probably should be no surprise. There is little satisfaction provided by the obvious contradictions in equality in theory and equality in fact. Even casual knowledge alerts the least observant that equality is hardly closer today than it was in the last century. At the same time, the enduring quality of the cowboy myth (not the cowboy reality) continues to resonate for those nostalgic for a time that never was.  

In politics, the cowboy myth has been used as a powerful symbol of rugged individualism, disdain for government, impatience with rules, and a certain feeling of inferiority. It is bolstered by clinging to the perceived virtues of utter loyalty to one's "master" and envy of the land-controlling absentee aristocracy.

The reality of the cowboy is an uncomfortable reminder that America (and Wyoming) always has had a class system. In the real-life economic scheme of things, the cowboy was at the bottom, the ultimate loser in the American game of using the weight of possessions as a measure of success. He was the hired itinerant worker whose only possessions were a horse, a saddle, a hat, chaps and boots. Few of these cowboys survived the waves of ranch consolidation, emphasis on machinery to do what physical labor once confronted and, in terms of their own livelihoods, increased opportunities for education, rural electricity, social security and the enforcement of labor standards and the minimum wage. If he didn’t become a rancher, the cowboy went into another occupation which often necessitated a move out of Wyoming to more urban areas of America. Maybe it isn't accidental that the real cowboys--the open-range variety--blown into myth and celebrated in the state's heritage—“the characters” as Pete Simpson calls them--were virtually extinct by the era of the New Deal.

As a contemporary measure of this collision between the cowboy myth and the cowboy reality, no one today aspires to the role of the real cowboy--seeking to make a living on the meager wages offered for distinctly unskilled labor. Real cowboy jobs in Wyoming go begging or get taken only by non-English speaking immigrants whose other labor options are almost entirely closed. To those celebrating the mythic cowboy, the real cowboy would be the subject of scorn, the product of an underachieving, underclass. Who with any ambition, after all, would aspire to a career as an itinerant laborer, working with cattle, facing the most precarious of futures fraught with economic hardship? 

The myth of the cowboy was in full swing by the early 20^th century, but for Wyoming, a place lagging the national trends, the celebration of the cowboy myth took on its greatest significance in the 1930s when the bronc rider took his permanent position on our license plate.  The last of the open-range cowboys, if any were left, celebrated their 80^th birthdays or older.  The hardships dimmed with years or media depictions modulated the worst of them into heroic obstacles that were overcome.

The mythic cowboy had become the mascot for the University of Wyoming. That adoption, in the late 19^th century, furthers my point. When an opposing team, a group of soldiers from Fort D. A. Russell in Cheyenne, played against a University of Wyoming team and suffered a humiliating loss, the opponents accused Wyoming of hiring a "ringer"—a cowboy, a paid itinerant, to bolster the team's strength. The accusation continued in later games, too. "They have a bunch of cowboys on that team," was the derisive charge, the meaning of course that Wyoming had a bunch of itinerant, lower-class, probably paid ruffians on the team who lacked the mental acuities expected of collegians.

Wyoming students seized on the symbol and the cowboy of myth took on yet another role. Many must have known full well that the cowboy of reality was what many of their fathers had known when they were their age. The fathers—or grandfathers—had overcome the hardship, and thus, had the means to send their children off to college so they would avoid a similar hard existence. University students embraced the symbol and, like most others in the era, refashioned it to conform to a more heroic mythology.

To one old-timer in Niobrara County many years ago, Wyoming and, indeed, the nation, was now celebrating the myth--redefining the very lifestyle he had worked a lifetime to overcome. "All that time I was a cowboy, I didn't know how romantic it was," he said, not pointing out that the educated classes of his youth, too, had failed to see the occupation as anything but lower-class, loathsome and indicative of a lack of ambition, if not total absence of a brain. It was an age when free land could be had through filing under a federal homestead act. Why would anyone remain an unskilled, floating, itinerant laborer unless he was lacking in ambition, ignorant, attempting to flee a criminal past, or just in love with work around livestock—animals that one didn’t even own?

Later, jobs for the poorly educated laborer in such areas as the oil industry, construction and urban-based manufacturing were becoming more lucrative, and if not unionized, at least made secure through workers compensation statutes and guarantees of income after retirement. What incentive was there for anyone to remain a low-paid, seasonal agricultural laborer?

But if changes in the economy and various forms of government regulation brought an end to the cowboy of reality, it served to rarify the cowboy myth of the rugged individualistic who disdained regulation, worked alone and in all kinds of weather to serve and protect the interests of his employer. While he might have done it for the love of the animals, that is difficult to see, given that he was protecting what would be steak and hamburger once it was shipped to faraway markets after roundup. (In fact, the Belden image of the cowboy carrying the calf across the saddle can have the alternate meaning of demonstrating the fragility of his economic station that even saving the life of a tiny calf might spell the difference of his employer’s making it or going broke in the cattle business).

 In the 1930s, re-creation of what the cowboy actually represented made its way into state politics. At first, politicians like Democrat Lester Hunt profited from the powerful symbol after he commissioned the "bucking horse" for the state's license plate when he served as secretary of state. But later, the newly fashioned image suited post-World War II conservatives who embraced the new mythical cowboy while their Democratic opponents inexplicably ceded the powerful symbol that Hunt used effectively for election to governor and the U. S. Senate. The conservatives, like movie-makers of the 1930s, carefully refashioned the image. As opponents of big government they adopted the mythical cowboys as symbols of resistance to any organized government. With their big business allies, they also repositioned the cowboy as someone utterly loyal to authority and totally devoted to "the man," not unlike how Southerners once were convinced that the slave mammies in the antebellum South so loved their employers. The cowboys demonstrated the love through unconditional loyalty, steadfastly guarding their individuality by accepting whatever wage the rancher would pay, and storing their bedrolls in bunkhouses regardless of such inconveniences as lack of heat, solid walls, or tight doorways, or vermin and snakes under the floorboards.  The mythology preached that by accepting those conditions, the cowboy was showing a fierce loyalty, a love for his boss and an acceptance of his inferior station in society.  It is in those respects that the myth of the lost cause and Southern slavery coincides with the myth of the Wyoming cowboy.

Celebrating the mythical cowboy, for some, may mean wanting to relive those mythic times when employees accepted with gratitude whatever they were given and worshipped the boss as a higher form of humankind. The message for today is unmistakable. Why can't that class of people be that way today?  And there should be more of them. Clearly, it must be the current corrupting culture, spurred on by government policies, that made them change and drove them into other endeavors. It was the minimum wage, unions, other alien forces, that make the current lower classes shiftless and lazy, disrespectful of their superiors and unwilling to accept the conditions their predecessors “thanked us” for providing. Why can't all employees be like the cowboys of the past with unquestioning loyalty in "riding for the brand"?

Curiously, the logo of the bucking horse on the Wyoming license plate was added just at the time that the open-range cowboys of the 19th century were fast disappearing. But, coincidentally, in that very decade, the Wyoming State Legislature designated "Wyoming Day" as Dec. 10th of every year.  It did not commemorate statehood (that happened on July 10, 1890), nor any particular cowboy-based celebration or incident. It honored the day in 1869 when territorial Governor John A. Campbell signed the Suffrage Bill, granting women the right to vote and hold office--for the first time in any government. 

The bucking horse logo reflects the nostalgia of a by-gone age.  With its complicated mythology, the cowboy image provides the state with a retrospective of where we believe we came from--regardless of whether or not it is accurate in any or all of its historical details.  The myths can provide inspiration, whether or not the story is absolutely correct. But whoever defines the image controls the debate. For instance, by looking at the image of the cowboy on the bucking horse in our famous logo, how does one know that the figure is not a person of color--or, for that matter--a man at all? To be truly representative of the cowboy of reality, there is a better than even chance he would be Native American, Latino, Black or an immigrant. Of course, that is not what many of the mythmakers would prefer.

On the other hand, our motto as the "Equality State" can be viewed as far more than retrospective pride in an isolated legislative act carried out for women in the first territorial legislature on the frontier. We can view it as much more broadly universal equality, defined by generations of Wyomingites who knew discrimination by race and ethnicity as much as by gender. Over time, it has become aspirational--it is more than the past that we commemorate by the term. It is a goal to which many of us believe that we, as a state, ought to be moving toward.

One must also consider the other tradition in Wyoming history. More people worked on the railroads and in mines in 19th century Wyoming than worked as cowboys on the open range. To this day, the state's economy remains reliant on mining, even more so than on agriculture. How did the miner lose out to the cowboy when it came to historical myth-making in Wyoming?

Perhaps it lies in the difference in historical experience. Unlike his contemporary cowboy who worked in more familiarity with his boss, miners worked under supervisors who, in turn, served absentee owners whose motives were never in doubt--higher profits regardless of the toll on human labor. Unlike the myth of the cowboy that grew in contradiction to the reality, the myth of the miner more closely parallels the facts. The story is a familiar and oft-repeated one about workers banding together to gain economic parity with an absentee soulless corporation bent on making profits and paying as little as possible for labor, safety and benefits to their employees. Despite newer technology and different methods of mining, present-day absentee mine owners still follow that path as they try to deregulate practically everything so that exploitation can extend even beyond the workers to the natural environment as well.

A few miners are still with us. Some lasted longer than cowboys--at least, early on--because they were more successful in organizing and gained greater protections from government as a result. (After all, the office of state mine inspector goes back to before statehood).            

Unlike the cowboys of reality, the miners made economic gains and wrung out assurances of safer working conditions. But those victories came at a high cost to the myth of the miner! No one yearned to return to those mythic times when non-English speaking workers were so desperate to live in America that they accepted jobs in the far interior in a place bereft of vegetation, besieged by bad weather, plagued by cave-ins, subject to loss of limb from unsafe equipment, and at the mercy of outside economic interests. Modern times were better. Who wanted to celebrate the myth of the miner who experienced working conditions so vile that mine disasters in Wyoming took hundreds of lives and brought thousands of life-shortening injuries and disease? 

What remains is one important element of the myth of the miner, that they were one big happy international family. Few want to acknowledge that the now-celebrated "diversity" was originally rooted in company policies seeking to divide labor by preying on their racial and ethnic differences. Among some opinion-leaders of Wyoming, there was little reason to exploit the myth of the miner--but fine to revere the industry itself. Even now, the politically powerful still worship the energy industry--again, not the workers, but the avaricious (usually absentee) corporate officials who seem to gain stature when they force company bankruptcy, rip off workers, and mock environmental and tax regulation. They are in the cult of the businessman, the new high priests of the era.

Miners may be declining in numbers, but there is still with us a laboring class, some of them immigrants, but mostly native-born Wyomingites. Often they display a lack of  "respect for the natural hierarchy" by voting for labor-friendly candidates, supporting institutions working toward equal opportunity, and actually embracing the need for government control over upper class ambition, over the big business tycoons who became even more emboldened when one of their number moved into the White House.

Ambivalence over immigration continues among many residents. (This, even though in every census in the territorial period and up to the 1920 count, the Wyoming population ranged from one-half to one-fifth being foreign born). Historians recognize that immigration always had racial components, but so, too, there were class components, even in such racist-tinged incidents as the Rock Springs massacre.

Some incidents seem to have escaped both race and class explanations. One is the Johnson County Invasion. Even in the 21st century, the "war/invasion" continues to suffer from misinterpretation and even misidentification of the parties. Wasn't it sheepmen v. cattlemen (false) or farmer v. rancher (false), or law-abiding citizen v. rustler (also false)? Even those who are descended from the small ranchers who were targets of the "invaders" seem not to understand the conflict as rooted a class-- between big operators and many of their former employees--ex-cowboys who were seeking escape from the itinerant lifestyle, now so celebrated in the myth of the cowboy, if not the reality of his actual condition in the open-range days on the frontier.  

The cowboy well knew that when conditions were difficult on the range--in bad weather, in stampedes, in confrontations with rustlers--he needed to count on his fellow cowboys for help.  Regardless of their race or ethnicity, they became a part of his community. While stories are told of ugly racial incidents in cattle country in the 19th century, there are even more stories of men judging their companions on their honesty, integrity, steadfastness--men who would "watch your back." And the race or ethnic background was entirely irrelevant in a time and place where the individual character was the supreme judge of a man's worth. One can argue that the reality of the cowboy--an individual who was forced to cope as best he could with the economic circumstances he found himself in--did believe strongly in the concept of equality. That is not to say that cowboys were innocent of racism or gender bias. After all, they reflected the mores of their generation and the attitudes of their times, at least in the abstract. (There is the famous story of the newly-arrived British ranch owner who met a cowboy on his ranch just as he was riding onto the operation. He introduced himself and announced that he was the owner of the ranch--the man's "lord."  The cowboy shot back, "That man ain't been born yet.") 

But one must view this individualism in perspective. The cowboy's worth was not measured by his own ambitions as much as by how well he cooperated with the others in his "community"--his co-workers and those who relied on his character for their very lives. "Equality" meant that each person was measured without regard to color or creed.  Character came with the person--not from what group he may come from. Respect for the boss came when it was earned and demonstrated. If the boss didn't earn that respect, the cowboy simply moved on. In those instances, the boss might have had a superior economic position, but to the cowboy, he was the one who was distinctly unequal--indeed, inferior and not worthy of respect.

Recasting "cowboys" in the context of individualism, defiance of government regulation and disregard for community has many contemporary advocates who, conveniently, don't allow themselves to become bogged down by the history and facts about the real cowboys. They have the power to redefine the cowboy myth and convince their gullible readers/listeners who haven't had the opportunity of reading the real history. These are the people who wield the power to redefine the cowboy myth--the radio talk-show host, the glib politician, the entrepreneur, the computer billionaire, the corporate CEO, the major shareholders in the huge multinational chain stores and fast-food franchises. In the course of making millions in salaries and stock options for themselves, they disparage reform or pare down the labor force and shift jobs offshore where labor is cheaper while mouthing the "myth of the cowboy" to justify their actions. 

Every generation gets to redefine the mythology and choose the new exemplars of the myth. Given what happened to open-range cowboys in the last century, what role will be played by pieceworkers in the computer industry, Wal-Mart “associates,” fast-food workers, and low-paid tourism service workers? Will they gain the respectability that miners won in the last century? Or, like the cowboy, will they be replaced by automation, cheaper imported labor or innovation?  And what part will the itinerant “temps” in all these various sectors have in the nation's mythology?  Will they become the 22^nd century version of the American cowboy?  And, by then, how might that extinct species be used nostalgically to excuse inequality, chastise the unworthy, justify exploitation, and forgive unearned privilege for another generation?

It is time to either accept the historical facts of the cowboy life, use the lessons to aspire toward the mythical, simple virtues, or recognize that the myth is only the nostalgic dream of those wanting to excuse their own privileged station.

The challenge for all Wyomingites is to continue to work toward the equality bound up in the state's official nickname of the “Equality State." By that reference, we aspire to a more equal society, not just recognizing the need for equal economic opportunity and social justice, but by working together to further those goals for the benefit of everyone.

Let's keep the “bucking horse” license plate. It provides not only retrospective on where we have been, but where we wish to be in the future. Knowing that it is advertising  a mythical past, still it can serve to remind us of our aspirations for equality—the same aspirations of those represented by that figure who sought nothing more than escape from the uncertainties and hazards of the open-range cowboy life.

Wyomingites frequently debate whether the state ought to be emphasizing the official nickname, "The Equality State," or the recent popular nickname, "The Cowboy State." This essay is the eighth written by this historian since 1990 when he first began teaching Wyoming history at the University of Wyoming. Another version was written specially for Dr. Pete Simpson's class on Wyoming's "political identity" a few years ago when the author was asked to speak to the class about Wyoming's conflicted history with its symbols. Another version contrasted the two nicknames in the context of the "Wyoming quarter," where the "bucking horse" shared the "open space" on the face of the coin with the logo, "The Equality State." This version is a hybrid incorporating various of the themes, resulting in a somewhat rambling essay on the topic.  --Phil Roberts, 2017