Word: cowboying
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...Henry Blanton's Texas, abuse and affection are two sides of the same paternalism that cowboys and their rancher bosses have always traded in. It is the style the world got a look at in the carrot-and-stick politics of Lyndon B. Johnson. Henry Blanton is an alias for the 40-year-old cowpuncher whom Kramer selected to sit for her portrait of yet another vanishing American. Although he is foreman on a 90,000-acre Panhandle ranch, Blanton is entering his middle age with a hatful of failed promise and a headful of bourbon. "He moved." writes...
...watches westerns: "Henry, deep in his bedroll, shoring up courage against the river's dead, called on John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Glenn Ford. Especially Glenn Ford. He was convinced then that for 'expressin' right,' as he put it, there had never been a cowboy to equal Glenn Ford...
Blanton is knowing in the uses of loneliness. He suffers pain and disappointment without the crutch of self-pity There are always whisky and opportunities to commit mayhem in the name of cowboy justice. When a cow in Blanton's charge is gang-raped by three bulls from a neighboring ranch, Henry and his boys fall on them with castrating knives. But when Blanton's boss breaks a promise that could lead to a measure of financial independence, Henry submits in proud silence...
Jane Kramer, who originally wrote The Last Cowboy for serialization in The New Yorker, sets Henry and Betsy Blanton in a determinist context of history, geography and economics. Her sympathetic sketches of modern cowboy life are framed by facts - about beef consumption (Americans ate 27 billion lbs. of it in one year), ranching technology, federal meat-grading standards and the quirks in Texas law. Cattlemen, for example, don't have to fence their animals in. Farmers who want to protect their crops have to fence cattle out. Kramer achieves the intended effect: to show the American cowboy riding...
...Seems to me a man's handshake ought to be enough. My Granddaddy Abel never signed no contract. My granddaddy always said a man's word should be his contract, and that's what I do believe, and that's what any cowboy believes, and'-he took a long drink-'that's how I'm going to live...