In this path-breaking work, Allmendinger looks past the colorful cowboy of pulp fiction and film to investigate the equally colorful world that actual cowboys constructed for themselves. By assessing the workaday world of the cowboy with a mixture of exhaustive scholarly knowledge and intellectual brio, he reveals a set of sustaining myths to the stories, songs, and poems that cowboys themselves have written--myths by which they instilled their otherwise menial work with transcendent meaning and urgency. Branding read as skin grammar; livestock castration as a masculinizing activity; square dancing as intense moral drama; the lonesome cowboy as labor's ideal: these and other provocative insights emerge from this wonderfully innovative study--a study that not only gives us the cowboy as a serious cultural and laboring figure, but provides an interdisciplinary model in its combination of folklore, history, popular culture, and literary analysis.

In this path-breaking work, Allmendinger looks past the colorful cowboy of pulp fiction and film to investigate the equally colorful world that actual cowboys constructed for themselves. By assessing the workaday world of the cowboy with a mixture of exhaustive scholarly knowledge and intellectual brio, he reveals a set of sustaining myths to the stories, songs, and poems that cowboys themselves have written--myths by which they instilled their otherwise menial work with transcendent meaning and urgency. Branding read as skin grammar; livestock castration as a masculinizing activity; square dancing as intense moral drama; the lonesome cowboy as labor's ideal: these and other provocative insights emerge from this wonderfully innovative study--a study that not only gives us the cowboy as a serious cultural and laboring figure, but provides an interdisciplinary model in its combination of folklore, history, popular culture, and literary analysis.

In this path-breaking work, Allmendinger looks past the colorful cowboy of pulp fiction and film to investigate the equally colorful world that actual cowboys constructed for themselves. By assessing the workaday world of the cowboy with a mixture of exhaustive scholarly knowledge and intellectual brio, he reveals a set of sustaining myths to the stories, songs, and poems that cowboys themselves have written--myths by which they instilled their otherwise menial work with transcendent meaning and urgency. Branding read as skin grammar; livestock castration as a masculinizing activity; square dancing as intense moral drama; the lonesome cowboy as labor's ideal: these and other provocative insights emerge from this wonderfully innovative study--a study that not only gives us the cowboy as a serious cultural and laboring figure, but provides an interdisciplinary model in its combination of folklore, history, popular culture, and literary analysis.