reata, and horse. His life is — cattle; but those who think this life prosaic overlook the hidden romance, the lonely and tragic and humorous events of the round-up, the long trail-drive, or the night-watch.
Whenever the cowboy poet deserts the actual world, it is to dream of a cowboy heaven. (And, after all, was not just such an arbitrarily arranged heaven the basic fabric of Dante’s dream?) During the long night-watch, the cowboy looks up through the clear atmosphere to the star-besprinkled heavens and wonders about the Hereafter in terms amusingly translated from his daily occupation:
A maverick unbranded on high,
And get cut in the bunch with the “rusties”
When the boss of the riders goes by.
He carried the same terminology into his courtship songs, and indeed into all his songs, and thereby creates or perpetuates a new idiom. (In fact the cowboys have contributed a new idiom to our national speech. We never have a big party convention without certain headlines appearing: “Politicians ‘milling around’; leaders afraid of a ‘stampede.’”) About this idiom in his songs, the cowboy poet is far more exacting than about any question of rhyme or meter; and any departure from the correct vernacular or handling of the various leathers is at once detected as a mark of the tenderfoot poet.
The tradition is, then, intact in these cowboy songs, and we may accept them for what they are —
