On Finding Reality

I was browsing through the Buffalo Bill museum in Cody one warm summer afternoon a few years ago, enjoying myself, looking over the relics of days long passed and now seemingly improbable. Like so many museum things, they did not seem real any longer, they seemed like artifacts that had never been used. Then over on a wall I saw something that caught my eye; it was a silhouette of a cowpuncher astride his horse, looking over the range. Just a cowpuncher, in black and white, looking over his own familiar country. Most people coming through gave it no more than an occasional glance, spent much more time with the saddles and spurs and Indian relics than bothering with a silhouette of some obscure artist.

But that sketch caught my eye, caught more than that, it caught my imagination, for in it I saw the meaning of the whole West, the mystery and charm of the real country. Here was the feeling that most were missing. That lone cowpuncher typified for me the feeling of men for the open and a life of freedom, the feeling of a man for horseflesh, and smell of leather, the aroma of sagebrush and feeding cattle on a summer night. That man was part of the picture. He typified the real West, the part of the West that tourists never see. Here was reality, here was what a man might find if he lived on the range, learned to love the life, got the feel of it. Here was the real West, not a dessicated museum relic, not just a part of the life that was.

A little later, I was driving through the little cow town of Buffalo, Wyoming. Suddenly I heard a clatter, and down the center of the street came a horse and rider, a cowpuncher fresh from the range, covered with dust, no fancy chaps, no fancy sombrero, just an ordinary cowpuncher taking perhaps a shortcut through town. He rode erect, his horse stepping high, unconscious of the automobile traffic and as foreign to it as the silhouette I had just seen. Here was that same cowpuncher in life. Here was what I had thought of when first I saw the picture. Here again was the real West. And then it occurred to me that as a tourist I could never be a part of it, that unless I came to live and be a part of it I could never hope to achieve that kind of oneness with the country. My home was in the north, there I could be a real part of the life, but not here. That would take time and much living.