Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum

Does Ennis view himself as a cowboy?

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Kd5000:
Just "observing" on TOB  posts about how they weren't cowobys, etc etc.  Certainly not Jack. 

However, at the end of BBM, Ennis decides to go to ALma Jr's wedding and says there going to have to get themselves another cowboy as my little daughter is going to get married. 

I just thought Ennis was contract labor, a ranch hand who worked for different ranchers on a case by case basis.  Different ranchers would hire him out to build fence, castrate calves, daily ranch operations.    Are ranch hands and cowboys synomous?

I've known small time calf and cattle operations.  In many case, cowboy/rancher has a day job and has a small herd of cattle.  He (usually a he) offers his services to other small time ranchers in exchange for them helping him out when he needs it. THey pull their resources together for things like mass vaccinations of cattles, things like that.   

However, out west (TEXAS, the Rockies),  ranches are much much larger and usually have thousands of cattle. Hence, the cattle baron always keeps on a few ranch hands as needbe. Just my observation.  I ramble.

Back to the question. 
Are ranch hands and cowboys synomous?    And which is Ennis? 

Front-Ranger:
I went to a meeting in Casper, Wyoming, in October where there was a panel discussion about the myth of the cowboy. Speaking were John Nesbitt, a historian, professor of Western culture, and author; the poet laureate of Wyoming; a black rodeo bullrider and author; Linda Hasselstrom, a historian and author; and Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain. None of them had the definitive answer to your question, but Annie Proulx said, "If I had wanted them to be cowboys, I wouldn't have put them to work herding sheep!" According to Nesbitt, what sets ranch hands off from cowboys is horsemanship. In addition, several people from the audience spoke up and there were several women who were daughters or wives of ranch hands or ranch owners who were very discouraged because none of the mystique of the cowboy rubbed off on their men, translating to viable careers for them. Perhaps the most definitive answer was given by Proulx at the end of the talk when she left the audience with a riddle: "A yellow snake, a green kangaroo, and a pink elephant walked into a bar. The bartender said, 'You're too early, boys, he ain't here yet.'"

opinionista:
According to the Oxford English Dictionary 2002 edition, a cowboy is "a man on horseback who herds cattle, especially in the western US". Taking into consideration that definition, I'd say Ennis was a cowboy and so was Jack. The problem is that we are under the influence of Hollywood's definition of cowboys which is John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and so on.

A Ranch, according to the same dictionary is a large farm, especially in the western US and Canada, where cattle or other animals are bred.

I guess a cowboy and a ranch hand are basically the same thing, given that many cowboys work in ranches as cattle herders. However it is also true that not all ranch hands are cowboys, and not all cowboys are ranch hands. IMO Ennis was a the real cowboy of the two, since he mostly worked with cattle, and rode horses. Jack stopped being a cowboy when he moved down to Texas, married Lureen and started working as a salesman.


--- Quote --- and Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain. None of them had the definitive answer to your question, but Annie Proulx said, "If I had wanted them to be cowboys, I wouldn't have put them to work herding sheep!"
--- End quote ---

Interesting that comment Lee. I think in the essay Getting it movied, AP mentions that herding sheep is also a part of the cowboy life (or cowboy job), at least in Wyoming, eventhough the cowboys usually hate those animals. They tend to take these kind of jobs when nothing else is available.

Kd5000:
Well I do remember reading that Jack and Ennis were leftovers from the feudal era of the Old West, when cowboys were needed to drive herds of cattle to the markets in the midwest.  The economy in those western states was changing, especially in Jack and Ennis's youth. You could still sense the Old West, but it was dying...The frontier had been closed since 1890.

Cowboys weren't needed as much in recent times as they were back then.  Plus the rootless life and staying on the saddle for days, riding 1,000 miles, must have not been the world's most desirable job, no matter how much Hollywood has romanticized it.   I forget the exact details of the film RED RIVER. Wasn't it about driving cattle herds from TX to KS in the 1870's+? Don't know why KS. Chicago had the world's largest stockyards and the country's largest meat packing center.   Maybe cattle were put on trains from KS to Chicago or perhaps KS was the marketplace where agents bought cows for their respective stockyard.   ???

dot-matrix:
What I'm going to share is not gospel by any stretch of the imagination but it is what I learned at my Daddy's knee growing up on a horse ranch in Montana.  Cowboys work with cattle, Wranglers work with horses and Herders work with sheep.  Anyone hired to do the other work on a ranch like feeding stock, mucking out stalls, fixing fence etc is called a Ranch Hand. Ranch Hands are paid considerable less than experience Cowboys or Wranglers.  The Foreman or Ramrod is in charge of the men and the Segundo is second in charge.   And according to my Daddy any man worth his salt works side by with his men fair weather or foul no matter how much money he has or how big his spread.

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