Mountain gallery, cattle, cowboys and culture. If you havent, i would strongly urge you to. It is a fascinating collection. I am talking about a large collection of artifacts, art and other objects that illuminate the connection that i was not aware of, down through history through the cattle days, between the city of kansas city and amarillo, texas. It is so big, in fact, part of it has spilled into kirk call on the first floor. You may have seen the big saddle. It is a terrific exhibit. And i would be remiss at this point, before getting to michael, if i did not introduce ann duecy, standing in the back there. She is our Library Art Exhibit director. She has worked with michael. She is responsible for all of these great exhibits that you see in both of our galleries. She does a terrific job. And michael is really responsible for the most part, for this exhibit being here and bringing it to us. He is the associate director of Curatorial Affairs and the curator of art and western heritage at the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in canyon, texas, just south of amarillo in the texas panhandle. It is the Largest History Museum and the state of texas. In the state of texas. If it is the largest in texas, you Better Believe it is large. He is also a lecturer in western american studies at west texas university. Michael oversees art, weapons, military, sports, and cowboy and ranching collections at the museum. Which, as he puts it, it is like working at a giant toy store. I call it stealing money. Exhibit withd this an associate professor of art history at west texas a m, amy von lintel. Michael is from here, from the kansas city area. He was born in casey k, kck, he is a graduate of oak park high school. He went on to ku, where he had a double major in art history and painting, hard his masters in art history in smu in dallas. After college, he worked at what is now the smithsonian and art museum in washington dc. Ultimately, he landed at the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in texas. From the time he was a kid, michael says he was always fascinated by historical objects. Neglected animal bones he collected animal bones and relics. He was always fascinated by the American West. He grew up wanting to be a cowboy or a pro football player. He says he went to art school because he was good at drawing horses. Well, here is how big he has gotten. Michael was invited to dinner at the white house with george w. And laura bush during the second bush presidency. The museum had loaned a couple paintings to the white house for display there. And michael turned him down. It turned out that he wouldve had to have missed his sons graduation from high school. So he turned down the invitation to the white house, so good for him. Among other things, michael knows a lot, an awful lot about cowboys. He is revered in the amarillo area for the Living History Program that he presents as cowboy mike. I think he has come tonight as cowboy mike. I was kind of making the joke some of you may remember a few years ago when we did the big read on true grit. Our director was very fond on of putting on an ipad, cowboy eyepatch, cowboy hat, and a duster. He looks cool, but you did not get the impression that he had strung some fence. This guy looks like he has trung some fence. He is going to set it straight about cowboys. He is going to give us their true history. One spoiler. Six shooters are not involved. I say this all the time. I am proud of the programming, the public programming that we do at the library. All of the speakers that we bring in are really good. But the ones who really stand out are the ones who bring a passion that is infectious. They love what they do, they love talking about it, and they love sharing it with other people. We have gotten that from michael in the several months he has worked with us on the exhibit. And you are going to get that tonight. You are in for a real treat. Please welcome michael grauer. [applause] Michael First of all, thank you all for coming. It is a really nice crowd. That includes not only people in kansas city, but some of my closest and dearest friends that are here, also some of my family. Sorry, i got a little surprise here a few minutes ago. I have been doing the cowboy mike program for almost a decade at panhandle plains, and it stems from what steve was saying correcting history and being a public historian. Correcting history is different from academic history, and our job as public historians is to take history out of academia and put it in the hands of the general public to help tell good stories. That is basically what i get to do for a living, hang pictures on the wall and tell good stories. I make valuable american dollars doing that. They keep paying me, so i guess it is working out well for somebody, and any case. But when this project fell into my lap, at with my cocurator amy von lintel i am a great believer in giving back. I think it is vital for us to give back to our communities. I am lucky in that in this project, i am able to give back to the two places that are my home. The opportunity to give back to my hometown is a great thing for me. I remember as a little kid, my grandparents lived over in what used to be rosedale. We would drive by on the highway. I could see the ship we settled building should we saddle and alsoaddle building the big bull that got moved since it moved away from kansas city. I am not a cowboy, but i get to play one on tv. I have come to know cowboys. I have had the honor to handle artifacts that long to some of belonged to some of the greatest cowboys who ever lived, or some that you have never heard of. Those are the ones that interest me, the less famous ones. We are going to talk about the history of cowboys because it is not about the famous ones. It is about the ones that did the work. That is what i hope to convey to you today, this is a special type of person that is mostly misunderstood. Now, ann was willing to take a risk by letting us do a presentation here two years ago this month. We came, my cocurator and i, and we gave a presentation about cattle, cowboys, and culture. We do not know how big it was going to get. We kept looking at our collection and finding connections every time we opened a page, we found two more pages. Every rock we overturned, we found two more rocks. One of the things as a student of the American West i believe very strongly is i see this in both of my hometowns turning your back on your history is the worst thing you can possibly do. Being able to come back to kansas city and seeing what is happening in amarillo now, you are in a cowtown, folks. You will always be a cow town. The matter how many things you build, you are a cow town. Embrace it. I am going to evangelize for you today. I have done this in amarillo as well. I do not care what you build, you cannot escape your roots. So embrace them. Capitalize on them and use them. You have Great Stories in kansas city. Use them. Leverage them. Everybody loves cowboys, right . I do this program for little tty critters, all the way up to the critters that are 75 years old. Every time i do it, i watch people turn into children, whether they are four years old or 84 years old. That is fact. I will take you through the history of cowboys. This is according to my own research, and you may agree or disagree, but there will be time for questions. I have a short time and i have a tendency to go off on trails. But i will try to stay on point as best i can, ok . I am also a a technophobe. I learned how to use the clicker thing a little while ago. [laughter] we will see how this goes, all right . As they say, tighten your cinches here we go. , first of all, cowboys were not certain things. They were not gunfighters. There were not crimefighters. They were not bank robbers. Not unless they got fired, ok . They did not come into town to shoot things up, generally speaking, ok . This is probably my favorite artifact here. This is from our panhandleplains collection. Shoot for kansas city. This cowboy in this little ribbon it is only about this big hes carrying a hand cannon, as if all cowboys carried that kind of nonsense. We will get to that in just a minute. As charles good night said, cowboys are the most misunderstood of all americans in certain respects, but they were also in the cow country, where i live today and which still exists largely from texas all the way to western canada, they live a particularly dangerous life and did the work to do really wanted because the wages were low, it was dangerous, it was dirty, and frankly a lot of times it was boring. But they were responsible for someone elses property. That is the key to understand what they were doing, they were filling an important void. As america expanded to the west, we grabbed big chunks of territory. Cow country is generally all of this in here. Everything from the rockies east all the way to saddle country in california, and not in the northwest now in the northwest. Generally the great planes. Kansas city, the gateway to the great planes. That is key to understanding. After the civil war, there was a great demand for beef cattle in the midwest as well is in the eastern United States and Great Britain specifically. Cattle was left to run wild in texas. Stimates are anywhere from 6 million animals to 10 million animals by 1865. Did other side of the equation, all of the wild horses were there. At least 2 million wild horses in texas by 1865. In the final part of the equation most cowboys came from , texas. Thatl get you the two ways cowboys go north. Generally speaking, the horses were there, the cattle were there, and the cowboys were there. They all come out of texas. This is the time of what we are talking about, descendents of spanish cattle which we will texast in a minute longhorns. The meat was not necessarily good. So there were attempt to breed the animals up and make their quality of meat better, and kansas city plays a big role in that. It is hard to stand unless you go to western kansas, montana, wyoming, northwest texas. It is as simple as this this is what i tell the school kids. I have to give my lectures to the schoolkids. Everybody say it with me we aint got no trees. [laughter] we aint got no trees. Remember that. It is important. No place to hide. So cattle, this great commodity, is seen by an illinois businessman named joseph jean mccoy who realizes the way to get this product to that great market in the midwest and also in the eastern United States and europe, you had to get them to market somehow. There were railroads in texas, but it was three times as expensive to ship your cattle by rail as it was to drive them to the new railhead in the Central Pacific. And the first railhead of course was in abilene, here. The original cattle trail came out of south texas to sedalia. Kansas city is not even on this map you can do something about that, you can. The shawnee trail is to the east, but almost immediately by the 1850s, here illinois had quarantined against texas cattle, then missouri, that missouri is shut off from texas cattle on the health because of texas fever. They carried a tick that would investigated cattle, but they could enter the state that on railcars. Is why the Central Pacific is out there because eastern Kansas County also instituted quarantine. So texas cattle on the whole of hoof were not welcome into the part of the country we recognize. So cow town moved west. Abilene for a while, then ellsworth, wichita, then dodge city. You can see the great cattle trails. One of the things you need to remember is the cattle trails went right through comancheria. It was a territory basically governed by comanches from the Rocky Mountains to the mississippi valley, governed by fear and trade. So what to do do . You signed a treaty with these comanches that did not understand the treaty of 1867, and you tell them they have to give up all of this and move to this. We all know nobody wants to go to oklahoma on purpose, right . [laughter] michael so that did not go over too well, but nevertheless this is what happened. The u. S. Army was in collusion of protecting the cattle trails that came out of texas, even from the line of military forts year they were there to protect the cattle interest. By the time the trail started and it continued from 18651890, we believe there were probably about 35,000 cowboys involved in this. But nobody knew what a cowboy was. Nobody knew what a trail drive looked like it given what you see here in new monthly magazine harpers magazine. , there aint no cow trail that ever looked like that. And Texas Longhorns did not look neither. Ey cows that was important to remember. So the whole idea of what was a cowboy and what were these enters the public consciousness, and that was something that under the popular lexicon. Nobody really knew. Popular culture gets a hold of it quickly. They had a wild west show as literally part of the wild west. Ok . , wild lessers cowboys. Eventually, dime novels pick up on this in the 1880s and 1890s. By the way, jesse james was not a cowboy. He was a psychopath with a gun. That is really important. He was never a cowboy. But you start to see a blending between what are called wild west euros and cowboys and heroes and cowboys and cowboys get sucked into that. Eventually, literature gets a jumpstart with the publication of the virginian and pretty soon you have a tsunami of western fiction sweeping across the country. Everybody who can pick up a pen is writing cowboy stories and artists supplying illustrations, most of which by artists who have never been out west. In this case, the artist went to colorado and worked for nine days and then went back to pennsylvania and wrote stories. Made accurate western stories. Eventually, the great pulp magazines of the 1930s got involved, and this is what cowboys allegedly did according to western fiction. Then hollywood got involved with moving pictures. This is one of my favorite pictures showing gary cooper getting his lipstick applied so he can play a texan. Ok . Hollywood has gotten it wrong nearly every time. Im about to tell you why. Ok, so true west magazine a couple of years ago decided they would look into this and sort of a scholarly way. Where was cowboy ground zero . Where did it start . There were three different people writing about this. In my own research, heres what im about to tell you. Cowboy ground zero starts in spain with the beginning of bringing cattle to north america, roughly about 1521 into what is now mexico. They were brought on ships and turned loose. Spanish herding practices meant they did not castrate the bull calves. Cows do what cows do and they made a lot more cows. That is important to remember. But these herding techniques were learned by someone. I always ask students this one, who taught the spaniards had be cowboys . Ok . It was north africa. They had a style called up in the air it was about riding on a short stirrup with maneuverability on the horse, quick mobility. Direction after direction. You Wear Clothing that allows you to move. That is part of this whole idea. So north africans taught what would become spanish cowboys, but they also did not use rope. They used something called a hawking blade a long pole with a , crescent shaped blade on the back. Because the wild cattle were running everywhere and there are so many in mexico, they simply would flick that hawking blade and cut hamstrings and they would drop on the spot. ,hey would butcher the hide take it right there, render the tallow and leave the meat to rot. What does that sound like to you . What else happened in north america about a couple hundred years later . Absolutely. That is what happened to the buffalo. Same thing. So where does the rope come in . It comes from west african slaves who used the rope to capture and heard animals and herd animals they roped from foot. It is a blending of technology from north and west africa the gives us a cowboy we know today. This is cowboy ground zero. Africa. That is vital for us to africa. That is vital for us to understand where they go. Now, initially they were not owners of ranches. They were mixed blood people. When i want to tell you folks, the first cowboys were probably indians. Uhoh. That flies in the face of a lot of stuff, doesnt it . They did not wear boots. They might wear shoes. Some did not even use stirrups. They learned how to use a rope. Ultimately, mexican cowboys can do things with rope no one can do today. I laid out on here in the front and i want you to come look, i have a cattle rope that as you can see is about 80 feet long. In texas cowboys rode with this about 2030 feet long. Half the size, ok . It is all about how you manage the rope. The style learned will become part of it. Wraparound. When you rope the animal. I am going to try to show you how to do this. Pretend this is a cow. It is all about securing your loop. We didnt as afternoon. We hit it most of the time this afternoon. The wind caught it. Do you see that . The wind caught it. [laughter] michael so i will capture the animal here. I can feed the rope back and forth theoretically. Give them a little room going back in because you do not want to hurt their self esteem. [laughter] michael the vaquero tradition is very much alive and well in california. In texas, they did what is called tie it fast. I fast and drag the animal where you want it to go, you dont care about his feelings. That is the important distinction. Hispanic cowboys were very much part of the equation. But they were paid about one third the wages of other cowboys. This is important. There were africanamerican cowboys. About a quarter of them were black or hispanic, mostly black. There were American Indian cowboys. They raised their own cattle in indian territory. Comanches, after they moved on to the reservations in southwestern oklahoma, insisted that any cowboys grazing herds on their only and had to be indian cowboys. They did not like texans. Imagine that. But most of them were euroamericans of some type. As you can see in this photograph of dodge city. They came from denmark, germany, france, all over the place. Most of them were attracted by the stories they read that made it sound very exciting. Most men the came out and tried to be cowboys did not last. It was just too hard. It was too difficult. It was dirty. All kinds of Different Things, they really do not last. Then even by the mid1880s your people doing this sort of thing, posing for photographs in dodge city. None work