Cornyn: National Day of the Cowboy: Remembering the cowboys behind Lonesome Dove saga
Sen. John Cornyn
Special to the E-T
Keep your saddle oiled and your gun greased because the “National Day of the Cowboy” – the fourth Saturday in July – is finally here. This day celebrates the lasting legacies of the cowboys that pioneered the American West as they worked cattle, beginning after the Civil War in the heart of Texas.
If you’ve read or watched Lonesome Dove then you know the intrepid tale of the two retired Texas Rangers, Augustus Gus McCrae and W.F. Woodrow Call, who traveled from the Rio Grande in Texas to Montana in the 1870s driving a herd of stolen Texas Longhorns. These two men are the epitome of this holiday and helped define the American cowboy experience. Their story is widely regarded as one of the most realistic portrayals of the Wild West.
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True West Magazine
The Courageous Life and Death of Oliver Loving
In 1867, beneath a bluff a few miles from Carlsbad, New Mexico, two Texas cattlemen one of them a trail-hardened 52-year-old, the other a 23-year-old roughneck were fighting for their lives, surrounded by a marauding party of Comanches. If recorded at all, such an event would have been no more than a blip on the historical calendar of the American West, but this one and its aftermath turned out to be one of the most amazing examples of courage, loyalty and sheer grit in all the annals of the frontier.
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