Jane Kramer, one of the most admired writers for The New Yorker Magazine convinced her editor in 1977 that she wanted to write a special story on the “last cowboy.”  At the time she lived in New York with her husband and daughter and had traveled to Europe many times for her stories.

Before she left New York to find the “last cowboy,” she did not know for sure where she should look for this fellow.  For a while, she had thought of Montana or Wyoming.  She decided to go to the Panhandle of western Texas since she had friends who lived and ranched in that part of the west.

“They instructed me,” she wrote, “introduced me around, made certain that no one within a couple hundred miles would be at all alarmed when a strange woman with a small daughter started showing up at odd places and odd hours, asking questions, taking notes, making drawings of the sorts of things sensible people knew about already — the parts of a calf cradle, fence-mending tools, mesquite trees and cactus flowers — and trying desperately to get around in a pair of brand-new cowboy boots.”

Her boots came from a Western store in suburban Dallas and as might be expected, they were the wrong boots.  “Painfully, laughably the wrong boots,” she wrote.  “But the cowboys I got to know always managed to keep from laughing as the way I stumbled around for my first few weeks in the Panhandle.  They were grave and solicitous about the condition of my raw ankles and sore toes.”

Her Texas friends were experienced in dealing with Eastern visitors.  They waited until the boots were broken in, and she was broken in with them — at least to the point that she could cross a pasture without compulsively scanning the pasture for rattlers, the sky for twisters, and everything in between for bulls.

Eventually, her friends sent her off to wander on her own.  She was accompanied by her young daughter who was receiving a priceless education which was not available in the classrooms of New York City.

After traveling from daylight till dusk and stopping and visiting with many cowboys, she had traveled miles from where she started.  Finally, she met Henry Blanton far out in the pasture standing by his old, well-traveled pickup.  He became the “last cowboy” for her story and she and her daughter spent all their time at Henry’s home near Canadian (in northeast corner of the Panhandle).  It was here that Jane became well acquainted with Henry and his family.

She met Henry really by accident.  As she traveled throughout the Panhandle, she began to learn something about the ways that these cowboys made thin but workable arrangements with the life they led.

Later, at another gathering of cowboys, she had a chance to watch Henry.  “There was something about him,” she wrote, “that moved me, and afterwards I sought him out, not really knowing why.  All that I did know for a while was that Henry, in his way, was very different from the other cowboys.  He had settled into his life, but he could not seem to settle for it.  He moved in a kind of deep, prideful disappointment.  He longed for something to restore him — a lost myth, a hero’s West.  He believed in that West, no matter how his cowboy’s life, and the memory of his father’s and grandfather’s cowboy lives, conspired to disabuse him.”

For years, Jane had been writing from other countries.  Now she wanted — and needed — to look at America again.  It seemed to her that the camp of a cowboy would be the place to start.  To her, “A cowboy was the most ‘American’ thing I could think of.”

Sometime later, Jane and her daughter had been riding with Henry for a long time that day when he suddenly stopped the pickup.  “See that cow?” he said, pointing.  “She’s looking for her calf.  It’s kind of hard to explain, exactly, but a cow with a calf on her — there’s something about her.  You can just tell.”

They waited silently and watched.  In a few minutes, a tiny calf came skittering out from behind a cactus.  The cow stared hard at the pickup.  She lowed for her calf and kept on lowing until it had skittered past the truck and was nestled underneath her, sucking.  She never once took her eyes off the pickup until her calf was safe.  Henry laughed and they drove off, talking about cows.

He explained that the hardest thing about moving cows with a calf was making sure that every mother cow had her calf with her.  He reported that he had a neighbor who he would never let get near his cattle.  This neighbor was fond of galloping around and roping every animal he saw.  There were gentler ways of moving cows and Henry did not want his neighbor on the over 90,000 acres which he managed.

Henry was able to account for every one of the twenty-two hundred cows in his herd, just as if they were his own.  He knew which cows delivered strong, healthy calves each spring, which cows needed help calving, and which ones tended to miss a year or deliver stillborn.  He also seemed to know by instinct when a fence was down or a post had rotted off.

That evening, back at the ranch with the Blanton family, Jane knew that she had made the proper choice.  Later, when she and her daughter left the Blanton ranch, she wrote that the experience had “. . . taught me more about America than I had ever hoped or wanted to discover.”

 

Author Clarence Shoemaker, originally published in the Gregory Times-Advocate on May 18, 2022