Cowboy Wild

The cowboy – North America's most popular cultural export – transforms history into a narrative of conquest that is nostalgically regretted even as it is celebrated. Like all mythic figures, he moves beneath the surface of public consciousness, serving as a source of shared values that shape us more profoundly than we might ever expect. The biggest homage to this icon takes place not in the United States but in Canada where the Calgary Stampede is the world’s number one tourist attraction for the month of July – an unparalleled place to consider the hero of the West.

The first cowboys I photographed were at a small-town rodeo in rural Alberta. I camped out with the competitors and was surprised to find them watching satellite TV in their big RVs. Sometime after dark, I woke to shouts of Yahoo! and the roar of ATVs careening through the trees.
 I had grown up on the other side of the Atlantic where cowboys rode the silver screen. Six shooters and friends like Tonto were irresistible to young boys and provided the narrative for our games. In Caroline, I had expected bedrolls around campfires. That sleepless night, more than the picture-perfect rodeo the next day, fueled my fascination.
 


That summer I went to my first Calgary Stampede. It was like being at a cowboy convention and I was hooked. I went to the rodeo but found my gaze kept turning towards the audience rather than the arena. The cowboy of the imagination interested me as much as the real McCoy. I bought a cowboy hat and joined the faithful, sweating on the concrete.

For a few years I looked forward to seeing Big Joe, one of the oldest cowboys still competing, a wild horse racer who grown up in New Mexico and now ran cattle in northern British Columbia. One afternoon, I watched him snap a dislocated shoulder back in place by bracing it against a urinal. When Big Joe talked, other cowboys listened. When women were present, he tried not to swear and apologized if he did. Another regular stop was the teepee of Ed Calf Robe, a Siksika elder who has been at the Stampede every year since he was born. He says that cowboys and Indians really got along, that Hollywood was where they fought. He remembers being a kid and watching movies where the Indians would empty the whole barrel and one cowboy would fall. Then the cowboy would shoot once and ten Indians dropped. “We used to all want to be cowboys,” he says.



At the Stampede, photographers line the infields, shooting the legend year after year. The syntax never changes, representation is narrowly proscribed. Looking for more bandwidth, I wandered the acres of halls and grounds, alert for the unscripted. It was a gentleman cowboy drinking at the rodeo bar one afternoon who told me what I was doing. He had been watching me roam back and forth clicking away and said I was bird dogging. The dictionary says that to bird dog is to follow a subject of interest, especially a person or a trend, with persistent attention. For ten Stampedes, between 1995 and 2008, I bird dogged the cowboy, trailing the scent to where myth, history and spectacle collide.