The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots & Class Conflicts in the American West

by Mark Lause

Although later made an icon of "rugged individualism," the American cowboy was a grossly exploited and underpaid seasonal worker, who waged a series of militant strikes in the generally isolated and neglected corners of the Old West. Mark Lause examines those neglected labour conflicts, couching them in the context of the bitter and violent "range wars" that broke out periodically across the region, and locating both among the political insurgencies endemic to the American West in the so-called Gilded Age.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Labor

304 pages, Hardcover

Published January 16, 2018

Reviews

[Peter Gilmore · Rating 3 out of 5]

The term "the Great Cowboy Strike" refers to a specific event in the Texas panhandle following the Civil War. The book "The Great Cowboy Strike" examines this event, other work stoppages, and social relations amid the great cattle boom of the late nineteenth century. Helpfully, Lause relates all of this to western development and the radical mass movements in the western states - of small ranchers and cowboys and other workers -- which challenged cattlemen, railroads, and mining companies.

Lause's book is an often fascinating look beyond the romanticism of life on the Great Plains as promoted and exemplified by countless Hollywood productions. And it's a useful riposte to the pernicious ideas promulgated by Hofstadter, Nevins, & Co., which so unhelpfully suggested that the history of the United States was uniquely free from social conflict.

If Lause effortlessly shoots down the "Consensus School," his "Great Cowboy Strike" is a jolting reminder of America's endemic violence. Read as the nation reeled from the horrific murder of school children in Parkland, Florida, "The Great Cowboy Strike" repeatedly points out that it wasn't only cattle drivers who packed pistols. The rights of property (e.g., the "right" to accumulate as much wealth as possible at the expense of others) were defended and advanced by extralegal and legal means. Even if it sounds vaguely like the plot of a Saturday western, big cattle ranchers did in fact hire desperadoes to dispatch those who got in their way. Legal remedies were sometimes convenient, sometimes a fiction, sometimes ignored.

In the Democratic-controlled states of the former Confederacy, Democrats ruthlessly waged war on farming dissidents. In the Republican-controlled states to the north, Republicans aimed shotguns at farmers with independent politics.

The collapse of America's brief, bold experiment in multiracial democracy -- Reconstruction -- looms large in these events.

There are wonderful stories and great use of detail in "The Great Cowboy Strike." However, this reader often felt lost in the weeds, given the great welter of names thrown about in the telling of sagas. "The Great Cowboy Strike" is well worth reading, however.

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

yee
-and I can't emphasize this enough-
haw.

[Cody · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like the author wanted to write a book about The Great Cowboy Strike, but didnt have anywhere close to enough information about it, so he just included everything about the American West remotely connected to the topic in the book and turned what could have been a good 30 page article into a 260 page book.

Chapters 3 and 4 are the true heart of the book. Chapter 3 is about the strike and chapter 4 is about the strikes that resulted from the strike as the movement spread around the nation. The first 2 chapters also serve a role as background history leading up to the strike. I dont know that anything after chapter 4 was truly necessary to the topic.

That said, I did enjoy the conclusion. In the conclusion, the author gives a history if Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis and then offers am interesting history of how Hollywood has depicted cowboys and pushed Turners frontier mythos in film. It had little to do with the Cowboy Strike, but it was very interesting in itself.

[Nan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A MUST READ!!! #mustread

[Chris Lund · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you're looking for an relatively academic detailed dive into labor strife and political progressivism in the late 19th Century American West, then this is probably the book for you. But if you're looking for more of an old fashioning interested book to read, I'd suggest going elsewhere. I really appreciate some insights and the general thesis of the book, but I found it really tough to maintain a consistent interest. The ideas seemed to jump all over the place, going from one story to the next with fairly awkward transitions, and the book was sorely in need of a good editor (there were far more typos and grammatical mistakes than is really acceptable for a professionally published book). All that being said, I do still feel like I benefitted from reading it, primarily because it framed cowboy lore and progressive political warfare in ways that I hadn't previously considered.

[Nicho · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is cool because of its exploration into the politics of the Midwest during its inception and the political context of events typically considered fable such as cowboys. However, it is simply confusing to follow, there are a lot of unnecessary details and while it can be cool for following a story it’s too windy to be enjoyable to follow consistently.