Being a cowboy is not a job. It is in the nature of a calling. A way of life. A philosophy. If you don’t believe this, the next time you’re around cowboys, just listen up.
At the Eston rodeo last weekend, I asked rodeo clown/philosopher/poet Lee Bellows why cowboys never take their hats off. A simple question, I thought, requiring a simple answer. Instead, the answer grew into a discourse on the philosophy of being a cowboy.
The hat is part of the cowboy’s uniform, Bellows explained. About his own hat, he said, “I take it off for the anthem and prayers, but otherwise it stays on. It’s part of who I am.”
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Bellows admitted to taking it off to sleep, but allowed as how he has on occasion napped in his hat.
There’s also a very practical reason for keeping the hat on: it’s not unknown for a cowboy’s hat to cost $300 to $500 and what better place to keep an eye on it, in a sense, than to have it on one’s head?
Fights have started with somebody trying to take off a cowboy’s hat.
Cst. Richard Faucher of the RCMP, a lad from Quebec serving in Maple Creek, found that out.
In Stuart McLean’s book, Welcome Home, Travels in Smalltown Canada, Faucher says, “I have learned lots of things. I’ve learned that if you arrest a cowboy you don’t touch his hat. They have these expensive hats. So if you are putting them in the jail for the night and you are going to search them, you don’t just grab the hat from their head. You tell them what you are going to do and then you take it and put it down on the table carefully.”
Besides the philosophical, there is a practical reason why a cowboy wears his hat at all times: protection from the elements. Jack Humeny of Eatonia, a cowboy poet/musician/philosopher, said that he wears the hat for protection from the heat and from the cold. Cowboys need that protection, he said, because when they’re working, they’re out all day and “they’re long days.”
The hats get protected too. McLean recalls a rainy day in Maple Creek when he saw a cowboy with “a custom-fitted plastic cover over his hat to keep it dry.”
Bellows and Humeny teamed up for a session of cowboy poetry and song.
Cowboy poetry is an art form which has come into it’s own in recent years.
Like true country and Western music, it can be sad or it can be glad, but it always carries a message.
