The Tenderfoot
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The idea for the Tenderfoot began when my grandmother showed me a letter written to my great-grandfather Hugh Cooke in 1920 by a Wyoming rancher called Boney Earnest. This angularly named gentleman, I discovered, had taught my great grandfather the ranch business when he went to America to seek his fortune in the early 1880s.
Contrasting the American West of the 1920s with that of the 1880s Boney Earnest says, in his very personal style, 'It seems there is nothing left in this country any more for a man to live for. The cattle have nearly all gon with the Game... All over that Country whare we killed the old Buffalo that poor old Karr took the photo of is all dotted over with Oil Derricks... There is automobiles by the hundreds running all over the Country whare, in those days, nothing could be seen but the gay and festive Cowboy and a bloodthirsty Indian looking for scalps...'
Not so in 1883 when 20-year-old Hugh Cooke, the gentleman son of a Welsh landowner, landed in America. Cattle ranching in the western states of America was booming. Between 1860 and 188O the rush to buy land and cattle had spread like a fever. By 1883, within little more than 20 years, virgin land once roamed by herds of buffalo had become cattle and cowboy country.
My great grandfather emerges as a man eager to succeed, but as a pragmatist for all that. His letters are clearly those of a young man. He was only 20 when he left England in love with the freedom and the physical hardships of the ranching life, thirsty for knowledge and experience, but also under some parental pressure, the pressure any young English Gentleman felt in the late Victorian age, to make good.
He found the life of a cowboy tough but simple, the life of a ranch owner far less simple and just as tough. His letters chronicle a transition from early innocence to young maturity, a transition from paid hand to employer of men and owner of property. Unfortunately, the hard winters and low prices of the late 1880s put an end to his American enterprise, as they did to the livelihood of hundreds of other cattle owners in the American West.
Rupert Davies-Cooke, 2016
The idea for the Tenderfoot began when my grandmother showed me a letter written to my great-grandfather Hugh Cooke in 1920 by a Wyoming rancher called Boney Earnest. This angularly named gentleman, I discovered, had taught my great grandfather the ranch business when he went to America to seek his fortune in the early 1880s.
Contrasting the American West of the 1920s with that of the 1880s Boney Earnest says, in his very personal style, 'It seems there is nothing left in this country any more for a man to live for. The cattle have nearly all gon with the Game... All over that Country whare we killed the old Buffalo that poor old Karr took the photo of is all dotted over with Oil Derricks... There is automobiles by the hundreds running all over the Country whare, in those days, nothing could be seen but the gay and festive Cowboy and a bloodthirsty Indian looking for scalps...'
Not so in 1883 when 20-year-old Hugh Cooke, the gentleman son of a Welsh landowner, landed in America. Cattle ranching in the western states of America was booming. Between 1860 and 188O the rush to buy land and cattle had spread like a fever. By 1883, within little more than 20 years, virgin land once roamed by herds of buffalo had become cattle and cowboy country.
My great grandfather emerges as a man eager to succeed, but as a pragmatist for all that. His letters are clearly those of a young man. He was only 20 when he left England in love with the freedom and the physical hardships of the ranching life, thirsty for knowledge and experience, but also under some parental pressure, the pressure any young English Gentleman felt in the late Victorian age, to make good.
He found the life of a cowboy tough but simple, the life of a ranch owner far less simple and just as tough. His letters chronicle a transition from early innocence to young maturity, a transition from paid hand to employer of men and owner of property. Unfortunately, the hard winters and low prices of the late 1880s put an end to his American enterprise, as they did to the livelihood of hundreds of other cattle owners in the American West.
Rupert Davies-Cooke, 2016