Defending the fort in suburban Athens

AP photo

By T.W. Burger

In Texas, late in December of 1989, Thomas Everett Blasingame pulled his horse up short, dismounted, lay down in a field, crossed his hands over his chest and died.

His coworkers at JA Cattle Co. of Goodnight, Texas found him that way. His horse stood nearby.

Blasingame was 91. The Associated' Press story said he was the oldest working cowboy in Texas. He told the Wichita Falls Times the previous summer that he wanted to die just the way he did.

Ever wonder what happened to cowboys?

For those of us who grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s, the cowboy represented all the things that were supposed to be great about this country. Self-reliance. Fairness. Straight-shooting. Free.

Any kid worth his salt played cowboys and Indians. (I apologize for the insensitive description. It was the 50s.)

I can remember crouching in a besieged fort in suburban Athens, blazing away at an incredibly rabid riot of ravening redskins and leering cattle rustlers. I'll bet I died heroically 20 times that single afternoon.

"Kachow! Kachow!" The noises we made were as much a part of the game as the cap pistols and the holsters. A six shooter was good for a seemingly unlimited number of Kachows, and it was considered bad form to count the number of Kachows spraying forth as the firearm was brandished, bringing some villain to his just desserts with every blast.

Never mind that the fort was the attic of the house being built across the street from my own in Homewood Hills. Never mind that the Wild Indians were Bruce and Billy and a few others whose names I have forgotten. Never mind that the last time I died I fell through the gypsum ceiling to land in the room below, at the feet of a startled and angry carpenter.

A deputy sheriff dropped by my house to speak to mom and dad about that one. Very embarrassing.

Kids do not seem to play cowboy much anymore.

On the other hand, a lot of grown-ups seem to still be trying it, though they've twisted it around to be something else. Walk into any bistro or club that doesn't cater to the country club set or academics and you'll see good ole boys slouched over a bar, some twang-and-groan misery on the juke box and something that looks like cowboy hats on their heads. (More recently, they seemed to have evolved into baseball caps.)

The kids run around and pretend to be Rambo, a fictional character who suffers and whines a little too much to ever ascend to cowboydom.

I do not know where cowboys went. Maybe we got too cynical. Maybe we had too many doses of sad realities; the Kennedys, Watergate, 'Nam, Columbine, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Uvalde; the list has continued to grow.

I wanted to find out more about Mr. Blasingame, but the first number I reached in Goodnight, Tx, had been disconnected, and the second, at JA Cattle Co., gave me a recorded answer. I hung up. An answering machine didn't fit the picture, anyway.

I know, of course, that the thundering youthful fury of my cowboy world, with its guns that never ran out of bullets and rivals that never died forever, was purely imaginary. It arose from my own limited understanding of the world's working, the absurdities promoted by television and the movies, and my own wish that evil could be cured by shooting at it.

Thomas Everett Blasingame was born at the very end of the Wild West, two years before birth of the lunatic 20th century, when you could ride for your whole life and not come across a car, a shopping mall, or an income tax form, and when the world was full of cowboys.

The last real cowboy laid down and died in the winter grass, on a ranch that has an answering machine. With his boots on, naturally.

Somehow, the world seems a little harsher.

T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks,

He is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg, Pa.