The Great Cowboy Strike

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

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When cowboys were workers and battled their bosses

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.

Reviews

  • Widely ranging across time and space, this engaging history moves gracefully from cowboy work culture, to politics, to The Wizard of Oz. Lause enhances his stature as the U.S. historian most able to connect agrarian radicalism to union organizing. A stirring account of western labor radicalism and its limitsat times in the face of racism and of unity among settlers across class lines.

    David Roediger
  • Mark Lause has made a major contribution to Western US history, to areas of working class history little understood, and to the connection of these developments with a drastic change in regional ecology. This book will stand, and suggest much about the current "Gilded Age" that will be vital to understand today.

    Paul Buhle
  • Focusing on industrial workers in the Northeast and Chicago, U.S. labor history largely ignores the rural proletariat, leaving the impression that none such existed in the vast expanse of the cattle and agribusiness industries west of the Mississippi. Historian Mark Lause has turned that erasure upside down with this meticulously researched and beautifully written history of the of cattle worker's militancy and organizing. Although the 1880s cowboy strikes are at the heart of the story, Lause takes the history from the Civil War's Missouri Confederate guerrillas and ethic-cleansing Texas Rangers and the genocidal campaigns of the Army of the West against the Plains peoples of the bison and the Apaches, into the 20th century and the organized revolt of tenant farmers in Indian Territory in opposition to conscription for World War I, the 1917 Green Corn Rebellion. Both these proletarian actors, cowboys and landless farmers, were made up of not only the white cowboys-as-gunslingers of Hollywood imagination, but Black, Indian, Mexican, and Anglo.

    Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz