M ark A. L ause . The Great Cowboy Strike

In The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West, Mark Lause takes aim at the cowboy myth, recasting the independent, stoic, mythic heroes as wage laborers struggling against centralized corporations and the state. The book argues that a short series of fleeting but successful labor actions taken by seasonal wage laborers in the cattle industry of the interior West (i.e., cowboys) formed a significant but little-recognized component of the insurgent Populist, labor, and class-based conflicts of the 1880s and 1890s nationwide, all of which suffered, in the long term, violent repression and political defeat. For Lause, the intense violence that characterized the 1880s cowboy strikes further proves the assertion, widespread in scholarly work of the past few decades, that violence by the powerful against the powerless remains a central theme of U.S. western history. In that regard, Lause follows another central mission of the field: to deconstruct long-held mythologies. Lause forges strong connections between specific moments of labor activism on the open cattle range and much broader union and political insurgencies of the late nineteenth century: the Grange, the Knights of Labor, the Farmers’ Alliance, Greenbackism, Populism, and the Union Labor Party; Lause also makes compelling connections between episodes of intense violence against cowboys and against union organizers, Populist politicians and journalists, African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South, and industrial workers in northern cities. These are all of a piece, he argues, “power and authority ruthlessly imposed,” the powerful deploying “legal” and extralegal violence in their own political and economic favor, without consequence (243).

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