00:00In our imagination, it's true that cowboys are mostly white and originally from Texas.
00:04But you have to know that for a long time, Texas wasn't actually part of the United States.
00:08The first cowboys were Mexican, and there's even an art of cowboys who were black and
00:12who have been completely erased from history.
00:15So we're a long way from the cliché of the virile white solitary man.
00:20We can have this image of the cowboy as a great adventurer who goes wherever he wants.
00:25In fact, he's often depicted without a wife, children, or family.
00:29Okay, all of that is false, right?
00:32Because cowboys are basically a very precarious profession, and there are people who are
00:36in the service of a boss, so they have to rent their accounts.
00:39They are not free at all, and when they go on the transhumans, when they guide the cattle
00:43along defined routes, well, they follow the herd, right?
00:47They don't want to.
00:48So it's a very difficult job.
00:50You spend all day on the horse in the sun, and it's really nothing like an adventurous life,
00:55at least not the free life we imagine it to be.
00:57We imagine it to be.
00:58In movies, we often see shootouts taking place in the towns of the Wild West.
01:04Though that's also a cliché, because most of the time, especially cowboys, well, they
01:09don't have money, so they simply can't suffer from guns or pistols.
01:16So even the settling of scores, as we see them in movies, there is very little evidence that
01:20is attested.
01:22There were some, of course, but it's very anecdotal, and there weren't that many gunfights.
01:27Weapons weren't allowed in saloons.
01:30Most of the time, they were left at the entrance to the saloon, or sometimes even at the entrance
01:33to the town, depending on the town.
01:36Simply because, well, a saloon is a party place, so there's also alcohol circulating, and we
01:40know that things can quickly go wrong.
01:43So back then, we were just as down-to-earth as we are today.
01:47When we could take steps to prevent things from getting out of hand, we did.
01:50So we avoided weapons in saloons.
01:53Women had their place in the Wild West.
01:55And by the way, we can consider that there were coogirls, what we would call coogirls
02:00today, but who weren't called that at the time.
02:03The problem is that these cowgirls were often the daughters or wives of ranchers who did the
02:09same job, who took care of the cattle, but who weren't paid for it.
02:14So we don't consider it their job, because they weren't paid.
02:18There is a bit of a bias that comes into play, but they were certainly there, and some were
02:23even able to be ranch owners at one point in their history.
02:28So yes, women worked on the farm.
02:31They even worked quite a lot, and have been of great help in this beef industry, actually.
