If you could cast but one vote, would you say this man looks like / feels like the personality of —
- A Boomer?
- A GenXer
- A Millennial
- Or the empathetic, kind, nice, polite generation after them?
The American West iconic cowboy image (and time! … before the rise of barbed wire and stronger land claims by homesteaders) belongs mostly to one generation. Can you tell (by how you know the generations now) which one it is?
And the answer is …
GEN X, the Nomad generation, which if you think about it makes sense: the NOMAD archetype wanders along the plains of the US, always on the move with a small tribe.
It’s true.
While cowboys as a thing have been around for ages, the iconic American cowboy era is a post-Civil-War phenomenon. The food industry and meat-packing industries had vast upticks in capacity to support the CW war-machine and need to feed the (mostly Union, northern) troops.
When the war ended and the factories and meat-processing plants were still around but the war-need wasn’t, the food production capacity was redirected toward consumers, and the desire for (and access to) beef increased quickly and dramatically. As did the need for cowboys to manage the cattle herds.
After the war, there were also an eff-ton of soldiers with PTSD — confused, lost and in need of employment.
Almost all the iconic cowboys of that iconic American cowboy era were the age and generation that lines up with “the GenXers of the day” (born 1822-1842), a generation that would go on to earn the name “Gilded,” though by no means was that the experience for the majority of its kicked-to-the-curb generational members.
