Characters of speakers – Westerners and the worry wart

8. Westerners
The “Westerners” is an international organization of men who, by rearing or by reading, are aware of the way of our West and proud of our Western heritage. Television and movies have come far from the Horse Operas when actors hitched up their pants before they squatted around a campfire! Yet they still frequently leave considerable space between fact and fiction.

Six guns didn’t make square shooters of all those rugged hombres who turned a barren wilderness into fertile fields, and so some cashed in with their boots on. Their ranks were filled by the trail blazer, the tenderfoot, the nester who came by rail; the man with the pan in search of gold, the miner who curried the countryside for metal, and the mule skinner who could move his team up mountains with a jerkline and blacksnake. Among them moved the fancy vested gambler with his gold watch chain (dealing every game from the bottom); the grizzly old whacker who guided his oxen with only a bullwhip, and the notch-gunned rustler who could stand before a mirror and beat himself to the draw.

Of all these, the cowpoke . . . that corrugated character with parenthetical legs, is best remembered. After supper in the summertime he sat on a top rail telling passers “Howdy” .. . and if he wasn’t pickin’ his teeth with a knife, he was dribblin’ tobacco down his chin. Let’s not forget the nesters who followed all these; they fenced in the land and fathered farmers’ daughters for the dwindling herd of cowboys to marry and settle down. Our speaker, the product of just such a proud progeny, is eager to preserve the pristine purity of the West and to protect it from the “pap” put out by some script writers.

9. The worry wart
Our speaker has been affectionately dubbed a worry wart, and he’s come to tell us how to be the way he “ain’t.” Worrying is akin to swaying in a porch swing-it’s something to do but doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s the interest we pay on troubles we’re always looking for, and it leads us to see the worst side of everything.

That’s the moral in the story of a tiny tot who wandered from camp in the Kootenai Forest. Grizzly bears abide in that Idaho wilderness, and the child’s mother was worried because she’d sighted one close by. A posse set out in hot pursuit-looking not for the child, but hunting for the bear; hour after hour, they brought down bear after bear. Finally someone remembered to look for the little lass and found her less than a mile from camp; she’d only wandered away but a score of grizzlies had been wantonly waylaid. Our speaker wants to tell us that when we neglect to worry, worry will die of neglect.

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