Quite often it is What one Doesn't Say, Rather than What one Does,
That Matters Out West




by Eric O'Keefe

By West Texas standards, the handwritten note bordered on verbose: "You need to work for this magazine." The author was a fourth-generation rancher. I, the recipient, was a stringer for The New York Times. Another detail worth noting? The name of the publication affixed to the note: Cowboys & Indians. If memory serves me, that issue featured Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut adapting Elmer Kelton's The Good Old Boys, which puts this episode somewhere around the latter part of 1995. I had lived west of the Pecos on and off for close to 20 years, a span long enough for me to recognize that the most important part of that old cocklebur's note was what he left out. Social anthropologists refer to this phenomenon—a communication's unspoken or, in this case, unwritten elements—as the cultural subtext. The rest of us call it "reading between the lines." And even though C&I was in only its second year of publication, its content and presentation heralded an auspicious future, particularly for those savvy enough to affiliate themselves with it. I affiliated. And so have thousands of others. Back in '95, readership was less than 30,000. C&I's most recent audited numbers put our paid circulation at more than three times that figure, right at the 100,000 mark. We print eight issues a year, instead of four, and there has been a corresponding increase in heft as well. Does any of this matter? To readers of The New York Times it does. "Perhaps the best indicator of this interest in second homes in the Old West has been the exponential growth of Cowboys & Indians, essential reading for any weekend warrior Westerner." So reads a recent story in the newspaper's Escapes section whose focus was how "a fascination with homesteading and the cowboy culture is sweeping a certain demographic of middle-age professionals from the Coasts." As a case study, Times reporter Janelle Brown used her parents: "The first sign that something was going on was when Cowboys & Indians magazine materialized on my parents' coffee table. They began traveling to cowboy poetry readings; Clint Black quietly replaced Barbra Streisand in the CD player. Finally, my parents confessed: they had bought property in Montana and were planning to build a log cabin in the wilderness." Similar intentions were expressed in 1999 when George and Laura Bush ventured in search of their own ranch. Our cover story was fashioned from a wide range of sources, from the architect who designed their house to the mayor of Crawford. Perhaps the most poignant is Adair Margo's account ["A Texas Vision in the Oval Office"] of the friendship between the President, the First Lady, and Tom Lea, the legendary El Paso artist and author who passed away last year. Like the Bushes, I, too, knew Mr. Lea. We met on numerous occasions—always at his studio behind the house that he and Sarah shared "on the east side of our mountain" in his native El Paso. Take with you his words on his home, his life, and the West: "It is the sunrise side, not the sunset side. It is the side to see the day that is coming, not the side to see the day that is gone. The best day is the day coming ..."

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©2002 Cowboys & Indians