Cowboys and Indians - Dare I Write It?

Once upon a time, in a land not far away, in a time not so long ago, a bunch of kids got together to play outside. Regularly. So regularly, it was daily. Numbers predicated on the weather conditions. Yes, that was a reality.   

When we were young, we played Cowboys and Indians, or Cops and Robbers, in the spruce nap (or woods, or thicket for the non-nap-understanders) on the hill behind the house. When I say "we", it was the collective "we" of the young crowd in the community, forty, fifty, or sixty youngsters from toddlers to teens, girls and boys, loose in the woods just behind our family’s back fence for hours on end, summer mostly, but often in winter.

We were always worried about a counting equality so we would do half and half of whoever was present and the choice of the leader of the day determined if you were the good guy cowboy or cop, or the bad guy Indian or robber. You had no say unless you were the leader, but everybody got their turn at some point.

Living in St. Mary's Bay, we had no idea what the word Indian meant, nor cowboy for that matter though we did have horses around which was definitely a condition of employment for a cowboy. But I digress. I guess the early TV shows influenced the idea of the worth of the cowboy or the Indian and where equality factored into that.

Television, for the most part, made us believe that an Indian was the bad guy just because he was born an Indian. Though, when we wore the hat or proverbial feathers of Indians on the trail, I don’t recall feeling like a bad guy and believed we had a side to protect, and we wanted to win as a team. Unlike the westerns, sometimes, as Indians we did win. It was really a game of tag - you were caught, herded, and congregated and the last one standing made the team a winner.

We also got the idea of the cowboy being the good guys from the same westerns. But the ordinary cowboy was rarely the hero. It was the sheriff, or the lawmen, or the army, that came in and saved the day and sometimes were even fighting against cowboys not just the Indians.

Generally speaking, John Wayne was rarely a plain old cowboy in any of the 9 million westerns that he starred in. But he was always the hero, only being killed once that I recall and that was by plain old bad guy cowboys and not the dreaded bad Indians. Sometimes in the John Wayne movies there even got to be good Indians. Imagine. But, that sentiment didn’t always shine through, nor was it as emblazoned on our minds.

When we played cops and robbers, the robbers always stole the play money from the bank. That’s how it repetitively started. The fortified structure made from pared sticks and was double dutying as a bank and a jail stood out more than the regular bough structures for the town dotting the trails along the hill. So as a robber, we knew we were bad, we did something wrong. We entered where we shouldn’t have, took the monopoly money that wasn't ours, and went to jail for it if we were caught. As the cops, we were the good guys and were defending the property of somebody else. It was clear - good and bad. Even in the picking, the cops seemed to always have the stronger team.

Cowboys and Indians wasn't so clear. We were bad just because we were Indians in the eyes of the cowboys. We didn't rob the bank. We just existed. So when we were the Indians being chased for the sake of being chased we didn't feel like we were bad. But we ran. Some of us enjoyed the power of being the cowboy more than the subservience of the Indian but some wanted to be the Indian and tried harder to win. Not that it would change the course of history, but maybe it would.

Once the log jailhouse slash bank was constructed, our young minds gravitated to the nuance of Cops and Robbers - good and bad. It was easier to understand. 

I'm sure there is some lesson that I should learn from it. Maybe a person is not bad just because of who they are, or where they come from. I don’t know, that sounds too simple to be true. 

Maybe we just have to run the trail in the woods behind the house while being chased by a passel of (toy) gun-toting cowboy wanna be's to understand that concept with a slathering of a misconstruedness of who we are and how the cowboy rose to become mightier.

Or maybe we just have to be kind. Nothing else. Let’s try that. No woods running required.