Dreaming With the Cowboys

Dreaming With the Cowboys by Anthony Rain Starez
The black smoke belched into the air as the steam engine locomotive left the station house and attempted to pull it's payload of cars filled with passengers. Chugging along slowly at first but building speed with each turn of the wheels. The powerful train's engine jerked and yanked on the cars, while the driver pulled on the steam-powered whistle, blasting out a high-pitched howl. Rocking back and forth in the open-air car and holding on to the seat I watched the trees fly by with the hypnotic stare that only a 10-year-old boy could possess. The smoke was thick and filled the air with the distinct smell of burning coal....soot was everywhere, but no one seemed to mind. In fact, it only added to the overwhelming feeling of stepping back in time, which is exactly what the magic of going to the old western amusement park called Six Gun Territory was all about. I always wore my buckskin boots and white Levi jeans with holes in the knees. It was my way of being a cowboy, and as a child it was one of my biggest dreams.
	If you didn't look around you at the other passengers who were dressed in tourist attire, pale skin and cameras hanging around their necks, you could be taken away with the sensations of what it might have felt like to ride the train to an old western town in the 1800s....maybe Kansas City, the wild frontier town that catered to tired and lonely cowboys coming off long cattle drives and ready to party with a warm bottle of whiskey, saloon girls and sometimes their guns.
Upon reaching town I'd climb off the train with a certain swagger in my walk as I strolled down the gravel covered streets...and I'd kind of get quiet for some unknown reason! Maybe it was the Clint Eastwood syndrome, but I'm not sure I'd ever seen a Clint Eastwood movie at that young age. All the buildings were realistic to the times, complete with saloon and can-can girls who'd do a show every couple of hours. My mother was actually a can-can girl at one time, dancing and singing "Won't You Come Home Bill Baily." There was the local sheriff's office, town bank and courthouse. Realistic cowboys walked around in the crowd with weathered looks on their bearded faces, leather chaps, cowboy hats and gun holsters complete with six-shooter. Every cowboy movie I'd ever seen came rushing back in my mind like a I was remembering a past life. Yes, I was young, but already had developed quite an imagination.
	Three or four times a day there'd be a shoot out between the good guys and the bad, with always the same "good guys win" outcome, but not before there were cowboys strewn throughout the streets pretending to be dead. The shows were always narrated by another cowboy on the sidestreet with a microphone.
His job was to fill in the story to the audience of bad blood between the sheriff and a rival outlaw gang, or sometimes they'd hold a live bank robbery. The story lines were sometimes cliche, but always entertaining as the shoot-outs were loud and realistic. Mesmerized, I'd take in all the drama with every breath, and dream with the cowboys of a place, a time, that I could not be in. The idea of being a cowboy was enough to steal the heart of any young boy, and mine was truly captured. However, there was one particular place within Six Gun that made me feel something to the core of my being. It was the Indian village on the outside of the old western town. Rhythms of drums and dancing could be heard from a good distance, and they seemed to call to me. Handmade crafts could be bought in the village by authentic Native Americans that were from a large Oklahoma Indian reservation. I remember having a small animal skin drum at home that my father had bought me. The dancers and musicians were from the same reservation, and they always had a large audience as they performed under a circular open-air theater.
	Parading their culture was one of the few options open to them to make money, but if I could have told them what it meant to me inside to see their shws, I'm positive they would have seen it as much more than a business. In fact, visiting the Indian village was always the main reason I went to Six Gun. I'd never heard such primal emotional music and seen such movements of dance, it moved me inside so much that I'd go home and practice the dances alone just to recapture the feeling.
And actually performing the dances was even more intense, it was like a spirit had flown me away to the top of a canyon to look down upon myself. When I danced and sang, mimicking the ancient chants, I felt the culture of thousands of years, of a people who celebrated and told stories through music and dance. This music was not born of money or popularity, it was all in the blood of a people, a people most Americans had no idea about. A lost history to the outside world, and as a kid I only knew what I'd seen in my cowboy movies, which was so cheap compared to what I found here. And what I found in this art seemed more "real" than anything I'd felt. As the dancers would bounce lightly on their feet to the rhythms of the drummers and chants, it was as if they'd fall into a trance, letting the spirits take them through the music. The brilliant colored head dresses of feathers would shake while the dancers would spin in circles with spears and shields, signifying victory in battles. Bells around the dancer's moccasins would ring out to accompany the drum, while most dancers had painted faces and long black hair. There was the Eagle dance where the dancer wore an Eagle costume with large wings and would pretend to swoop down upon the Earth and gently glide back to the heavens.. There was the hoop dance and circle dance that told a story of our place in nature, it was a celebration of the circle of life itself. It was told to me one time that the Native Americans had a hard time understanding why white man had abandoned the circle and made everything square, like, houses, cars and divided land up into square chunks.
	This was my Six Gun Territory in the early 1970s, an amusement park built for tourist who'd found their way to Ocala, Florida usually on their way to, or from, Walt Disney World in Orlando. But for me, a boy who only lived down the road a couple of miles, it was magical, an ideal place to forget who I was, and simply dream with the cowboys. Guess I'm still dreaming!