There are two types of cowboys in this world. There are the ones who populate Hollywood's movie screens who wear six-shooters strapped to their waists in order to gun down those ner-do-wells stupid enough to challenge them to duels on the main street of town. On the other hand there are the men who hardly ever shot a pistol in their lives, and spent their days out on the pasture lands shepherding herds of cattle from point a to point b.
It's the former of course that captures everybody's imaginations. It's far more romantic to see oneself as a lone gunman facing down incredible odds then riding a horse in the freezing rain in the middle of the night trying to track down a cow that's gone missing. It's far more likely that a cowboy met his end because of an accident like being thrown from a horse and cracking his skull or falling under the hooves of a herd of cattle than from staring down the business end of any weapon.
Of course there were bank robbers and train robbers, but most of them probably never saw the inside of anybody's bunk house any more than a bank robber today would work on a ranch, so you can't really call them cowboys either. People who take to robbing banks for a living aren't going to find the hard work and lousy pay associated with herding cattle and other ranch associated chores that appealing. On the other hand cattle theft, or rustling, was probably one of the few crimes committed where a knowledge of cattle and the wilderness was needed in order to succeed
In his first novel, A Tale Out Of Luck, published by Center Street an imprint of Hachette Book Group USA and being released Wednesday September 3rd, Willie Nelson, with the help of Mike Blakely, has combined the reality of life on a cattle ranch with a dash of the cowboy myth to create a story that's every bit as enjoyable as the songs he sings. Real cowboys (the guys who work as ranch hands), rustlers, Texas lawmen, tavern girls and even a band or two of Indians meet up together on its pages with the expected, and some unexpected, results.
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