Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1987
Abstract
Environment and culture shape human beings, both as individuals and as societies. In all the vast plains of the Americas where a cattle industry developed, a human type evolved a distinct way of life: the gaucho in Argentina, the charro in Mexico, the llanero in Venezuela, the guaso in Chile, and the cowboy in the United States and Canada. 1 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an Argentine intellectual who was an avid reader of James Fenimore Cooper, was perhaps the first to state clearly in regard to the Americas that wherever a similar combination of geographical features occurs, parallel customs and occupations have evolved among otherwise unrelated peoples, but the observation has since become almost a commonplace.2 Naturally, people with parallel customs have produced similar bodies of literature, but the mythic underpinnings of that literature are not necessarily the same, as a comparison of two outstanding novels shows.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly [GPQ 7 (Summer 1987): 166-177].Copyright 1987 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska—Lincoln.