Steer, steer on the wall; what’s the cowboyiest state of them all?
Here in Colorado, we pride ourselves on our cowtown, Wild West heritage, but are we actually out there working the land in our Wranglers, or just strutting our stuff at the Grizzly Rose in our Rockmounts? If the cowboy spirit is all self-reliance and hard work, where do hipsters and $10k-a-month apartments fit in?
In movies, cowboys look like the gunslinging John Wayne, the sometimes morally dubious “hero” battling it out with Native Americans and outlaws. But cowboy culture isn’t just putting on a Stetson hat and twirling a gun. It’s truly a way of life. A stubborn, rebellious, unrelenting way of life. It’s venturing into the unknown and blazing trails no matter the cost. It’s living with nature and wedging our humanity into its rugged, vicious ecosystem. It’s an independent spirit and a fight for freedom. Maybe not surprisingly, it tends to involve trouble with the law.
Bareback rider Clayton Biglow competes in the Bareback Riding at the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyo., on July 30, 2023. (Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)
Because it’s an election year and we clearly need to pit ourselves against each other more, we decided to rank the states by their cowboy-ness. To do so, we looked at ranches and rodeos. We considered love for the land, grit and resilience. We consulted rodeo experts and learned the real roots of the term “cowboy” itself. We thought about Western movies, Beyoncé and why “Yellowstone” is so great.
So giddy up, buckaroos. Here are the ultimate, most definitive of all time and place rankings of the cowboyiest states in the union.
5. Arizona
There were a lot of states duking it out for No. 5. Nebraska has loads of ranches; Montana is almost nothing but wide open spaces; Iowa produces a ridiculous number of hogs; and doesn’t every kid in Utah and Oklahoma know how to mend a fence? But Arizona, also home to ranches, open spaces, hogs and shovel-wielding kiddos, edged them out because of one place: Tombstone.
Tombstone is the home of maybe the most famous gunfight in the West at the OK Corral, and the lore of that alone is enough to challenge the Grand Canyon for Arizona’s most famous landmark. Because shootouts didn’t always end well, its Boothill Graveyard is the final resting place for many legendary cowboys and outlaws.
Also very Wild West: Tombstone’s population of just over 10,000 at its silver mining peak somehow sustained more than 100 saloons. (We won’t go into the brothel count.)
4. Kansas
John Curry, also known as “Kansas Jack” of Olathe, Kan., a member of the Single Action Shooters Society of Olathe, helps drive some Longhorn cattle at the Free State Farm in Lawrence, Kan., May 23, 2002. (Mike Yoder, AP)
You know the saying, “Get out of Dodge?” It comes from Dodge City, Kan., otherwise known as The Wickedest Little City in the West. Rural Kansas has been home to more shootouts than you can shake a spur at, and Dodge City even employed Wyatt Earp as assistant marshal to try to keep the peace among all the bank robbers and saloon-haunting gamblers that blew through town. With all that history, plus still-thriving crop and livestock industries, Kansas makes the cowboy cut.
Also, there’s just not a ton to do in most of Kansas, so why not hop on a horse or bust some mutton?
3. Colorado
Sure, we might be better known for Denver’s urban culture nowadays, but our state was built by prospectors heading west to seek their fortunes in our gold-filled mountains. And it’s not like they played fair when it came to divvying up the Gold Rush riches. Border to border, you’ll still find artifacts of our legit Wild West past, from Cripple Creek’s Outlaws and Lawmen Jail Museum to southeastern Bent’s Old Fort Trading Hub to the St. Elmo Ghost Town. Not to mention the famous guys buried here, like Buffalo Bill and Doc Holliday.
And it’s not just the past. Cattle production is our top agricultural commodity, and it takes real-life cowboys to tend to that land and wrangle those cows. We’re also home to a whopping eight rodeo associations, including Aurora’s International Gay Rodeo Association, Colorado Springs’ Women’s Professional Rodeo Association, Westminster’s National High School Rodeo Association and the ProRodeo Hall of Fame and Museum of the American Cowboy in Springs.
“There is a reason they have all settled in Colorado,” said Kent Sturman, director of the ProRodeo Hall of Fame and Museum of the American Cowboy. “Can’t get much more ‘cowboy’ than that!”
While our population may be ballooning with transplants from more urban areas and our agricultural land has been cleared for condos, we’re still interested in that cowboy way of life. Sturman said that ticket sales for rodeos are currently at an all-time high, so we’re obviously yearning for some of that boot-stomping spirit.
Cowboys and ranchers are up before dawn to head out to gather the cattle for their final branding at Chico Basin Ranch in Hanover, Colo., on June 29, 2024. (Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)
“The heritage is staying strong, I believe,” Sturman said. “Rodeo is more popular today than ever before based on the membership numbers, number of fans and how the sport has reached many more households with being televised more in the last ten years.”
2. Wyoming
It’s pretty hard to argue with Wyoming’s cowboy claim to fame. Besides hosting Cheyenne Frontier Days, the “daddy of ‘em all” when it comes to outdoor rodeos, one of its nicknames is the Cowboy State, and Cody is known as the rodeo capital of the world. Oh, and there’s a freaking cowboy on Wyoming’s license plates.
Chet Johnson, a saddle bronc rider from Buffalo, Wyo,, has been a part of the rodeo circuit for years, traveling around to states with varying degrees of cowboy-ness. Wyoming, he said, is definitely the most cowboy of them all.
“I gotta go with Wyoming,” Johnson said. “I think because we have a lot less people, and we’re way more ranch-based. We don’t have farming, no big cities and it’s all pretty rural. What a cowboy needs to survive is wide open spaces, and that’s what we’ve got.”
Despite being the ninth-largest state by area, Wyoming has the smallest population, so yeah, there’s a whole lot of room for wrangling and riding off into the sunset.
1. Texas
Arizona Territory cowboys in 1879. Often what real range riders wore in the 19th century bore only a passing resemblance to the get-ups symbolic of cowboys today. (C.S. Fly/Buyenlarge, via Getty Images
Of course it’s Texas. Texas raises the most cattle, has double the farmland of any other state, puts on the largest livestock exhibition in the world and even invented the term cowboy (more on that in a minute). Folks there make killer barbecue, ride horses and mechanical bulls on the reg, shoot guns for fun and say things like, “God bless Texas.” Heck, they even have their own version of the tuxedo.
But maybe the biggest reason that Texas tops our cowboyiest countdown is because it’s where the word cowboy originated. And it isn’t pretty.
“A Black man was the first man to be called cowboy,” said Larry Callies, founder of the Black Cowboy Museum in Rosenberg, Texas. “’Hey, boy, go get that cow.’ That’s where the word cowboy came from. The white man wouldn’t be called a cowboy. In Texas, where the first cowboys came from, the white man was called a cow hand or cow man or cow puncher, but not a cowboy. Because a cowboy in Texas was Black.”
Callies comes from a long line of Black Americans working the Texas land, many as slaves in the 19th century. His uncle, born in the early 1900s, told him that they didn’t have white cowboys when he was growing up, that it was a derogatory word.
It wasn’t until Hollywood started calling white men cowboys in those box office-friendly Westerns that we started thinking of the term as John Wayne types. Now, Black Texas natives like Beyoncé are reclaiming their cowboy heritage — and making fringed gloves and bedazzled chaps cool.
Texas also has that independent spirit that we don’t want to mess with. (It’s the Lone Star State for a reason.) And with it being so dang big, there’s a whole lot of room for animals to roam, guns to be fired and gigantic belt buckles to be worn.
For freedom-loving, trail-blazing, term-coining and simply the sheer multitude of cows, Texas is the cowboyiest state of them all.