Cattle Kings Pass with the Vivid West
The glory period of cowboys was the 1860s through 1890s, when the decline of the open cattle industry plus the mass spread of railroads caused the end of an era. But a 1924 New York Times Magazine article described how many of those former cowboys were still around.
As journalist Owen P. White reported from El Paso, Texas, these men had settled down and adjusted to the new times:
The cattle king, once a character admirable for his broad acres, his personal hardness, his likable wickedness, his open-handed generosity and his entire indifference to the comforts of civilization, has yielded to the uplifting pressure of commercialism and allowed himself to be forced into a position of secure mediocrity.
In other words, those fine old-timers who used to come into town for a hell of a time, and have it after they got there; who played poker, monte, and farobank with the high and beautiful North Star as the limit; who took cold unless they wore a six-shooter and carried a Winchester; who slept better on the ground than they did on a mattress; who "rolled their own" and drank whisky [sic] out of tin dippers, and who held no natural enmity in their hearts for anyone in the world except Apache Indians, cattle rustlers, and horse thieves... have now entirely disappeared from the face of the earth.
For the modern-day equivalent of former practitioners of a bygone lifetstyle, consider the viral 2015 Ask Reddit post: "Emos of the early 2000's, what are you guys doing now?" More than 10,000 comments, with the most upvoted being "Hate to sound stereotypical but I'm a manager at Hot Topic."
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3vhkrw/emos_of_the_early_2000s_what_are_you_guys_doing/
Cattle Kings Pass with the Vivid West: Cowman Now Sits at a Desk and Sells Hornless Steers
Published: Sunday, Decemnber 7, 1924