Cowboy Coloring Pages

The movies made cowboys into gunslingers, but the real job was mostly horses, cattle and hard work outdoors. These cowboy coloring pages stay close to that real life on the ranch, with cowgirls as busy as the cowboys, and a few quiet moments by the fire.

On horseback, a cowboy rides through tall prairie grass, through a red rock canyon as the sun goes down, through the snow in a sheepskin coat with his horse's breath clouding in the cold, and past a windmill herding cattle. Another leads his horse across a rocky creek and a packhorse loaded with bedrolls through a mountain pass, waits by a stone trough while his horse drinks, and sits at the corral fence in the saddle. A cowgirl races around the barrels in the arena, and a rodeo rider waves his hat on a bucking horse while a rodeo clown cheers him on.

The chores fill a lot of pages, as they filled a lot of days. A cowboy holds a coiled lasso by the corral and twirls it for children watching from the fence, repairs a saddle under the tack shed, fixes a wagon wheel, mends a barbed wire fence and polishes his spurs on the porch. A cowgirl braids her horse's mane, carries feed buckets between the stables, kneels beside a newborn calf, beads a leather hatband and coils a rope on the tailgate of a pickup. A young cowboy feeds an apple to a horse by the barn, and a little one hugs a round pony.

Then the day slows down: coffee heating over a campfire, a nap against the saddle by lantern light, two cowboys playing fiddle and harmonica by a covered wagon under the stars, a cowgirl with a guitar on a hay bale, a rider sheltering under a rock ledge while rain falls on the mesas, and a cowboy whistling as his dog leaps a stone wall. There is a chuck wagon with its pots hanging, a weathered old cowboy in close-up, a hat on a fence post with a wild rose, tooled boots on the porch, a hat, lasso and boots on a blanket, and a mandala of horseshoes and rope.

Where cowboys came from

The first cowboys were Mexican vaqueros, who worked cattle on horseback in New Spain long before the American West was settled. American cowboys learned the trade from them, and the language shows it: lasso comes from the Spanish lazo, lariat from la reata, rodeo from rodear, to round up, and bronco from the Spanish word for rough or wild.

The great age of the cowboy was short. After the Civil War, cowboys drove huge herds of cattle north from Texas to the railroad towns of Kansas, on trails that took months. The chuck wagon, the rolling kitchen on one of these pages, is usually credited to the Texas rancher Charles Goodnight, who fitted out an old army wagon with shelves and a hinged table in 1866. Within about twenty years, barbed wire fences and railroads had ended the long drives, and the cowboy's life settled onto the ranch, where it still goes on.

What cowboys wear, and why

Every piece of the outfit had a job:

• The wide-brimmed hat kept off sun and rain, and could scoop water for a horse.
• The bandana covered the nose and mouth against the dust kicked up by a herd.
• Boots with a high heel kept the foot from slipping through the stirrup.
• Spurs nudged the horse, and chaps protected the legs from thorny brush.

Western colors

Leather is the heart of a cowboy page: saddles, boots, belts and chaps in every brown from tan to dark chocolate. Jeans are faded blue, shirts are plaid or plain, bandanas are red or blue. For the horses, try a real coat color: bay (reddish brown with a black mane and tail), chestnut (copper all over), palomino (golden with a white mane) or a paint, patched in brown and white. The desert pages love sunset colors: orange and pink rock under a purple sky.

Easy riders and busy ranches

The simplest pages keep one figure large with little around it. Quick to color, above the grid, begins with:

• Horseshoe mandala
• Under the rock ledge
• Best friends

The detailed ones fill the scene with fences, planks, grass and tooled leather. Lots of detail begins with:

• Saddle repair
• Rodeo ride
• Morning chores

A Western party

Cowboy pages suit a birthday party or a rodeo-themed afternoon. Set out brown, tan and denim blue, print the boots, the hat and the pony hug for the youngest guests, and the barrel racer and bronc rider for the older ones. Children can design their own brand for the ranch and draw it on the saddle.

Printing the ranch

Every page is a free A4 PDF drawn at 300 dpi. A4 prints at full size, and on US Letter "fit to page" shrinks the drawing by about six percent so every hat brim and spur stays on the paper. The printing guide shows the setting. Add to pack gathers the whole ranch into one file. More horses are in the horse coloring pages, more ranch life in the farm coloring pages, more American scenes in the United States coloring pages, and another kind of adventurer in the pirate coloring pages.