Tom Mix, Johnny Mack Brown and Buck Jones were the heroes of my childhood. People thought of them as cowboys but they weren't cowboys at all.

They were gunfighters with hearts of gold. They didn't work together. They turned up individually wherever they were needed. They put manners on people who were misbehaving, such as bent sheriffs or greedy bankers or other gunmen who were up to no good. They were the great stars of the silver screen in the early 1930s.

The real cowboys were a different breed completely. They worked in ranches and did a very valuable job for the new country. They worked mainly in Texas, a state so big that one of its ranches, the King Ranch, was bigger than Ireland. The cowboys' hard work came in the spring when they branded young cattle. This job demanded great skill with a rope and a horse.

For the rest of the year, the cowboys' work was routine. The main part consisted of driving big herds to the stockyards in Chicago. These drives could take several days at a time and the cowboy needed a deep knowledge of cattle. The most important man in the company was the camp cook: the food he provided was very important to his comrades. He brewed good coffee and cooked flapjacks, beans and frijoles. Of course, he prepared the steak.

The cowboys in the Old West were connoisseurs of food. They provided beef for millions of their countrymen, and they didn't go without it themselves. They also brought along a few cows, so that they could have fresh milk. All in all, they were an elite. They had a good life compared to the Americans who worked in the factories and mines.

The cowboy's life wasn't without worry: he had to have a great knowledge of how cows behaved and he was always on the guard lest a maverick break away caused a stampede. The stampede was the biggest nightmare: some cattle would be lost and many of the others might remain discontented and inclined to stampede again. This was especially true at night, and the cowboys used to sing to them and possibly play the guitar. Thus a tradition grew up.

Sentimental

When, at last, the drivers reached Chicago, they were well paid and given a few days leave. We never saw a good film about the cowboys' lives. Most were glamorous and romantic. Even the better movies such as Stagecoach, High Noon and Yellow Sky were to some extent sentimental and far away from the truth.

If some director had the common sense to show life as it was, he could have produced a classic but Hollywood didn't favour reality -- it gave the people what they thought it needed. This was a great pity because a vast sector of American life has gone unrecorded. We were told in a recent film that America was born in the ganglands of the east. This was palpable fiction: the gangs did not grow food or rear cattle or in any way contribute to the millions who needed food and drink.

There is one film that portrays the life of the real cowboy: it is called The Overlanders. It was made in Australia. It shows a big herd of cattle being driven from the north west to the east coast at a time when it was feared that the Chinese would invade. The plan was to leave them without cattle and so the cattle were driven to the safety of such places as Brisbane and Sydney.

This film has no drama or romantic interest. The hero was Chips Rafferty, a model of what we see as a typical Australian. There was a girl in the film called Daphne Campbell, but there was no romantic interest. Her role appeared to be that of a reporter for some television station or some radio station. The Overlanders wasn't a great film, but I would love to see it again, just as I would love to see a real film about the life of a cowboy.

As far as we know, very few Irish became cowboys: they settled in the east, especially in New York and Boston, and they worked in the mines and in the factories. Thus, they had a far inferior life to the men who drove the herds from Texas to Chicago.

Very few of the Irish went to work on the land. They preferred to herd together, unlike the Irish immigrants from the North, who went out west and became farmers and played an important part in the political life of America.

The coming of the railway is thought to have hastened the end of the cowboys' life -- it didn't. It was cheaper to drive cattle on their hooves than to transport them, so I do not know when the era of the great drives came to an end. It was probably very early in the 21st century.

Even in the present day, Texas provides enormous quantities of beef. The middle west of America is the bread basket. It grows vast quantities of grain. The eastern states provide milk.

Obstacle

The early drivers of cattle faced formidable obstacles, especially in the form of rivers that ran from east to west. They had to know the best crossings.

One river seemed almost impossible to cross, but the pioneers or the drivers found that it wasn't an obstacle at all and a proverb became popular: Powder River, a mile wide and a foot deep. There are Powder Rivers in many of our lives.

Fogra: Deep thanks go to TG4 for their coverage of the Tour de France

- Con Houlihan