April 25, 2026
When your cowboy is just content
Larry McMurtry's Tall Tales
Fans Discover the Wild West Was Just Really Good Marketing
TLDR: Larry McMurtry’s essay argues that the Wild West was as much a sales pitch as a real place, with myths stitched together by writers and showmen. Readers are gleefully leaning into the idea that cowboys were early marketing products, joking that America has basically been raised on frontier fanfiction.
Larry McMurtry’s legendary molasses barrel story is supposed to be about the tragedy of losing a winter’s worth of sweetness… but online readers are zeroing in on a different flavor: the West was basically the original PR campaign. One lone top comment drops an archive link like a mic, hinting that the real drama isn’t in the prairie dust, it’s in how the story’s being framed.
People are riffing on the idea that cowboys were less rugged heroes and more early influencers, crafted by “pulp writers and advertising men.” The snarky mood: if your grandpa’s cowboy tales sound like Netflix pitches, that’s because they kind of were. McMurtry’s own punchline—preferring the beautiful lie about the spilled molasses over the boring truth about a greedy pig—has readers joking that every family has that one story that got “director’s cut” levels of editing.
Instead of crying over the lost syrup, commenters are laughing about how America has been binging cowboy fanfic for over a century. Some are half-mad, half-amused that the “real West” might be just as made up as the myth, while others shrug and say, if the fiction’s better than the facts, pass the popcorn. In this thread, the cowboys aren’t the heroes—the storytellers are.
Key Points
- •Larry McMurtry grew up hearing cowboy stories at family reunions at the Clarendon Country Club, but a tale about a molasses barrel most influenced him.
- •The molasses barrel story involved his grandfather transporting an 80-pound barrel of sorghum molasses from Archer City, only for it to be lost in an accident during unloading.
- •In his 1968 essay collection *In a Narrow Grave*, McMurtry later clarified that the barrel actually emptied because a sow pulled out its spigot, yet he admitted preferring the fictionalized version.
- •McMurtry argued that the myths of the American West were largely invented by pulp writers, artists, impresarios, and advertisers, and that the “selling” of the West came before its “settling.”
- •Across his novels, essays, and screenplays, McMurtry depicted figures from Texas Rangers to Houston academics while critically examining myth-makers like Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley, avoiding nostalgic portrayals of the West.