Those of us who spend our days walking on pavement, riding public transportation, and staring endlessly into computer monitors probably have a pretty romantic view of what it means to be a cowboy. In American culture, as far back as it goes, the cowboy has served as a hero, a symbol of the road less traveled and the kind of hard work that puts calluses on your hands.

Challis Whitlock, a real cowboy, has the calluses, but he’d never refer to himself as a hero. In fact, even calling himself as a cowboy makes him a little uncomfortable, he tells me, sitting inside the tack room at Diamond Cross Ranch in Jackson, Wyoming. The code of the horseman, it seems, is deeply rooted in humility. “The quieter you are, and more reserved you are, the more you’re looked up to.” But he is a cowboy, and a damn good one, according to Grant Golliher, the proprietor at Diamond Cross alongside his wife, Jane.

Whitlock, a son of Kinnear, Wyoming, met us at the ranch to talk about why he can’t imagine being anything but a horseman, and detailed the unspoken language he uses to communicate with these wild, beautiful animals.

“Horses are made to just run out on the range, wild. It’s not in their livelihood to be ridden, that’s what we want from them. So we have to go about asking them in a way that they’ll allow us to do that. You can’t really tell ‘em what to do, you have to ask ‘em.”

Get a glimpse of Whitlock in action at Diamond Cross, and hear the man’s words on what it means to be a horseman.

Photographs by Joseph Haeberle

Video by Voca Films with additional footage by Emmie Sperandeo

Challis Whitlock on the Humility of the Cowboy Mindset