Solitary Nature of the Cowboy Figure

We were talking in class the other day about the ways in which the traditional Western archetypes might apply to Tropic of Orange and both Gabriel and Bobby were mentioned as possibilities for the “cowboy” figure. I was thinking which of those two male characters would fit in more with men like John Grady or Art Croft and I felt myself leaning towards Gabriel, mostly because his narrative arc establishes him as something of a “wanderer.” However, after some thinking, I settled upon another reason: Gabriel, unlike Bobby, ends up alone at the end of the novel with the death of Emi. Is romantic loss and loneliness a necessary attribute for the character archetype of the cowboy? We see in All the Pretty Horses John Grady’s rejection by Alejandra and subsequent wandering alone through the desert. In The Ox-Bow Incident, similarly, Gil returns to town only to find that he has lost Rose to another man. His behavior afterwards reflects that of the traditional cowboy: he drinks, he fights, and he rides. Could a cowboy maintain a successful romantic relationship and still be called a cowboy? Or is the wandering lifestyle necessary to be a cowboy simply not conducive for the success of such a relationship? I think why I find this interesting is that characters like John Grady or Gil seem to desire successful relationships with women given their emotional turmoil when these relationships fail. The inability of romantic relationships to coexist with the cowboy lifestyle drives a lot of what makes cowboy characters interesting.