“Send us a boy- we'll send you a cowboy!” is the Box Canyon Boys Camp slogan, sounds interesting right? The bedwetter’s are a group of labeled misfits who are at the camp for the summer and decide to go on an adventure and save a herd of buffalo from a three day hunt in Arizona. By looking at the bedwetters struggles in the novel Bless the Beasts & Children written by Glendon Swarthout, one can see that the buffalo's struggle runs parallel with the boys.
The boys and the buffalo are both neglected by society. Cotton’s dream at the beginning of the novel shows the bedwetter’s penned up in a cage and then let go into a fenced field surrounded by people, exactly like the buffalo when the boys saw them the day before. “Raging, he stood. Omnipotent, glaring at the line of humans, he centered on the muzzle of a rifle and down the barrel and into the half face of a woman seated on a tarpaulin sighting him. She fired. He recognized her. The microseconds recognition shattered his heart even as her bullet broke his brain. It was the…show more content… “ They were known variously as the Weirds, the Screwups, The locos. They were the bottom of the barrel” (Swarthout Pg.17) This shows the Bedwetter’s other names made up by the other kids at the Box Canyon Boys Camp and how they made fun of them and called them “the bottom of the barrel”. The buffalo are also at the bottom of the barrel and there soul purpose for people was to hunt them for a game. Another quote that shows my point is “It was to be expected that any summer would single out a misfit or two, an isolate here, an emotionally disturbed there, but Cotton’s group was unique. They moved in with him because no one else would have them” (Swarthout Pg.17) The quote shows how everyone in Cotton’s group was a misfit or an outcast and they were all marginalized just like the buffalo being penned up in a cage instead of roaming