Poem On The Range
Cowboy Poets Gather In Nevada To Paint The West With Words,
Happy To Tell Of Life In The Saddle At The Drop Of A Stetson
Universal Press Syndicate
March 20, 1994
Just after sunrise on the Big Springs Ranch in northeastern Nevada, saddle leather creaked, spurs jingled, coyotes yipped. The sounds of the West. Then one more sound of the West was heard - a cowboy reciting poetry:
"There ain't no squall the banshee makes will make your neck hair rise,
Like that there bovine blood call as it echoes to the skies . . ."
The cowboy was Larry Schutte; the poetry was "Cowpen Moo-sic," a Western classic written by S. Omar Barker.
Schutte, 39, wore fringed chaps, a black cowboy hat and a blue neckerchief as he moved cattle in a pasture of rye. He, his horse and his dog worked in unspoken synchronization. As the herd moved, it seemed to generate its own weather system, raising a cloud of dust and the rumble of thunder.
Schutte tends to 1,000 head of cattle. He also tends to two children, makes horsehair ropes by hand and is a poet, singer, and musician in his own right. All that left him with little time to get into the town of Elko, Nevada, just 75 miles away, where more - much more - poetry was being recited.
For five days in January the rhyme was the reason as more than 40 cowboys recited and more than 8,000 fans listened during Elko's 10th annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering.
The term "cowboy poet" might conjure up a conflicting image: the strong, silent type and the sensitive, expressive type - an unlikely cross-breed of John Wayne and John Keats. But, indeed, most poets at Elko were, like Schutte, working cowboys.
They were genuine crack-of-dawnin', cigarette-rollin', dust-eatin', manure-troddin', sweatband-stainin', finger-freezin' wranglers who rope and ride, even if the hoofbeats of the cattle drives have been replaced by the whine of 18-wheelers hauling herds on asphalt "trails."
...And they recite at the drop of a Stetson.
At Elko they versified about bravery and tragedy, about uncanny cowhands, recalcitrant mules and "wrecks" (accidents on horseback). Their poems about practical jokes and tall tales evoked laughter from the audience; their poems about having to shoot a faithful horse brought tears.
Elko's Cowboy Poetry Gathering, held in winter when ranch duties slacken, is the oldest and biggest of its kind. But more than 150 other such gatherings are held throughout the year. Some include barbecues, others offer rodeos and collectible shows, still others conduct workshops where people can learn how to braid rawhide, engrave silver or prepare roundup recipes for hungry hands.
Elko featured all that and more, including scholarly panel discussions on ranching issues and a "Gathering of Gear" exhibit and auction that displayed the bridles and bits, quirts (short braided whips), bosals (bitless nose bands) and mecates (horsehair ropes) that are essential to a cowboy's day at the office.
And like most cowboy poetry gatherings it was family-oriented, with PG-rated language and special activities for children such as a puppet show, a poetry session for cowboys under 18, and a mechanical steer that young wranglers could try their hand at lassoing.
A Western Woodstock
But whatever its program, a cowboy poetry gathering is a kind of Western Woodstock, a celebration of Western culture and the words and music that express it. Each gathering presents a picture of the West as cowboy poets paint with words just as deftly as the classic Western artist Frederic Remington did with colors.
Their oral landscape reminds listeners that although prosaically the West is where hamburgers come from, more romantically the West is where America's original heroes - cowboys - come from.
These cowboys ride across a West that is as varied as it is vast, a West where ranches with names like the Pitchfork, the Four Sixes and the Circle-R hunker in mountain valleys or sprawl over plains near small towns with names like Hereford, High River and Recluse.
It is a West where for every city the size of Los Angeles, Calif., there are a thousand the size of Los Angeles, Texas (population 150). In fact, the combined population of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah is less than that of New York City.
Elko is typical of the Western small town - its main drag, Idaho Street, serves as a linear cornucopia of souvenir shops, boot shops, tack stores, steak restaurants, motels, mini-malls, and, this being Nevada, wedding chapels and casinos.
Demographically, Elko is a town of 27,000, a number swelled by a boom in gold mining in the area. And being rated No. 1 in the book "The 100 Best Small Towns in America" in 1993 didn't hurt, either.
Geographically, Elko is a notch on Interstate 80, which stretches like a belt 2,900 miles from New Jersey to San Francisco. During the poetry gathering, travelers came from both ends to learn about real cowboys.
One traveler, Randy Hale of New York City, learned that "the biggest problem to them is losing their ranches. The biggest problems from a New York point of view are drugs and guns and kids dropping out of school. . . . Their way of life here is completely different from mine. And some of these people are darned good poets."
Those darned good poets spent most of their time in Elko at the Convention Center. Featured poets recited in the auditorium, sitting on the stage in a row like birds on a wire. Other poets recited in three meeting halls during sessions that were open to anyone.
Some were relaxed veterans; some were nervous newcomers, standing banjo-eyed behind the podium and gripping the microphone tightly like a saddle horn. Poems ranged from classics to original works. Some were polished, some were ragged, all were sincere.
There were no winners or losers. Elko was just a forum for self-expression. If a cowboy forgot the words of a well-known classic he was reciting, a sympathetic voice in the audience likely would prime his poetic pump by calling out the next line.
Cowgirl Poets
Elko was a forum for cowgirl poets, too. Western writer and editor Teresa Jordan said, "Ranch women's writing has exploded in the last four or five years."
One cowgirl poet, Georgie Sicking of Nevada, has been a rancher most of her life (when she was 19, she was late to her wedding because she was roping wild burros). She is 72 now, and time, like prairie rain, has washed soft ravines in her face. Back when she decided to become a cowgirl, she was discouraged by less-liberated women. She wrote of those days:
"When I was young and foolish, the women said to me,
Take off those spurs and comb your hair if a lady you would be.
Take off that Levi jumper, put up those batwing chaps,
Put on a little makeup and we can get a date for you, perhaps' ...."
But she stayed in the saddle and eventually got her own ranch. "I do all the work myself except for plowing and haying. And neighbors help me with the branding."
Amid all the poetry, occasionally was heard a discouraging word. Cowboys, ever at the mercy of the elements, lately feel buffeted by winds from Washington, D.C. Much of the land in the West is public, its use regulated by the federal Bureau of Land Management under Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Many ranchers graze their cattle on more public than private land. They pay a grazing fee, but fear fee increases and worry about land-use restrictions that result from recreational and ecological considerations.
These changes leach out into the poetry. Baxter Black of Colorado wrote:
"If you've been losing sleep at night about the public land,
Yer not alone. We're all concerned with changes wrought by man.
. . . A wall! We need a giant wall to hold the riffraff back,
But since they own the public lands, we'll prob'ly catch some flak."
And there's one more change wrought by man. The growing interest in cowboy poetry has elevated it to the status of a business. At gatherings such as Elko's, dozens of books and tapes of poetry are sold. A few poets even make a living at it.
Waddie Mitchell of Nevada, for example, has recited on "The Tonight Show" and makes about 120 public appearances a year. He hopes to earn enough money to buy a ranch so that he can return to "buckarooing.
Cowboy poetry has even evolved to the point that these sagebrush literati sit in two camps: traditional and free verse. Hal Cannon, a founder of the Elko gathering, said of traditional verse, "You can trace cowboy poetry pretty directly back to England, to the old ballad form of poetry."
Traditional cowboy poetry is easily understood. It rhymes. It often has a four-beat cadence, like the gait of a horse.
Nevada cowboy Rod McQueary writes some free verse. When he recites, his words are spaced as regularly as fence posts:
"When they ask of Life, what will I say?
Can I describe time that swirls,
With fickle castanets,
And disappears?
A shrinking, self-swallowing serpent? ..."
But whether the form is traditional or free verse, a cowboy cannot live by poetry alone. He must have music. So at night in Elko, after the day's poetry sessions had ended, more sounds of the West were heard.
A few blocks down Idaho Street from the Convention Center, at the Stockmen's Motel, cowboys and cowgirls gathered in a meeting hall to listen to jam sessions as pickers and singers sat in circles with guitar, fiddle and mouth harp. They played "Git Along, Little Dogies," "Red River Valley" and "The Streets of Laredo." There were waltzes, ballads and square dance tunes.
By 3 a.m., cowboys and cowgirls began to leave the Stockmen's in twos and threes and fours. On Idaho Street a few cars and pickups cruised. A horn honked. From within one car the bass of the stereo thumped like a heart.
And then amid these city sounds came once again the sound of the West: A cowboy meandered through the Stockmen's parking lot repeating aloud lines recited earlier in the night by poet Buck Ramsey:
"I'll live in time with horse hoof falling;
I'll listen well and hear the calling,
The earth, my mother, bids to me,
Though I will still ride wild and free . . ."
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