The Cowboy Poet and the End of the West
CROKE, BILL
The Cowboy Poet and the End of the West BY BILL CROKE Elko, Nevada The word "buckaroo" is an American corruption of "va-quero," the Spanish word for cowboy. Unlike their counterparts on the Great...
...But his New Age buckaroo experiment sparked a real-estate boom and the rising assessed valuations of nearby properties...
...Sharing the walls with deer and antelope trophies are signed photos of Golden Age of Hollywood regulars Joel McCrea, Dorothy Lam-our, and especially Bing Crosby, whose picture or caricature decorates bars, diners, and fast-food restaurants all over town...
...Not surprisingly, one of the underlying themes of the Elko Cowboy Poets Gathering is the decline of the family ranch...
...he probably would have thought my asking for it an imposition...
...Each pays his last respects...
...Crosby owned a ranch outside of Elko in the 1940s and 1950s, and used to ride a horse in the Fourth of July parade as the town's honorary mayor...
...I shook a hand that felt like rough quartz, introducing myself and the magazine I was writing for...
...Most cowboy poets are stationary in recitation, but onstage Black adds a vaudevillian touch, driving his audiences wild with gymnastic antics and pratfalls...
...You dropped your tally book," he said disinterestedly...
...But you have to add in the Celtic ballad tradition, the precursor of the early American Appalachian folk idiom that has also given us old-time fiddle music and bluegrass...
...The average cowboy—indeed the average native Westerner—is by nature pragmatic, stoic, and utterly lacking in irony...
...I lost a ten dollar roll of quarters in the slots there one evening, then spied a crumpled five-dollar bill on the floor between two slot machines...
...McRae, a ruddy-faced sixty-four and considered a lovable curmudgeon by his peers, is the author of several volumes of verse detailing his life of ranching in the Tongue River region of eastern Montana, particularly the town of Colstrip, home to five generations of McRaes...
...In fact, the Great Basin is misnamed...
...In the 1920s, the poets Curley Fletcher, Badger Clark, and Bruce Kiskaddon— cowboys all—inaugurated the first poet gatherings at rural rodeos...
...They wore big hats and rode on Garcia saddles...
...the number of people under age thirty-five in livestock production has dropped 58 percent in the last thirty years...
...So we'll see...
...He owns 1.5 percent of New Mexico, including the Vermejo Park Ranch at 580,000 acres, the state's largest property...
...That question lies at the heart of cowboy poetry...
...It sounds better than it reads...
...Any good man's saddle...
...He gave me a slight smile and walked away...
...If there is a modernist branch of cowboy poetry, Paul Zarzyski represents it—though he laughed when I asked him if he was the cowboy's Ezra Pound...
...The next morning, in the address that opened the Gathering, the poet Waddie Mitchell—with his trademark waxed mustache and broad brimmed brown hat—focused his brief remarks on the conflict over the public lands in the West and the administrative shift over the years from "dominant use" to "multi-use...
...He is Kack...
...He can bring down the house with "The Throwback": He'd have to savvy the ropes and Be proficient with his lariat skill, For the man who can't handle this basic jok His worth to the outfit is nil...
...The casinos are lively twenty-four hours a day...
...They Bill Croke is a writer in Cody, Wyoming...
...And how can environmentalists say that ranchers like Mitchell who work hard to improve their federal leases are not environmentalists...
...The rider on the far left is a bespectacled man named Claude Dallas, the buckaroo who, in 1981, shot down the two Idaho Fish and Game officers who caught him poaching deer in the remote Owyhee region of southwest Idaho...
...Besides, he had told me who he is...
...He was short and wiry and looked to be about sixty with a weathered face, gray hair, and a drooping, silver walrus mustache...
...I've been known to spend time in barrooms, Call 'em saloons if you choose, But whether I stay and spend all my pay Depends on lots more than the booze...
...Right," I said...
...The first cowboy poems were ballads recited or sung to the accompaniment of fiddle, guitar, and harmonica...
...I never got his real name...
...Then there's the recent New Economy mania for acquiring ranches at which the wealthy can indulge their Ben Cartwright fantasies...
...He was a little pigeon toed and bow legged, the way horsemen always are, and he wasn't at all excited about getting his picture taken...
...Add the fact that the market for beef is oversupplied by corporate agribusinesses fattening mass-produced herds on feedlots, and you have a recipe for intergenerational disaster...
...I ain't smilin'," he said...
...Kack," he repeated testily...
...There was a full moon, and as the plane crossed over the shiny snow ranges, I looked down to see one ranch light shining up from the vast-ness below...
...The cowboy poets' gathering echoes with horror stories of elderly ranchers—masters of large spreads— making poor estate-planning decisions or dying intestate, and their children having to sell to developers just to pay the estate tax...
...Lomax followed up with a more thorough treatment of the tradition with Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cowboy Camp (1919...
...In the residential neighborhoods off Idaho Street, I saw well-kept middle-class homes next to weedy vacant lots and rundown trailer parks...
...Born and reared on a ranch sixty miles from Elko, the best-respected of the current cowboy poets, Waddie Mitchell, remembers that the half-dozen annual journeys he took as a child to town were "like a trip to the city...
...In recitation—he can go for an hour without consulting a text—Mitchell shows a very professional sense of timing and diction...
...In "Story with a Moral," the tale of a lone buckaroo finding a dead cow, he recites: Her eye sockets were alive with maggots that thrive On dead flesh, putrid yellow and green, And the hot sun burnin down, turnin pink things to brown, Spewin ' oily gunk in the stream...
...Given the unpopularity of President Clinton's public-land policies in the West, I was surprised by Murphey's tepid opinion of George W. Bush: "I like his opposition to the estate tax," he said...
...Still, there are 40 percent fewer cattle on the range since 1984, the first year of the Elko Gathering, and Mitchell closed his speech with the question, "Are we here to celebrate or eulogize the cowboy life...
...It's poetry that wants to have a good time...
...Today, the health of the local economy is dictated by beef prices, gold prices (several hardrock mines operate in the area), and a national economy robust enough to encourage visits by tourists interested in hunting, fishing, and summer pack trips in the nearby Ruby Mountains, or the indoor recreation of casino gambling and legal prostitution...
...Lariat," "cincha," "concho," "latigo," and "remuda" were all parts of their vocabulary...
...But in the end, the statistics were overwhelming: There has been no new net income in Rocky Mountain cattle ranching in the last thirty years...
...For he has decided that, oddly enough, They ain't going to take anymore...
...Thorpe's Songs of the Cowboys (1908) and Lomax's Cowboy Songs and other Frontier Ballads (1910) are the first scholarship that we have...
...Hard on the heels of Sierra-Pacific Industries, a California and Oregon timber company, Turner is America's second-largest landowner...
...Unlike their counterparts on the Great Plains, the stockmen of the Great Basin—comprising large parts of Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon—had strong connections with the Southwest and Mexico...
...You can spot them in a widely reproduced 1970s National Geographic photograph by William Albert Allard, which shows a set of horsemen galloping through the sagebrush...
...You know what a kack is...
...You're not worth much without your tally book...
...One ranch light beneath the big buckaroo moon...
...He was walking through the crowd, and I stopped him and asked if I could take his picture...
...At the far end of Idaho Street, near the Interstate, is the Red Lion Inn, Elko's newest and most popular casino, shiny and squeaky clean with Las Vegas pretensions...
...This past year the event was designated the official "National Cowboy Poetry Gathering" by the United States Senate...
...A woman from Texas talked about diversifying her operation by promoting the selective hunting of sage grouse in season...
...And Kack is a buckaroo...
...Black is the "Poet Lariat" of the "Sagebrush Shakespeares," since he alone enjoys a national audience, thanks to the humorous radio monologues he does for National Public Radio...
...A decade ago Ted Turner bought the legendary Flying D Ranch near Bozeman, Montana: 129,000 acres running from the Gallatin River to the crest of the Madison Range...
...Elko is a speck in this huge landscape, but long before there was Las Vegas, there was Elko...
...And the World Series or Super Bowl of cowboy poetry is the Gathering held for a week each January in Elko, Nevada, under the auspices of Elko's Western Folklife Center and a long list of prominent corporate sponsors...
...He was saluted by environmentalists at the time for his foresight in "land stewardship," and because "property rights" is a mantra in the West, the locals felt that Turner could do what he pleased with his ranch...
...He wore a high-crowned gray hat, a soft leather vest, blue neckerchief, faded jeans, and scuffed brown boots...
...Turner had hundreds of miles of interior fences removed so he could raise a large herd of free-ranging bison...
...He honed his raconteur's craft in obscurity, supporting himself as an itinerant "large-animal veterinarian" at big cattle outfits from Idaho to California, and many of his funniest bits are about veterinary medicine as practiced in the rural West...
...And the only thing that you have left now of value, Strange as it seems, is the ground...
...My first thought was that no one on the convention floor could be familiar with horses in anything but a strictly recreational way...
...This tradition was first chronicled by the early folklorists Howard Thorpe and John Lomax...
...The Doc says I need to go someplace that's warm, But shoot, it's just age takin'hold...
...He'd rather throw his prize away...
...Those are the Sagebrush Shakespeare big leagues...
...Ironically, Ted Turner and his ilk—as they chant the dogma of "preserving open space"—are partly responsible for the subdivision and ranchette sprawl of the Bozeman-Gallatin Gateway area and the end of the traditional agricultural economy of the Gallatin Valley...
...Then I saw one man, different from the others...
...A saddle," I said confidently...
...When I nod and they throw this gate open to the same gravity, the same 8 ticks of the clock, number 244 and I will blow for better or worse from this chute—ttesh and destiny up for grabs, a bride's bouquet pitched blind...
...Cat...
...A former rodeo rider and student of the serious poet Richard Hugo at the University of Montana, Zarzyski strives mightily to make his sharp, pun-filled, free-verse poems do anything but rhyme...
...in Montana, the annual net income from farming and ranching is roughly equal to the net government subsidy by the U.S...
...Otherwise, we're just reenactors, like those guys who dress up to reenact Civil War battles...
...At a press conference at the Stockmen's Hotel, Michael Martin Murphey mourned that Western art could survive only if ranch life did...
...They wear yellow rain slickers or long black dusters and high-crowned hats...
...But he had him a rifle and twenty-odd shells, And he sets on the porch by the door...
...This ocean of sagebrush also has twenty-five thousand feral horses roaming wild—with federal protection, to the consternation of the ranch owners...
...The sky behind them is black with storm...
...Robert Burns, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Service, and Robert Frost are the main influences on cowboy poet-ry—insofar as it has discernible literary roots...
...Mitchell's rival, Baxter Black, is Mark Twain served up with a little Groucho Marx...
...He said, "My name's Kack...
...Phrases like "land trusts" and "conservation easements" were thrown around...
...Downtown are the Stockmen's Hotel and the Commercial Hotel, venerable seedy monuments to Elko's colorful past, dim and smoky places with worn carpets...
...Christie's, Sotheby's, and other famous auction houses now routinely list trophy ranches, and pages of them are found in the "Weekend Journal" section of the Wall Street Journal...
...Indeed, for most of those ranchers, the federal government is a stern and uncompromising landlord in matters of grazing fees, environmental regulations, and the unpopular mustangs...
...A related Basque influence gave them woolly sheepskin chaps and a better sense of cooking than the Midwest typically knew...
...The Stockmen's and the Commercial are typical of the town...
...The town dates to 1868, when it was a stop on the new eastward-reaching Central Pacific Railroad...
...About as far as you can get on the other end of the spectrum is the work of Wallace McRae...
...Known as "cowboy poetry," it may be far healthier than the culture it celebrates and seeks to preserve...
...If he can't make the valley, And won't see another day, He won't let them have this pistol...
...It has an airport, with a terminal about the size of a large convenience store—though Elko County is the fifth-largest county in the nation, bigger than Delaware, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, and the District of Columbia combined...
...It is a vast, empty land, what geologists call "Basin and Range...
...At the Convention Center I attended a two-hour seminar entitled "Securing Ranching's Future...
...Smile if you like," I said, and immediately regretted saying, as I saw his steady stare in the viewfinder...
...At the 2001 Cowboy Poetry Gathering at the Elko Convention Center, most of the Stetson hats worn by the visitors were the well-brushed western specialty-store kind, as were the new sharp-creased Wranglers and five-hundred-dollar custom-made boots sporting cactus or cowboy-on-a-buck-ing-horse designs...
...Now you'd think with this list ofrequire-ments That the job would've been hard to fill, But the human race now and then breeds a throwback, And for some reason these men fit the bill...
...One can't say that cowboy poetry is dismissed in elite academic circles as nothing more than doggerel: It would be dismissed that way, if anyone in elite academic circles had ever heard of it...
...My saddle," he said, as if to correct me...
...He was to Elko what Frank Sinatra was to Las Vegas...
...Steeped in the ranch life, Mitchell's verse is known for its vivid imagery and sometimes unpleasant ranch realism...
...You'll hear no keening to the vaulted skies But the good hands know when a good hand dies...
...Today, a rancher's greatest enemy is not drought, blizzards, or plagues of grasshoppers, but estate taxes...
...As I took the shot I dropped the notebook sandwiched under my arm...
...It's made up of over a hundred and fifty mountain ranges separated by wide valleys with scattered small towns and two thousand ranches raising a half million head of cattle...
...A town of eighteen thousand people on Interstate 80, Elko is about as remote from anywhere else in the West as you can get: 236 miles west of Salt Lake City, 186 miles south of Boise, 289 miles east of Reno, and 470 miles north of Las Vegas...
...A steady stream of truckers roll off the Interstate and make a beeline for the bordellos...
...They somehow share a secret bond As each one recollects: TogetherSeparateSilently...
...Using a favorite rodeo metaphor, he told me, "I try to make every line an eight-second bucking-horse ride...
...The classic scene is the campfire after a long, hard day trailing cattle...
...How can anyone prove he's an environmentalist...
...Otherwise, I didn't hear much during the campaign concerning agricultural policy...
...Sounding like the old Sagebrush Rebellion warrior he is, Mitchell talked about the West's half a billion acres of public-domain land, constantly wrangled over by environmentalists and the so-called "extractive industries," including ranching...
...Across the West, private land is increasingly valuable for uses other than livestock...
...I thought about him as I flew from Elko to Salt Lake, the first leg of the journey home...
...Lately I've noticed some pain in my joints, Gets worse as the weather gets cold...
...Cowboy poetry's great sin among the culture snobs is that it's recited, rhyming verse as entertainment—and so is presumed to offer no great insights into the human condition...
...But this regional phenomenon is responsible for the cowboy-poetry gatherings that are held every weekend in locations scattered across the West— not to mention a cottage industry of small-press books, CDs, cassette tapes, calendars, T-shirts, etc...
...A community of ranchers and gold miners sprung up around the depot...
...Elko has seen better days...
...The casino taketh, and the casino giveth away—minus its commission...
...Prominent venues are Santa Clarita, California, Lewistown, Montana, and Riverton, Wyoming...
...Department of Agriculture...
...This gives the poetry, though leavened with tragedy, a comic tinge...
...Suddenly it was chic to be a rancher in Montana...
...ride with purpose—though what the purpose is, who can say anymore...
...Some of Elko's trouble can be traced to declining gold prices, but the bulk of it is due to the failing ranch economy...
...I asked Murphey—a popular, red-bearded, fifty-five-year-old singer of Western songs—if he was cheered by the arrival of the new administration in Washington...
...We're coming to take everything that you have, Your credit's no good, so we've found...
...Turner also owns large ranches in South Dakota and Nebraska...
...In the last twenty years the dying buckaroo culture of itinerant wranglers, cowhands, and camp cooks has inspired the revival of a minor genre of American literature...
...Is it a vibrant, contemporary art form or a reenactor's commentary on the stuff of museums...
Vol. 6 • April 2001 • No. 28
