Elko, Nevada
The word “buckaroo” is an American corruption of “vaquero,” the Spanish word for cowboy. 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. “Lariat,” “cincha,” “concho,” “latigo,” and “remuda” were all parts of their vocabulary. They wore big hats and rode on Garcia saddles. A related Basque influence gave them woolly sheepskin chaps and a better sense of cooking than the Midwest typically knew.
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. The sky behind them is black with storm. They wear yellow rain slickers or long black dusters and high-crowned hats. They ride with purpose — though what the purpose is, who can say anymore? 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.
If he can’t make the valley,
And won’t see another day,
He won’t let them have this pistol;
He’d rather throw his prize away.
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. Known as “cowboy poetry,” it may be far healthier than the culture it celebrates and seeks to preserve.
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. 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. Prominent venues are Santa Clarita, California, Lewistown, Montana, and Riverton, Wyoming.
Those are the Sagebrush Shakespeare big leagues. 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. This past year the event was designated the official “National Cowboy Poetry Gathering” by the United States Senate.
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. 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.”
In fact, the Great Basin is misnamed. 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. This ocean of sagebrush also has twenty-five thousand feral horses roaming wild — with federal protection, to the consternation of the ranch owners. 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. Elko is a speck in this huge landscape, but long before there was Las Vegas, there was Elko.
The town dates to 1868, when it was a stop on the new eastward-reaching Central Pacific Railroad. A community of ranchers and gold miners sprung up around the depot. 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. The casinos are lively twenty-four hours a day. A steady stream of truckers roll off the Interstate and make a beeline for the bordellos.
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. (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. The casino taketh, and the casino giveth away — minus its commission.)
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. Sharing the walls with deer and antelope trophies are signed photos of Golden Age of Hollywood regulars Joel McCrea, Dorothy Lamour, and especially Bing Crosby, whose picture or caricature decorates bars, diners, and fast-food restaurants all over town. 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. He was to Elko what Frank Sinatra was to Las Vegas.
The Stockmen’s and the Commercial are typical of the town. Elko has seen better days. In the residential neighborhoods off Idaho Street, I saw well-kept middle-class homes next to weedy vacant lots and rundown trailer parks. Some of Elko’s trouble can be traced to declining gold prices, but the bulk of it is due to the failing ranch economy.
We’re coming to take everything that you
have,
Your credit’s no good, so we’ve found.
And the only thing that you have left
now of value,
Strange as it seems, is the ground.
Today, a rancher’s greatest enemy is not drought, blizzards, or plagues of grasshoppers, but estate taxes. Across the West, private land is increasingly valuable for uses other than livestock. 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. 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.
But he had him a rifle and twenty-odd
shells,
And he sets on the porch by the door;
For he has decided that, oddly enough,
They ain’t going to take anymore.
Then there’s the recent New Economy mania for acquiring ranches at which the wealthy can indulge their Ben Cartwright fantasies. 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. 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.
Turner had hundreds of miles of interior fences removed so he could raise a large herd of free-ranging bison. 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. But his New Age buckaroo experiment sparked a real-estate boom and the rising assessed valuations of nearby properties. Suddenly it was chic to be a rancher in Montana.
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. Turner also owns large ranches in south Dakota and Nebraska. He owns 1.5 percent of New Mexico, including the Vermejo Park Ranch at 580,000 acres, the state’s largest property. Hard on the heels of Sierra-Pacific Industries, a California and Oregon timber company, Turner is America’s second-largest landowner.
Not surprisingly, one of the underlying themes of the Elko Cowboy Poets Gathering is the decline of the family ranch. At the Convention Center I attended a two-hour seminar entitled “Securing Ranching’s Future.” A woman from Texas talked about diversifying her operation by promoting the selective hunting of sage grouse in season. Phrases like “land trusts” and “conservation easements” were thrown around. 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; in Montana, the annual net income from farming and ranching is roughly equal to the net government subsidy by the U.S. Department of Agriculture; the number of people under age thirty-five in livestock production has dropped 58 percent in the last thirty years.
Lately I’ve noticed some pain in my
joints,
Gets worse as the weather gets cold.
The Doc says I need to go someplace
that’s warm,
But shoot, it’s just age takin’ hold.
At a press conference at the Stockmen’s Hotel, Michael Martin Murphey mourned that Western art could survive only if ranch life did. “Otherwise, we’re just reenactors, like those guys who dress up to reenact Civil War battles.” 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. 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. “Otherwise, I didn’t hear much during the campaign concerning agricultural policy. So we’ll see.”
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.” 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. “How can anyone prove he’s an environmentalist?” And how can environmentalists say that ranchers like Mitchell who work hard to improve their federal leases are not environmentalists?
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?”
That question lies at the heart of cowboy poetry. Is it a vibrant, contemporary art form or a reenactor’s commentary on the stuff of museums? 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. The average cowboy — indeed the average native Westerner — is by nature pragmatic, stoic, and utterly lacking in irony. This gives the poetry, though leavened with tragedy, a comic tinge. It’s poetry that wants to have a good time.
I’ve been known to spend time in bar-
rooms,
Call ’em saloons if you choose,
But whether I stay and spend all my pay
Depends on lots more than the booze.
Robert Burns, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Service, and Robert Frost are the main influences on cowboy poetry — insofar as it has discernible literary roots. 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 first cowboy poems were ballads recited or sung to the accompaniment of fiddle, guitar, and harmonica. The classic scene is the campfire after a long, hard day trailing cattle. This tradition was first chronicled by the early folklorists Howard Thorpe and John Lomax. Thorpe’s Songs of the Cowboys (1908) and Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and other Frontier Ballads (1910) are the first scholarship that we have. Lomax followed up with a more thorough treatment of the tradition with Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cowboy Camp (1919). In the 1920s, the poets Curley Fletcher, Badger Clark, and Bruce Kiskaddon — cowboys all — inaugurated the first poet gatherings at rural rodeos.
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.” Steeped in the ranch life, Mitchell’s verse is known for its vivid imagery and sometimes unpleasant ranch realism. 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’s oily gunk in the stream.
It sounds better than it reads. In recitation — he can go for an hour without consulting a text — Mitchell shows a very professional sense of timing and diction. 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
job,
His worth to the outfit is nil.
Now you’d think with this list of require-
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.
Mitchell’s rival, Baxter Black, is Mark Twain served up with a little Groucho Marx. 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. Most cowboy poets are stationary in recitation, but onstage Black adds a vaudevillian touch, driving his audiences wild with gymnastic antics and pratfalls. 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.
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. 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. Using a favorite rodeo metaphor, he told me, “I try to make every line an eight-second bucking-horse ride.”
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 — flesh and destiny up
for grabs, a bride’s bouquet
pitched blind.
About as far as you can get on the other end of the spectrum is the work of Wallace McRae. 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.
They somehow share a secret bond
As each one recollects:
Together Separate Silently.
Each pays his last respects.
You’ll hear no keening to the valuated
skies
But the good hands know when a good
hand dies.
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-bucking-horse designs. My first thought was that no one on the convention floor could be familiar with horses in anything but a strictly recreational way.
Then I saw one man, different from the others. He was walking through the crowd, and I stopped him and asked if I could take his picture.
He was short and wiry and looked to be about sixty with a weathered face, gray hair, and a drooping, silver walrus mustache. He wore a high-crowned gray hat, a soft leather vest, blue neckerchief, faded jeans, and scuffed brown boots. 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.
“Smile if you like,” I said, and immediately regretted saying, as I saw his steady stare in the viewfinder.
“I ain’t smilin’,” he said.
As I took the shot I dropped the notebook sandwiched under my arm. “You dropped your tally book,” he said disinterestedly. “You’re not worth much without your tally book.”
I shook a hand that felt like rough quartz, introducing myself and the magazine I was writing for. He said, “My name’s Kack.”
“Cat?”
“Kack,” he repeated testily. “You know what a kack is?”
“A saddle,” I said confidently.
“My saddle,” he said, as if to correct me. “Any good man’s saddle.”
“Right,” I said. He gave me a slight smile and walked away. I never got his real name; he probably would have thought my asking for it an imposition. Besides, he had told me who he is. He is Kack. And Kack is a buckaroo.
I thought about him as I flew from Elko to Salt Lake, the first leg of the journey home. 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 vastness below.
One ranch light beneath the big buckaroo moon.
Bill Croke is a writer in Cody, Wyoming.
