Prairie Poets Meet at ‘Cowboy Woodstock’

‘Can you imagine John Wayne or Gary Cooper breaking into poetry?’

--Guy Logsdon

“Well, this sure blows the image to hell,” Guy Logsdon of Tulsa muttered through his cigar.

“The cowboy is the epitome of American manhood and here these sons of bitches are writing poetry for each other. Poets are supposed to be sissies. Can you imagine John Wayne or Gary Cooper breaking into poetry?”

Logsdon, who claims to have “the world’s largest collection of dirty cowboy poems,” was the last speaker at the First Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a three-day get-together for buckaroo balladeers that ended Saturday night in Elko, a northeast Nevada town of 8,758 that boasts it is “the last real cow town in the West.”

It was a whooping success--”the cowboy Woodstock,” exulted Hal Cannon, director of the Institute for the American West, which sponsored the gathering.

About 110 cowboy and cowgirl poets, along with 400 friends and fans, read and listened to verses based on the daily lives of cowboys and ranchers, past and present.

They returned to the roots of America’s century-old love affair with the cowboy as a symbol of national character and a heroic past, and found them alive and deep.

The session was meant to honor a tradition that goes back to the frontier and encourage an American folk art that has persisted for a century in regional isolation, Cannon said.

“Hollywood made the singing cowboy famous with his guitar,” said Nyle Henderson of Hotchkiss, Colo., who breaks horses and guides pack trains in the Rockies.

“I’ve been in quite a few cow camps and around a lot of campfires, and I can’t hardly remember anybody who ever played a guitar. But there’s almost always several guys who know some poems and stories, and they take turns reciting them.”

Cowboys of all types, from educated outdoorsmen with advanced university degrees to cattle state drifters in flashy outfits, turned the Elko Convention Center into a bobbing sea of cowboy hats.

On hand were cowboys who wrote a little poetry and poets who did a little cowboying.

There were aged sons and daughters of the pioneers, their faces tanned to leathery monuments by a half-century of Nevada summers or Wyoming winters.

There were fresh-faced young men flaunting the buckaroo finery that has sprouted in popularity among some young cowpunchers in certain parts of the West--jeans tucked into ornately colored boots with very high riding heels, silky neck scarfs in bright pastels, enormous droopy hats right out of 19th-Century tintypes and large mustaches, twisted and waxed to Salvador Dali ends of wire-thin fineness in serpentine loops.

“Lordy, those boys look like the old photographs of my grandfathers,” exclaimed one ranch matron.

There were professional codgers, men in their 60s and 70s who have turned tales of their colorful youths, a “shucks ma’am” drawl and a talent for personifying America’s past into a semi-pro occupation as walking museum exhibits.

There were rodeo riders. There were owners of great spreads who worry about cattle diseases and federal regulations, serious businessmen and women in conservative Western garb who had to mobilize the neighbors to fill in for them on the chores so they could take a vacation.

They brought poems written by themselves or parents and grandparents. Or they recited works by poets popular in the West, some of them dead for generations, others writing today.

They read poems about smart horses and stupid cows, or sometimes vice versa, about cherished dogs or vanished youths.

Bad Jobs, Good Waitresses

There were poems about the beauty of the land, the bitterness of mountain winters and dirty jobs like delivering calves. There were poems praising the coffee bean or a good waitress in a cafe or damning the federal bureaucracy, and poems about windmills and pickup trucks and sunsets and manure.

Cowboy poems resemble the poetry of the turn of the century, not the deeply introspective abstractions of modern poets. The poems are almost always simple, rhythmic verses with funny or melodramatic endings, of the kind typical of Robert Service or Rudyard Kipling, whose outdoor, adventure-oriented poetry was a popular influence on the form.

Most of the participants gathered Wednesday in Salt Lake City to catch a late-night train to Elko. As the train rolled through the desert about midnight, Big Jim Griffith wrapped his 6-foot, 7-inch frame around his guitar, propped his boots against the window sill and began singing “Long Journey Home:”

“Black smoke rising and it surely is a train. . . .”

Mike Korn accompanied on banjo and the crowded Amtrak car sang along. Nearby were Chip Rawlins, Zac Reisner and Freeman Smith.

It was television heaven--”real cowboys,” the vanishing knights of America’s golden past, caught live and singing. Film at 11. The TV camera lights blazed and the lenses cruised in on them like circling sharks.

As it turned out, TV had missed the rhyming ranch hands to zero in on academia-by-the-Pecos, to the chagrin of Griffith and Korn, who were embarrassed to be mistaken for cowboys instead of cowboy watchers.

Academic Backgrounds

Griffith, originally from Pasadena and Thousand Oaks, has a doctorate in cultural anthropology and hangs his Stetson at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he is director of the Southwest Folklore Center. Korn grew up in Van Nuys and earned a master’s degree in folklore study from the University of Western Kentucky.

Rawlins is a genuine range inspector for the U.S. Forest Service in Wyoming, who also has a master’s degree in literature, publishes modern poetry in little journals and is up for a writer-in-residence post at a prestigious private university.

It was Griffith who originated the idea for the gathering at a 1979 conference for state folklorists at the Library of Congress. It was funded by about $75,000 in grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Western cultural foundations. Folklorists from 15 states nominated poets from their states.

South Dakota sent Jo Casteel, who runs a 10,000-acre ranch near the Black Hills with her husband, Tom, and two children. Six neighbors agreed to look after their 450 cattle and 600 sheep so she could attend.

Gentle Feminism

Casteel, who has written some gently feminist poems chiding the traditional cowboy masculinity, said: “I’m no women’s-libber, but I stick to my guns.” She said she had written poems for years, “just about the daily life on the ranch, anything funny or not so funny, and I just stuck them in a drawer.”

“My family got after me to do something with them,” she said, “so I published them in a little book.” Her twin sister drew the cover illustration and her 11-year-old son drew some of the others.

Billy Fouts of Sonora, Calif., a horse wrangler and mule-train driver for the government in Yosemite National Park, said he was “flabbergasted” to find there were so many others like him, but it was difficult to appear on a stage with a microphone with poetry that was written in solitude.

“I usually just recite my poetry to the trees or maybe a few fellers around a campfire,” Fouts said. “I was shaking so hard the first time I went up on that stage, I had to stand with my back against the wall.”

From Kanab, Utah, came Buck Croft, who said he had been a wrangler for many movie companies and rode in rodeos for 22 years until “I got a sudden attack of common sense.” He now hunts lost cows for ranchers in the Arizona strip area north of the Grand Canyon.

Imaginary Dog

Croft has an imaginary dog named Blue, whom he pets and talks to. Sometimes he bawls people out for stepping on Blue’s tail, “which just gets some waitresses plum disturbed,” he said, adding, “one place, they made me take Blue outside.” Commented another cowboy: “He named his make-believe dog Blue? The man has no imagination.”

The cowboy is not vanishing at all, according to Korn. “If a culture is viable it survives, and the cow culture is viable,” Korn said. “As long as people eat beef, somebody has to breed the cows and chase them around.

“But it is changing, that’s what cultures do.”

National Mythology

Freeman Smith, whose wife Emily inherited a 15,000-acre ranch in Arizona founded by her grandfather, called the gathering a chance for cowboys and ranchers to remind themselves of the position they hold in national mythology.

“Cowboys, however Americans define them, have become symbols of the freedom of the individual,” Smith said. “. . . Americans feel they can be part of this code of honesty and integrity.

“The myth isn’t literally true. There are real cowboys who are dirty sons of bitches who would cross you up. But it’s founded on a reality that, among cow people, your word is your bond. A handshake is a contract.

“Without such ideals, we have no measure of our accomplishments.”