Words Don’t Always Rhyme but Seldom Is Heard a Discouraging One

No one ever confused Allen McCanless with T. S. Eliot, but listen to the gait of his words and you can smell the prairie winds. Listen and you hear a cowboy’s soul, alone and free in the vast kingdom of Western mythology:

... My ceiling the sky, my carpet the grass,

My music the lowing of herds as they pass;

My books are the brooks, my sermons the stones,

My parson’s a wolf on a pulpit of bones ...

McCanless’ poem, published in 1885 and once sung as a night-herding tune, is an example of cowboy poetry, part of a little-studied oral tradition of the West that still flourishes on ranches from Montana to Texas. Unlikely as it may sound, no working men in America are more closely identified with writing and reciting poetry than cowboys. And none get more quizzical looks than a cowboy who comes out of the closet and admits he is a practicing poet.

“I’ve been writing poetry for years,” said Gene Jordan, a cowboy from Bayfield, Colo. “I kept a pen hidden under the bed all that time ‘cause my wife’d say: ‘Don’t embarrass people with that garbage.’ She’s my ex-wife now.”

Until recently, poetry was the cowboy’s secret, a private language for the expression of shared experiences. It was full of creaking leather and the tramp of horses’ feet and the smoke of campfires many miles from all concrete.

Let people that set and talk explain

just whether I’m wrong or right.

My hoss is pullin’ the bridle reins

and I’m hittin’ the trail tonight.

--Bruce Kiskadoon

Ten years ago, the closet door started opening on cowboy poetry. On a tour of Western ranches, Utah folklorist Hal Cannon was amazed to find that poetry was still as much a part of the modern cowboy’s life as it had been in the days of the unfenced range. This storytelling in verse represented, he thought, an important form of American folklore that deserved to be heard and preserved.

As director of the Western Folklore Center in Salt Lake City, Cannon organized the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering here in Elko in 1985. More than 50 working cowboys showed up to recite their poems. They came not to mourn a vanishing era but to celebrate a life that is still as free and independent as any we know today.

Since that first session, cowboy poets have appeared on the “Tonight Show” and “Good Morning, America,” and toured college campuses as far east as Dartmouth in Hanover, N.H. They are suddenly in demand at cattlemen’s conventions and county fairs throughout the West, and cowboy poetry festivals are scheduled this summer from Big Timber, Mont., to Prescott, Ariz.

Thin Volumes

More than 200 books of cowboy poetry--many of them thin volumes published privately and available only in tack shops and local drugstores--are on the market. Baxter Black alone has sold more than 50,000 copies of his books. Cannon’s anthology of cowboy poetry has sold 30,000 copies.

“If you look at cowboy poetry as a technician, you can riddle it,” Cannon said. “It’s simple meter, simple form. But people reserve poetry for the most important things they have to say. Throughout time, our best histories of different civilizations have come through poetry, because poetry is what you feel about your history and how you make the language sing. So if you look for the emotions, the pure language, the vernacular, cowboy poetry becomes very heady, wonderful stuff.”

The cowboys--more than 200 of them this time, plus 1,500 or so friends and fans--came to Elko again recently, for the fifth annual poetry gathering. They wore tight Levi’s, bandannas, shirts with snap buttons and ten-gallon hats that are not removed, even during dinner. Many, like Waddie Mitchell, the ranch boss on a spread outside Elko, had spent the previous day tending cattle, carrying hay through the snow-covered meadows and preparing for the March calving season.

Cowboy Town

Elko (population 16,000) made them feel at home. It is still a cowboy town, just as it was in the 1800s when longhorns were driven to the railhead here. It is a place where people do not wear granny glasses or order cherries in their cocktails. Bartenders at the Stockmen’s and the century-old Commercial Hotel hand customers bottles of beer, on the assumption that no one would drink beer from a glass, and at J. M. Capriola’s, one of the West’s finest saddle makers, cowboys speak in hushed tones as though they had entered a church.

Anyone in improper dress stands out like a choirboy. When Kim Stafford, a (non-cowboy) poet and essayist from Oregon, attended the gathering two years ago wearing a straw Stetson, a man from Montana took him gently aside and said: “Son, we don’t wear straw in the winter. Besides, that hat’s got a Texas crease in it.”

For three days, these men and women from places such as Stagecoach, Nev.; Eagle, Ida.; Red Owl, S.D., and Lomita, Tex., shared their poems with each other in the Elko Convention Center. Clarence Wager, speaking of the man who patented barbed wire, said that “Joe Glidden’s dream is a pretty poor scheme for keeping this business alive,” and Don Kennington read a poem to his 82-year-old cowboy-father who had taught him to mount a horse from the left, milk a cow from the right, stay behind a mule and in front of a woman.

Their poems were about people and real happenings, about ornery broncs and long trails, about a love that is between not man and woman but man and land. Nearly all, like the late Badger Clark’s “A Cowboy’s Prayer,” echoed with an appreciation of a life not miscast:

I thank you, Lord, that I am placed so well,

That you have made my freedom so complete

That I’m no slave of whistle, clock or bell,

Nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street.

Whatever popularity cowboy poetry has gained in the West, its appeal does not stretch far over the Rockies. The New York Times Book Review devoted a full page to the medium in January under the headline: “Whoop-ee-ti-yo, Git Along Little Doggerel.” The article’s author, Edward Hoagland, concluded: “Cowboys don’t really write poetry any better than lawyers play golf, but you can learn a good deal about lawyers by how they play golf.”

Perhaps. But Western literature--the success of Larry McMurtry and the late Louis L’Amour not withstanding--has generally not been favorably received in the East either. It is considered the stuff of dime novels and were it not for university presses from Oklahoma westward, many notable works of the West never would have been published.

‘Real Struggle’

“It’s true, there’s a real struggle to get this stuff published, even deserving manuscripts,” said Robert Cowley, a New York editor who has worked for several major publishing houses. “Why the reluctance? The reason is New York. People in publishing here have a vacation and they go to Europe. Oh, they might go to California, but they certainly don’t go to Montana or Nevada. This is a very insular business, focused on New York and London. There is little awareness of other parts of the country.”

As cowboy poetry--and the Elko gathering--grow more popular, Cannon, the folklorist, sees potential danger. If the medium becomes overtly commercial, it will lose its authenticity. The poets will play to their audiences, instead of to each other. Or worse, the poets will be dudes from State Street instead of hired hands from the Double Bar X.

“When things get popular and you’re in front of an audience, strange things start to happen,” said Wally McRae, a Montana rancher. “You tend to read or recite funny. Our experiences come from deep emotion, and in front of an audience, you’re apt to forget that and just look instead for acceptance.”

Stories to Tell

But as the language of the working range, cowboy poetry will probably survive as long as cowboys have cattle to move and stories to tell about it. In Elko, a visitor whose ears are tuned to city murmurings can hear the song of magic words in every conversation, as one did recently when two cowboys with drooping mustaches met at the Stockmen’s bar. The jukebox was playing Keith Whitley’s “Hard Livin’ ” and the two men talked quietly while both stared straight ahead.

“Did you heal up pretty good after gettin’ throwed, John?”

“Yup, I don’t hurt nowhere anymore.”

“I can’t tell you about bein’ crippled up. You been crippled up more’n me.”

“Only problem I got now is I can’t bend over for any period a time. Can’t shoe a horse even. But I can still ride pretty good.”

“Did you know I got a new baby daughter, 15 months ago?”

“You don’t say.”

“Yup. Course, don’t know what to do with her ‘cept put her on the table as a centerpiece, but I sure am delighted to have the little buckaroo.”