Where the Buffalo Roam, Stories Are Told Via Poem

JoAnn Hoffman, a worldly California art dealer and model, got smitten with the last man in the world she would have expected--a cowboy from South Dakota.

He wooed her with his seductive, honest poetry, plumbed from his soul by way of his heart, each one signed, “Always your buckaroo.”

She married him, and now she’s a denim-and-boots cowgirl, with a smile as wide as the brim of her hat.

Hoffman, 46, has since discovered that the world of cowboy poetry includes a lot more buckaroo writers than just her husband.

This week she and her husband, Robb Hoffman, drove 18 hours in subzero temperatures, from Hill City, S.D., to this northern Nevada railroad, mining and cattle town to attend the 18th annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

About 8,000 people are expected to attend the function, which concludes tonight. They’re filling every motel room, clogging the streets with their extended-cab pickups, parading through town beneath a sea of cowboy hats and pouring into the convention center to be warmed by the prose, poems and simple songs of working cowboys.

“For people who value this lifestyle and ethic, the poetry tells the story,” Robb Hoffman, 45, said. “Cowboying is a dying breed. But we still have the stories, and when they connect, there are tears.”

More than 250 cowboy poetry gatherings have sprung up around the country, from Oregon to Texas--and a popular one that is staged annually in Santa Clarita--but this is the granddaddy.

“This has turned out to be much bigger than cowboys and poetry,” said Waddie Mitchell, 51, a local rancher and poet who helped launch this cowboy Woodstock in 1985. “It’s Americana. We’re celebrating the cowboy’s philosophy, reflecting on what’s really important: family, friends, the land and reestablishing links to our traditions.”

These are poems written by cowboys and cowgirls for one another, providing intimate snapshots of hard, honest, uncomplicated lives, and the unpretentious relationships they have with the land, the animals and each other.

They rhapsodize about the sunsets, complain about the cows, praise their ponies, compliment their neighbors and curse--and thank--the land.

One of the most popular cowboy poets, Wallace McRae, wrote about cowboys preparing for a cattle roundup in “One More Shipping Day,” including this verse:

You can see the frosty grass now, in the pre-dawn’s eerie light,

And there’s just a hint of light above the hill.

To the west a coyote caterwauls farewell to his friend, Night.

But except for him, and us, the world is still.

“This gathering is an oxymoron--cowboys and poetry, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of winter,” Mitchell said. “Whoever would have thought it would have taken off like it has? But it seems that people are hungry for this.”

Cowboy poetry dates to the early 1800s, fashioned by men and boys on the trails, around the campfires or in the bunkhouses, passing the time by telling stories blended with bravado and hyperbole, wit and poignancy. Storytelling evolved into cowboy theater.

Similar literary genres developed among loggers, railroaders, sailors and soldiers.

These cowboy stories framed an oral history of the Old West and frequently were put to rhyme so they could more easily be memorized and passed along.

By the late 1800s, some poems were being printed in cow town newspapers; in the early 1900s, the first anthologies were printed in book form. Cowboy novelty songs were being performed on stages in the 1930s, by yodeling cowboys accompanied by harmonicas and accordions. But by and large, this genuine cowboy art form played only to cowboy audiences.

To the public, cowboys seemed a tough, calloused breed, hardened by blazing summers and frigid winters, solitary and stoic, free of emotion and civil sensibilities. But in fact their lives were rich with experience, and they felt compelled to share it, at least among themselves.

Mitchell operated a cattle ranch outside of Elko and heard his cowhands reciting poems, old and new. There’s an audience for this, he thought, among all the cowboys around these parts.

Mitchell and folklorist Hal Cannon together staged the first poetry gathering in 1985, with more than 50 cowboys reciting their poems. It captured an immediate following, and the Elko gathering has now grown to capacity, limited only by the number of motel rooms in town. Even this week, with frigid temperatures and icicles draped on cars like crystal concertina wire, the followers have made their pilgrimage.

They come not just for the poetry but for seminars: rawhide braiding, horsehair hitching, gourmet trail food. There are headier sessions too: preserving watershed, financial management advice for female ranchers, rangeland restoration after fire.

But mostly, people come for the poetry, which in genuine hands can be the most emotional use of language.

“The poems reflect deep, Christian values,” said Bill Davis, 59, a grain inspector for California’s department of agriculture who drove from Sacramento with his wife, Lou Ann. “Family values, good morals.”

It’s popular among younger audiences too. “I love the history and the storytelling,” said Kari Martin, 25, of Yerington, Nev. “I’m from a ranching family, and it’s nice to hear how the life used to be.”

With broadened exposure, cowboy poetry has found not only an audience beyond the rural West but also among writers hoping to emulate the style but whose boots may never have stomped through a corral.

“Our initial ranching audience has extended to wannabes,” said Charlie Seeman, executive director of the Western Folklife Center, which sponsors the gathering.

Organizers feed the interest, providing workshops during the week on poetry writing.

“Maybe we’re all cowboys, or we want to be,” said participant Doug Miller, 54, a high school English teacher from White Salmon, Wash. “Cowboy poetry seems a contradiction: You can’t visualize cowboys sitting around writing poetry. But then you understand that they’re celebrating the land that they nurture and protect, and the relationships that they’ve developed with the land and one another.”

Blake Allmendinger, a professor of American literature at UCLA who wrote “The Cowboy,” a study of cowboy poetry, wonders if the genre is being hijacked by non-cowboy writers.

“We’re seeing [other] people jumping on the bandwagon, and it makes me wonder what a person’s credentials have to be,” he said. “Just live in the country? Put on a cowboy hat and be able to rhyme? Are people appropriating that persona? Cowboy poetry is elastic and [new works] aren’t exactly like what they used to be.”

But the art form remains vibrant, said John Dofflemyer, who lives along the western slope of California’s Sierra Nevada, near Visalia. A widely published poet and a fifth-generation rancher, he was this week’s keynote speaker.

Dofflemyer said he began writing poetry while attending a boarding school far from home. “I dealt with that by writing about the rural landscape. It was my release.”

Modern cowboy poetry embraces contemporary issues--tensions with environmentalists, frustration with the economy, anger at the government. But they largely follow the traditional template of a cowboy poem--long-metered, clip-clop couplets.

The new poems are replacing bravado and slapstick humor with introspection and vulnerability, said Dofflemyer, 53, who for years published a cowboy poetry quarterly. Contemporary subjects better resonate with readers today who question their values and reevaluate their lifestyles, although the poems may still contain passages that only cowboys can relate to.

The terrorist attacks Sept. 11 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted more writings, still and always with a cowboy’s perspective on life and relationships.

While not drawing direct reference to the attacks, Waddie Mitchell said he was moved by Sept. 11 to reflect on how people deal with conflict.

His effort, “Harsh Words,” opens with this verse:

When you face an altercation

With a loved one or a friend,

And what you say next could determine

How things turn out in the end,

Hold a tight rein on emotions,

Keep them checked at any cost,

For they can stampede all your senses

And a temper’s easily lost.