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The Right Word Round Up

Cowboys don't write poetry, they talk it. Elko, Nev., lies along I-80 in a high desert basin 125 miles east of Winemucca. Out here a four-by-four is far from the toy it is in California; it's one of life's necessities. When it's eight below-so cold spit freezes when it hits the ground-a four-wheel-drive can save a person's life. In Nevada cowboys call themselves "buckaroos," and Elko bills itself the "Buckaroo Capital of the High Desert." It's rugged country, the best place for the Western Folklife Center's annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

The Convention Center stands in the middle of a snow-covered park on the outskirts of town. Inside the heated lobby mingles a colorful collection of rugged looking men and strong willed women, bronc riders and buckaroos, dime store cowboys and shivering California tourists. They chat warmly over the merits of Justin's boots over Tony Lama's, of Wrangler over Levi, of saddles and Stetsons, of horses and verses.

Cowboy poetry enthusiasts say it's both the splendor of American West and the boredom and loneliness of the prairie that first inspired buckaroos to take up verse. Its themes run from the reverent to the absurd. Subject matter can be as somber as the son crippled by a fall from a horse or as lighthearted as an appreciation of the "Lowly Cow-chip." ("Good for growin' lots of corn and wheat/ In fact there's a little cow chip/ in everything we eat.") A respect for, and an awe of, the land itself is mixed with a bit of the tall tale and a lot of the shaggy dog.

"All day o'er the prairie alone I ride,

Not even a dog to run by my side;

My fire I kindle from chips gathered round,

And boil my coffee without being ground.

"Bread lacking leaven' I bake in a pot,

And sleep on the ground for want of a cot;

I wash in a puddle, and wipe on a sack,

And carry my wardrobe all on my back.

"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...

Cowboy poets, like most Americans, hold political views that range from shallow left to hard right. But a recurring subtext throughout the three days of the February gathering, despite the expressed reverence for "the land," is a backhanded commentary directed at "environmentalists." Poet Dick Ufford sums it when he jokes, "Nevadans hold no deep love for serious environmentalists." It's a sentiment that reflects the "mind your own business" attitude settlers come west to find.

But with wilderness land shrinking and wildlife endangered, many ranches, like Mary's River Ranch, 40 miles northeast of Elko and the home of poet and rancher's wife Merrily Wright, have discovered the benefits of conservation.

A wispy 34-year-old who wears her hair in a loose Edwardian bun, Wright lives on the ranch's 57,000 acres with her husband, John Wright, and their four small children. John's older brother, Preston, also lives on the ranch with his family. Mary's River Ranch, which rents another 50,000 acres from the Bureau of Land Management (107,000 acres total), has been the Wright family business since the1950s.

The Wrights have taken a "holistic" approach to their ranching. Holism, says Merrily's brother-in-law, Preston, involves encouraging biodiversity on their land and on the land they rent from Uncle Sam. The trick, says Preston, is to make the cows act like herd animals, like buffalo in the wild. Since cows are not wild but domestic animals, it falls to the rancher to manage their movements to the benefit of the land and the sustainable profitability of the ranch.

Still, Merrily says she understands the frustrations ranchers have with environmentalists and government agencies. "There are a lot of environmentalists that have a lot of idealistic theories," she says, remembering the day when the Nevada Department of Wildlife ran a trout survey on the ranch-during drought season. The agency blamed the declining trout stock not on the dry weather but the Wrights' thirsty cows (see inset). "Maybe theories don't always apply to what actually happens on the land, while the rancher is on the land all the time," she says.

Preston thinks some environmentalists suffer from impaired vision. They want to return the land to it's "natural" state without really knowing what that is. "It's a vision in which emptiness and silence become more important than making the land really healthy."

The price of beef led Merrily to write. Prices paid for beef at the supermarket, say the Wrights, hardly reflect the price they get for their cows. Since 1993, the bottom has fallen out of the cattle market, they say, sending prices back to 1973 levels-just 55 cents a pound. "The ranchers struggle anyway," says Merrily, "even when the market's good."

"Friends gently hint that I am going to grief,

But men must make money, and women have beef;

Society bans me a savage and dodge

And Masons would ball me out of their lodge...

To supplement her family's income Merrily decided to try her hand at composing, reciting, and, hopefully, selling poetry. "John knew I could write, poetry really quickly, so he said, 'Why don't you try to write ranch poetry, you know, cowboy poetry.' So I came up with 'My Husband Was Out Ridin'." She now has a self-published book out entitled, "The Lonely Cow-chip and Other Pungent Poetry."

In the Convention Center's Turquoise Room folklorist Ronna Lee Sharpe introduces poet Pat Richardson.

"A 10-year veteran Rodeo Cowboy Association saddle bronc-rider," Sharpe gushes, "Pat is an artist and illustrator in his own right, having drawn cartoons for the Rodeo Sports News. He's ridden and ranched throughout the west. His poems are finely crafted, some taking up to 13 years to write with the help of his brother, Jess Howard."

"She forgot to mention lies a lot," says the stocky, gravel voiced 62-year-old with a kindly buckaroo squint as he takes the microphone. Like most of the poets at this session, Richardson blithely ignores today's theme, "Cowboy History and Heritage," and plunges into his comic rhyme "Duckin' the Law," a tall tale about a stolen duck dinner and a near incarcerating brush with the law. (Actually, all Richardson's poems are comic rhymes.)

Richardson, traces his tall-tale style back to the days when cow punchers and mule skinners found themselves squatting around a lonesome campfire in the middle of nowhere. Words were the only entertainment besides listening to the coyotes howl.

Richardson, who now hauls gravel for a living and keeps a few cows on 20 acres near Merced, Calif., says his poetry is based in life. But if there's one rule by which he composes, it's to never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

"But then if my cooking ain't very complete,

Hygienists can't blame me for living to eat;

And where is the man who sleeps more profound

Than the cowboy who stretches himself on the ground...

"We were raised like coyotes," Richardson says of his upbringing. Born on a ranch near Caruthers, Calif., Richardson never had much of a chance to romanticize the Western myth or the cowboy lifestyle. He's always lived it. His father was a cattle trader, "kind of a wheeler and a dealer," whose habit of dealing in "cows that weren't his" caught up with him in the 1960s. Richardson hasn't heard from him since.

"I never did like western movies much," he says, "'cause I always thought they were kind of phony and weren't like real life."

Two-steppin' Western swing musician David Earl Pfeiffer agrees that, while cowboy films have romanticized the American West, they've rarely delved into the harsher realities of cowboy life. Pfeiffer, a baby-faced 32-year-old with a walrus mustache, custom made "double-pinch" hat, and an elaborate pair of V-cut boots, says, "Hollywood is not going to bother the public with the real facts of life if those facts of life aren't entertaining- things like being bucked off a horse right in the middle of a patch of prickly-pear and having your partner pulling prickly-pear out of your butt. It's not exactly the sort of thing they want on television."

"At first I just visited," says Pfeiffer, who started coming west eight years ago to escape the bustle of Washington D.C. Pfeiffer eventually settled on a 40-acre ranch near Saguache (pronounced "sa-watch"), Colo., and now works horses and tours the West playing honky-tonks with his brother, Jim. He admits to being an Easterner smitten by the Western myth and the cowboy lifestyle. "I feel I owe it to the guys I know not to destroy the myth," he says, "but give people a little more of a realistic view of what working cowboys do."

Pfeiffer thinks the grandeur of the West itself is enough to play the muse for western film makers and cowboy poets alike. "If you just take a look at the west, never mind the cowboy, and start from there, the sheer drama of the landscape alone is enough to thrill people. If you start with that natural beauty it's hard not to romanticize the job of a man who spends his days working horseback amidst all that."

"It inspires a lot of poetry for me," says Merrily Wright, of the land from which her family lives, "and I think that's why cowboys have so much poetry. They're out there in it."

"Between love and me lies a gulf very wide,

And a luckier fellow may call her his bride;

But cupid is always a friend to the bold

And the best of his arrows are pointed with gold...

-From Allen McCanless' 1885 poem "The Cowboy's Soliloquy"

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