Generations and Other True Stories (16 page)

He's one of those who drops by KNON to chat with Mr. and Mrs. Wahkinney. “The program does a lot to make the Indian culture more recognizable and not so mysterious,” he says. “That's what I hope I'm contributing to. I can't go back to the homeland, the Dakotas, and be everything I want to be there. Since I can't, I try to influence as much as possible, in a good way, the culture of Dallas.”

And he loves the powwows, where, he says, “I can socialize with other Indian people, dance whenever I feel like it, and not have to worry about anything. Just for those few minutes that I'm dancing, I can lose myself in the music and get away from everything.”

“The drum is the heartbeat of Mother Earth,” Linda Durant is explaining. She's a Delaware-Shawnee-Creek-Chickasaw, sitting in the grandstand at the Tulsa powwow, watching her friends and several hundred others dancing an intertribal dance to the music of Whitefish Bay, a drum from Canada. “Gathering around this drum, we're trying to keep in balance with Mother Earth. We feel that.

“And the medicine wheel you see so many people wearing as an ornament is a circle. It represents the whole universe. It has a point in all the four directions. It represents balance and harmony in the universe. All the four-legged animals, all the two-legged animals are part of it. We're all the same. And the air and the land and everything. We're all part of the universe.”

She smiles. “But I'm also a native Dallasite, Texan, American Indian. And a native of Oak Cliff. I have a lot of different worlds. Most people do. And we're shaped by those worlds.

“It's hard to keep the Indian sense of balance in a city like Dallas. It's hard to maintain your connection to Mother Earth. You have to be strong spiritually. The drum, the dance, all this helps us do that.”

September 1993

Some would say that cowboy poetry isn't really poetry. Others would say that poetry, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, or reader, or in the ear of the listener. I think the real poetry is in the soul of its creator, and that the best of the cowboy poets are true poets
.

To a journalist of my type, working on a story such as this is just about heaven: hanging around people with whom you're instantly
simpatico,
talking about something that means a lot to all of you—the West, its history, its culture, its peculiar arts—and laughing a lot
.

I became a fan of the people I interviewed for this story, and still read their work
.

Poets Lariat

“This friend of mine, Jack Douglas, he lives up there by Littlefield,” J.B. Allen is saying. “I come to find out that he's been writin' songs a long while. He's an artist kind of feller. Plays guitar. Anyway, I was helpin' him brand one time, and we was settin' around after dinner, and he said, ‘I been writin' some poems.' and I looked at him kinda funny, you know. Cowpunchers ain't supposed to write poems. But anyhow, he read one or two of ‘em off to me, and they was purty good. At the time, I was nightwatchin' at a feedlot and had a lot of time on my hands, and I just wrote a li'l old silly poem ‘bout somethin' that happened to me down on the river one time. One thing led to another and I got to writin' a lot of ‘em. I wrote two or three hundred the first two years. I just couldn't hardly write fast enough to get ‘em all out of there.”

Mr. Allen's voice is a kind of music not heard often in cities, deep as a cello but full of space and distance and weather. It's a voice born of thirty years or more of hollering at cattle, fighting blizzards and drought, and swapping stories over cups of strong black coffee in ranch-house kitchens and auction-barn cafes.

He's of a family of cowhands “on both sides of the tree,” and has spent all his fifty-five years, except for a hitch in the Navy, on the plains of Texas and points west, working and bossing on ranches. Now he and his wife, Margaret, have a place of their own, “a little cow-and-calf operation” he calls it, near Whiteface, between Lubbock and the New Mexico line.

He's as cowboy as they come. But on that fateful night at the feedlot, he became a poet, too. And during the few years since then, he has become one of the more original and authentic practitioners of the peculiar folk art called cowboy poetry that has lived quietly in Texas and the West for over a century, but is just now entering the consciousness of the rest of America.

“How do I go about writin' it? I
don't
go about writin' it,” he says. “The way I do it, a line will come to me in my head, and I'll write that down. And then another'n. And another'n. A lot of times the thing'll take off in a different direction than what I thought it was goin' to. Halfway through the poem, I still don't know how it's gonna end. But I git there.”

Somehow, the music of his voice gets transcribed to Mr. Allen's pages, where the vowels are just as strong and the g's are just as missing from the ends of words as when he's speaking. For his poems, like all cowboy poems, are meant to be spoken aloud.

“I kind of spell things like we talk,” he says. “You can git away with that with this kind of poems. I tell some of them boys from up north there in Montana and Idaho that they talk so good, puttin' the g's on the end and all, that it hardens up the sounds. I'm always hoorawin' ‘em about talkin' funny.”

Mr. Allen's poems also are written in capital letters, for a purely practical reason. “I type with one finger of one hand,” he says. “I don't know how to type no other way. And it's easier to push that little deal down there and then go tap, tap, tap. That way I don't have to mess with nuthin'.”

On the day he's telling these things, Mr. Allen is one of the featured poetry reciters at the Red Steagall Cowboy Gathering and Western Swing Festival, billed as “a celebration of cowboys and culture,” at the Fort Worth Stockyards. He figures it's about the sixteenth such event he has attended this year. Similar gatherings are springing up all over, even in the Deep South and Deepest Yankeeland. There's even talk of a “cowboy poetry movement,” and everybody, it seems, wants to join it.

“This Fort Worth deal is one of the gooduns,” Mr. Allen says. “Ol' Red knows who the realuns are. But the ‘cowboy poet' label has gotten to where it covers everbody and his frazzlin' dog that ever wrote anything. Some people claim to be cowboys who ain't, and some people runnin' gatherins don't know the difference.”

Tradition says it was a newspaperman who attached the label “cow boys” to the horseback laborers who drove the first Texas herds to the Kansas railheads after the Civil War. He probably didn't mean it as a compliment. The austere Midwestern townspeople and farmers considered the “cow boys” to be rowdy and dangerous border riffraff and avoided their company, except while separating them from their hard-earned wages.

True, the “cow boys” weren't the cream of society. They were young, usually uneducated men—many of them orphans, runaways, ex-slaves and peons—who signed on with the trail bosses to do grueling and often deadly work. A few were outlaws who found the herds good cover for getting out of the reach of Texas law.

After months of dust, lightning, swollen rivers, stampedes, hard work, loneliness, and little sleep on the trails, the “cow boys” tended to get a little wild when they arrived in town, where they became the victims of saloon keepers, gamblers, prostitutes, and unscrupulous merchants. Many of the boys got into trouble. Some were killed. As soon as their money was gone, the survivors would ride back to Texas.

Despite what “civilized” people considered to be the wretchedness of such a life, there was something about the young “cow boys” that inspired the imagination. The way they dressed, the swagger with which they carried themselves, the horses they rode, the humor and courage with which they did their work, the troubles and tragedies they suffered, their days and nights spent under wide skies and bright stars, wandering the endless, unfenced plains—all this suggested a kind of adventure and individualism and freedom that tamer town-bound and farm-bound men could only dream of.

And around their chuck wagons and campfires, the “cow boys” were creating a culture of their own that ignored what was happening in the towns.

“It started with the influx of the Celtic peoples into West Texas from the eastern coast of our country and also from the Old World,” says Red Steagall. “A lot of West Texas was owned and operated by British concerns, and they would send over people to take care of their interests. They brought with them a love of poetry, of Keats and Burns and all the great masters. And most of what we now think of as the old cowboy songs are derived from old English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh ballads. The cowhands entertained themselves at night reciting poetry and singing songs. They didn't have guitars. Hollywood invented the cowboy with the guitar. The cook might carry a fiddle or a banjo, or a cowboy might carry a mouth harp in his bedroll. They played the Old World songs and recited the Old World poems. As they became adapted to their new life, they rearranged those poems and songs so that they talked about things important to them now.
The Streets of Laredo
, for instance, started out as a shanty song in Ireland, became a seafaring song, and was changed to a cowboy song when it got to Texas. Later on, they wrote poems and songs strictly about the New World and their life on the range.”

When dime novelists and Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show embraced the Texas drover, dressed him in dashing duds and introduced him to the urban East and to Europe, the despised “cow boy” laborer became a romantic cowboy hero and an American myth. Hollywood and its big silver screen enlarged him into a demigod.

By then, the trail herds and the open range were history, and the real cowboys were hunkering down to the unglamorous tasks of building fence, repairing water gaps, oiling windmills, and doctoring sick calves. Around the turn of the century, Texas folklorist John Lomax had begun collecting and preserving the old cowboy songs that had never been written down, and a few cowboy poets such as Bruce Kiskaddon, Curley Fletcher, Henry Herbert Knibbs, and Badger Clark were publishing small volumes of verse about their former lives on the now nonexistent open range.

“Kiskaddon moved to Los Angeles and wound up being an elevator operator at the Ambassador Hotel,” Mr. Steagall says. “He would write poems going up and down that elevator, thinking about his old life as a cowboy.”

Outside the ranch country, neither he nor any cowboy poet ever was known. So as the real cowboy disappeared from public view into the fenced-in ranches of the sparsely populated West, the six-gun-toting, guitar-strumming Hollywood cowboy captured the movie and TV screens of the world and became the false stereotype of the American Westerner.

“All them silly songs they sang, like
Ridin' Down the Canyon,”
says Mr. Allen. “That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. After a feller has put in a ten- or twelve-hour day on a horse, he ain't gonna want to go ridin' off down the canyon to watch the sun go down. The humor has went out of ridin' by then.”

Despite the recent miniresurgence of the Western film, traditional cowboy stories and songs are almost absent from mass entertainment these days. Gene, Roy, Hopalong, and the other fancy-dressed stars of the formulaic B movies that established the false cowboy image are gone, too. But the sales of cowboy hats, boots, big belt buckles, and pickup trucks are stronger than ever, and their market has spread far beyond their western homeland.

“Today ‘cowboy' is almost a state of mind,” says Mr. Steagall. “The
real
cowboy who still works on a ranch sets himself apart from the cowboy who just puts on boots and a hat and goes to dances on Saturday nights. But the cowboy is about independence and individualism. He's seen as the last free American. And everyone, regardless of what walk of life he's in or where he lives, wants to feel like he's an individual and he's independent, even if it's just on weekends.”

Like J.B. Allen, Mr. Steagall grew up in the ranch country of Northwest Texas, where his father worked in the oil fields. After he graduated from West Texas State University, he sold agricultural chemicals and rode bulls in rodeos for a while, then, in 1965, he struck out for California to seek his fortune in show business. He later moved on to Nashville.

He recorded a number of country hits, wrote several more that other singers recorded, performed twice at the White House, and discovered Reba McEntire and helped promote her to stardom. But in 1977 he bought a small ranch near Azle and moved back home. “I really love North Texas,” he says. “This is where I belong, and this is where I'm going to stay.” For several years he raised cutting horses, but now his livestock consists of only four horses, two buffalo, one seventen-year-old longhorn steer, and a dog. He still records his songs and tours about 250 dates a year, but his songs now are in the traditional cowboy vein, not the slick country hits they used to be.

“All those years when I was writing songs, I was very conscious of whether or not they were commercial,” he says. “If they weren't commercial, I didn't even bother to finish them. I threw away thousands of ideas that I'll never get back, that are gone forever.”

In 1985, Mr. Steagall attended the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, the event that many cite as the beginning of the cowboy poetry movement. “I got all caught up in the spirit of the poetry,” he says, “and I realized that's where my ideas belong. I just absolutely fell in love with it. For five years after that, I didn't write a song. I didn't write anything but poems. It's the greatest creative release I've ever known.”

Earlier this year, Texas Christian University Press published
Ride for the Brand
, a collection of Mr. Steagall's songs and poems, and for four years he has run his own version of a cowboy gathering in Fort Worth. His features lots of cowboy music—especially western swing, which originated in Fort Worth—a two-night ranch rodeo, a special performance by Baxter Black, the Colorado veterinarian who has become probably the best known of the cowboy poets, and a chuck wagon cook-off in which ranch cooks compete against each other. An addition this year was the Cowboy and Cowgirl Poetry Contest, in which 1,374 children from forty-nine West Texas towns submitted their work.