The Long Trail: My Life in the West (10 page)

I’ve heard people say that horses are stupid, but they’re not. They’re clearly capable of loyalty and affection to humans. I’ve had two cowboys tell me that they suffered a heart attack, passed out and awakened to find their mount standing over them, as if on guard. But as herd animals of the savannah, horses are wired differently than we are. Too often people expect human-style rational behaviour from the horse. That can never be. For them, self-preservation comes first. Evolution has taught them that flight is their first survival option. The second one is fight.

Horses are like people: there are dumb ones and there are smart ones. Get the halter on and saddle them for a job, and you can sense their excitement. I’ve seen it so many times. Set out to herd cattle with a good horse and he’ll think the work is wonderful, even though you might not be able to catch him in the morning. Just like people, horses enjoy being assholes occasionally. They’re full of pride, and when they’re working well, they know it.

———

I quit the
Ian Tyson Show
in 1975—I was forty-one—as cutting horses were taking up more of my time and attention. I wanted to keep both playing music and cutting, but I knew if I hung on the station would eventually discard me. I wanted to walk while the show was on top.

To my surprise, after the show ended I couldn’t get music work in Ontario. I went to Nashville to get my act together musically but didn’t find success there either. It was the start of that big-hat, beer-drinking period down there. A lot of guys were writing incredibly stupid country songs, and they’d become hits. That scene didn’t interest me at all.

In Nashville I cut some decent demos that didn’t go anywhere. I think the Nashville producer types saw through me — saw that I probably wouldn’t commit and be the indentured servant type of artist they wanted in those days. They wanted you to get on the tour bus and stay there. And the more success you got, the harder they were on you. They made you a slave, basically. I’ve heard that industry people still say, “Ian won’t take direction.” In my mind that translates into “Ian won’t stay on the damn bus for 300 days a year.”

One guy who got away with getting off that hamster wheel was George Strait. He toured a lot but he also had his ranch. He broke that old pattern where you just worked all the time and if you didn’t agree to it, the industry people brushed you off. That’s what I like to think my problem was back then — as opposed to lack of talent.

I realized I had to find my way somewhere outside the country market. Nashville has a cool eclectic musical underground, but for the most part it’s become a factory for the
junk on country radio. As a western singer, you have to find another route. (That used to bother me, but when you’ve been around as long as I have, you learn to roll with it.)

So I headed back to my farm in Canada and conjured a plan to move to Texas, where land was cheap. I wanted to live in the West. I’ve always said it’s hard to be a cowboy in Ontario, and it’s true. Lots of guys try it, but it lacks authenticity somehow. Ultimately I couldn’t relate to the life and culture there. It’s perfect for some people, but not for me.

Besides, I was having trouble with a neighbour who had opened a landfill right beside my place at a time when hardly any environmental laws were enforced in the area. A wannabe cowboy friend of mine, Frank Watts, worked as an on-again, off-again realtor. “I think we can sell him your place if you want,” he told me.

“Think so? Because I’d like to get out of here.”

I was still running with Katie Malloch, but that was starting to unravel too. The distance between Montreal and southern Ontario made it hard to carry on the relationship. So there wasn’t much left for me in eastern Canada anymore.

But my Texas ambitions hit a snag, all because of a free-spirit benefit concert of some kind that I’d played in Montreal a few years prior. During the show I’d left my guitar case open on the stage, and a few fans tossed joints into the case. The airline lost my guitar and it ended up in Jamaica or the Bahamas or some damn place, joints and all. The guitar made it back to Toronto a couple days later, but it arrived with two big, burly plainclothes Mounties. They had opened the case and discovered the pot, and they followed up by getting a warrant and searching my house, where they found some hashish.

The situation devolved into theatre of the absurd. I didn’t smoke a lot of dope; I did it as a social thing, but that’s it. I didn’t go nuts the way so many people did back then. But those asshole Mounties decided they were going to get me regardless. I had to go to court, where I got a conditional discharge. Strangely, the incident got hardly any press attention.

Because of the conditional discharge, my criminal record in Canada was clean, but I was still guilty in the eyes of the FBI, who promptly jerked my green card. And there was no way I could get myself out of their computers. It caused me all kinds of trouble when I tried crossing the border. If I crossed as a cowboy with my horse trailer, I could always get into the U.S. without problems — the border guys cut cowboys slack for some reason. But if I went with a guitar, the border officers would hassle me no end and sometimes even turn me back. That happened for many years until I got some kind of border ID card in the mail that eliminated the problem.

I’m no fan of the U.S.–Canadian border — what the old-time Natives called the “Medicine Line.” It’s just an arbitrary line that follows no river, mountain range or natural boundary of any kind. It’s a political invention that ignores the rhythms of nature and the flow of the seasons. The cowboy culture has always ignored that arbitrary line as much as possible, but increasingly we’re forced to live with it. One of my neighbours has stopped going to weekend horse shows in Montana because crossing the border is too much of a hassle. That’s not good for the horse industry at all. And the ranchers here in Alberta suffered greatly when the U.S. shut the border to Canadian beef a few years back. BSE (most
people know it as “mad cow disease”) sure as hell doesn’t recognize a border, no matter how the politicos spin it.

Regardless of my strong opinions about the Medicine Line, I couldn’t move to Texas without a green card. So I decided to head west to Alberta instead.

I got the idea of moving to Alberta when my band and I played Calgary in the mid-1970s, doing a week of gigs at Ranchman’s, the local honky-tonk — a place I’d come to know very well. We stayed at the Carriage House Inn on Macleod Trail, and I remember looking out the window of my sixth-floor room and witnessing this incredible sunset. The purple hills and rose-coloured Rockies were very dramatic, reminiscent of the paintings of Charlie Russell. I stood in awe of that sunset and thought,
I’d kind of like to live here
. The horse industry in southern Alberta wasn’t very big back then, but I could see it was growing.

In 1978 I loaded up the horse trailer and drove west with my buddy Frank. We headed for a ranch at Pincher Creek, about 140 miles south of Calgary, where I knew the foreman, Alan Young. I had met Alan in the late 1960s at a competitive trail ride in the Cypress Hills; we had both been recruited as judges. He recognized me as a kindred spirit right away, and I recognized him right back. Youthful and athletic, he seemed like a carefree, upbeat cowboy. We hit it off in the Cypress Hills and partied together for most of the week.

Alan was a quintessential westerner, an unforgettable character with a reputation for toughness. He was like one of the old forest rangers in those western American towns
where they picked the toughest guy in town to be in charge. Alan loved being around people, but his one quality that didn’t quite jibe with the western toughness was that he loved to hang with people who were higher than him on the social scale. When I was doing the TV show in Toronto, he’d come visit once in a while and would always want to hang out with movie stars, wealthy people and musicians.

My friend, Alan Young, foreman of the Pincher Creek ranch
.
(COURTESY IAN TYSON)

Eventually Alan became the foreman of a large Pincher Creek ranch owned by Parisian entrepreneurs. “Come on out,” he suggested. “We’ll have a party that will continue here 24/7.” Alan was married now and had kids, but he still liked to party hard.

Moving to an Alberta ranch sounded like a good idea to me. My middle-age crazies were kicking in. I was forty-four but wanted to be twenty-two again, chasing girls, horses and cows.

Moving my stuff out to Pincher Creek took a couple of trips, and Frank helped out a lot, hauling my furniture — including the big wooden table I still use for writing — to a little creekside cabin on the ranch. At Pincher I was all cowboy, training horses, chewing Copenhagen and having girls visit me in my tiny cabin. I was really living the life.

Clay, who was eleven or twelve, came out to visit a few times, and he was pretty upset when he saw me with my Alberta girlfriends. He was a vulnerable kid, loyal to his mother, and I was pretty insensitive to what he was going through. But Clay could ride steers and he got along real well with my stud, so I let him ride the stud at a show. As I recall, he won a couple hundred bucks and a pair of spurs — and of course he was very happy about that. He was a good little rider. He got a painful rope burn on his hand during one
visit, but I think that was the only time he got hurt. He was a brave soul and I enjoyed having him out there.

At Pincher, whether Clay was visiting or not, we still partied, just as Alan had promised — especially when the Parisians were around. Alan in particular smoked like a chimney and drank a lot of whiskey. Ever aware of his obligation to entertain, he was always doing the cowboy shtick, always thinking of his next one-liner. Whenever he met somebody at a party, he’d ask, “Howdoyalikeitoutwest?” He’d get funny looks, but those of us who knew Alan got a kick out of it. He’d use stock one-liners like that over and over until we knew them all by heart.

When it came to horses, though, Alan was just like my old man — make ’em do it. Horses were tools to be used, and used hard. He had tried rodeoing a bit, with mixed results. “I never had much of a lick on the saddle broncs,” he told me once, making reference to his spurring. It was a hard thing for him to admit. He recalled working for a Texan on an old-style desert ranch in southern Alberta years earlier. “I’d get twenty miles into the desert and I’d be terrified that I’d get bucked off and get stranded out there and have to walk back. I never learned to loosen up. I wouldn’t get bucked off, but I wouldn’t win anything either.”

We had a lot of fun at Pincher. At the start of the summer of 1978, a wise old cowman from Lethbridge, George Brooks, wanted to run yearlings on the ranch (he was a friend of Alan’s). I liked George right away — he’s seventeen years older than me, so I started calling him Uncle George — and we formed an old-fashioned handshake partnership. Uncle George, a banker and I paid the ranch to summer the steers, with the idea of making a bunch of money down the
road. We ran about 1,800 yearlings — and we got rustled. I don’t know exactly who was behind it, but some of the branded cattle ended up on the nearby Peigan reserve, Brocket. In any case, we still made money from the deal.

Earlier in 1978 I had sent Doc’s Summer Wages to Bill Freeman, son of cutting legend Shorty Freeman, for training. Bill was another rising star in the cutting world, and when I visited him and Yeller in Missouri that summer, I was amazed at the latter’s transformation. He had become a golden copper palomino with a snow white mane and tail. Striking as he was, he had the cow sense and athleticism to back it up. He was a real contender for the Fort Worth futurity. (Back then the futurity was experiencing a growth spurt because of the excitement that Doc Bar horses were bringing to the arena. Doc Bar’s get and grandget dominated the event for almost two decades.)

By November the futurity pre-works were in full swing in Lawton, Oklahoma, but Bill was still procrastinating as to which colt he would show at Fort Worth. Politics were involved — and probably cash — and at the last moment Bill decided to show another stallion. Doc’s Summer Wages would be shown by me, a non-pro with no game plan.

In cutting you need two herd holders, who keep the herd centred, and two turn-back men, who prevent the cow you’ve cut from bolting. The turn-back men are extremely important, and I had no turn-back team ready for my first go-round. Thankfully Buster Welch showed up to fill the role and I rode into the herd. Yeller worked well, but I moved my rein hand just enough to get us eliminated; we did not advance. For us the big show was over. (Many years later, Bill Freeman would advise my friend Bill Riddle, “If
you’ve got three good ones before the futurity, you’re probably going to ride the wrong one.” Hindsight is 20/20.)

After the Fort Worth futurity, I hoped Doc’s Summer Wages would find success a year later at the Canadian futurity for four-year-olds. He did just that, winning both finals, open and non-pro. And he did it with a tendon that had been torn and healed — what horsemen call a bowed tendon. Doc’s Summer Wages wasn’t overly stud-like, but he was a charismatic horse with a flair for showmanship. In the arena, when I would bend over to put on his front splint boots, he would remove my hat with his teeth and wave it at the crowd.