Generations and Other True Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  “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.

  But the centerpiece is always a day-long string of cowboy poets from Texas and the Southwest, who stand before crowds of hundreds and recite their horseback-rhythmic rhymes about life, work, and death on the range.

  “A lot of people refuse to acknowledge that cowboy poetry is a real art form,” Mr. Steagall says. “For generations now, some people have refused to accept country music as a musical art form, and western novels as literature, and western art as art. It doesn’t bother me. The people who don’t like what we’re doing, I don’t identify with their life, either. But I accept the fact that they have one. Cowboy poetry and music have their own audience, and it’s expanding rapidly. Those are the people who want to know something about our heritage, something good, something solid, something real American. Cowboy poetry, you don’t have to wonder what it says. You don’t have to look for any hidden meaning. It jumps right up and hits you in the face.”

  Or, as J.B. Allen puts it, “These learned kind of fellers seem to put more value on poetry that don’t have no rhyme or meter to it than they do on poetry that has it. I don’t see why one has any more value than the other. I like a poem that sounds like a poem, not just a bunch of jumbled-up words throwed out there in the clear blue sky.”

  The movement began as a small scholarly project. Hal Cannon, a Nevada folklorist, discovered that a lot of cowboy poetry had been published in the past, but nobody had bothered to collect and preserve it. So he got a little grant and began searching for as many cowboy poems as he could find.

  “Everything,” he says, “from the first stuff that was published in Texas in the 1880s and ‘90s to modern cowboy poetry that we found in small-town newspapers, livestock magazines, and self-published books. Then we started doing field work all around the ranching country, trying to find ranch people who either wrote poetry or cowboys who recited old poems. We wanted to record and document those memorized poems that sometimes were never written down, that just existed in the memory of the cowboys.”

  At first, the ranchers and cowboys were skeptical of the scholars. “They didn’t trust that anybody was going to interpret them correctly, because everybody came to them with their stereotypes,” Mr. Cannon says. “They were surprised when we said, ‘Well, we don’t even want to tell your story. We want you to tell your story.’ It was a stunning thing that happened when that was the request, rather than ‘Tell us your story, and then we’ll make it into whatever we think will sell.’ One of the successes of this whole movement is that it’s really born in the culture itself.”

  In January 1985, Mr. Cannon put together the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, a town of about eight thousand in the ranch country of northeastern Nevada. He invited some of the cowboys who had recited their poems for him to come to Elko and recite them in public.

  Just before the gathering, Mr. Cannon was standing with his friend Waddie Mitchell, a cowboy—or “buckaroo,” as they’re called in the Northwest—in the back of the hall where they had set up two hundred chairs. Mr. Mitchell looked at Mr. Cannon. “We should put some of these chairs away,” he said. “This is going to be embarrassing.”

  “Just then, ranchers and cowboy families started filling the chairs,” Mr. Cannon writes in Buckaroo, a fancy new anthology of cowboy poetry, stories and art. “We organizers stood back, amazed at the fifteen hundred people who entered the auditorium, having traveled in the middle of winter to the middle of nowhere, for a poetry reading. These people had convened to recite their own poems, to tell their own stories and to sing their own songs.”

  The crowds have grown each year since, and by early fall every hotel room in Elko already had been booked for the next gathering. “We have people calling every day,” Mr. Cannon says. “We’re putting them on waiting lists. We’re trying to get people in Elko to open up their homes. The event has outgrown the town.”

  One of those attracted to Elko was a stove-up cowboy from Amarillo named Buck Ramsey. When he was a young man, Buck spent his days punching cattle and snapping out broncos on the big ranches along the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle. But thirty-one years ago, when he was twenty-four, the rigging broke on the bronc he was riding. The resulting accident left him confined to a wheelchair.

  Since then he has made his living as a writer. Today he’s also in demand as a performer—as a poet and musician—at cowboy gatherings, folk festivals, and museums, including the Smithsonian.

  Mr. Ramsey is a maverick in cowboy poetry circles. In his saddlebag on the day his bronc’s rigging broke, he carried a copy of The Rebel by the French existentialist philosopher and novelist Albert Camus. He loves the poems of non-cowboy Wallace Stevens and the fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. “If you want to write, you’ve got to keep your head full of good language,” he says. He was a charter subscriber to The New York Review of Books, and he “used to get drunk and drive a lot of people out of bars by reciting The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T.S. Eliot’s bleak poem. One of Mr. Ramsey’s poems includes a line he stole from The Canterbury Tales. He found the rhyme scheme of his most ambitious and most popular work in an English translation of Aleksandr Pushkin.

  Mr. Ramsey is an intellectual cowboy, an image that doesn’t fit the stereotypes, but one that fits more than a few cowboys he h
as known. “I’ve heard cowboys discuss the merits of different translations of the Iliad,” he says. “And there are a lot of Bible scholars among them. Some read the Bible to prove it’s all true, and some read it to prove it’s all not true. Cowboys read more than any other occupation I’ve been around, and some of it is pretty heavy stuff.”

  Mr. Ramsey’s poem Anthem, which may be the most formal and lyrical of all cowboy poems, has become an anthem of sorts for the cowboy poetry movement, because it captures the feelings of freedom, individuality, integrity, and closeness to the land that are in every good cowboy poem, and in a more musical way than most. It’s about a band of cowboys, riding.

  “I got to thinking about leather creaking,” Mr. Ramsey says, “when you have to get to the back of the pasture before daylight, and you’re riding out, and it’s dark, and everybody’s in a saddle trot, and there’s the creaking of the saddles and the jingling of the spurs. It was the creaking that got the poem going.”

  Written in the fourteen-line rhymed stanza that he found in the Pushkin translation, Anthem doesn’t sound like a traditional cowboy poem, so when Mr. Ramsey pulled it out and read it for the first time at the 1990 Elko gathering, he was nervous. “I was pretty afraid,” he says. “I was afraid they wouldn’t accept it as a cowboy poem. And if I hadn’t once upon a time earned money on horseback punching cows, maybe they wouldn’t have embraced it. But it got a wonderful response. In truth, if there’s been any criticism, it has been not in my hearing, and no one has told me about it.”

  Now Anthem has become the prologue of another non-traditional cowboy poem. And as I Rode Out on the Morning, recently published by Texas Tech University Press, is a sixty-three-page verse narrative about Billy Deaver, a fourteen-year-old who runs away from the drudgery of his family’s farm to become a cowboy. The story of Billy’s initiation into the cowboy life incorporates several earlier Ramsey poems and several characters from poetry and short fiction that he has written over the years. Mr. Ramsey sees the book as part of an eventually larger body of fiction and poetry focusing on various recurring characters—a sort of Faulknerian West Texas saga.

  Whether prose or poetry, there’s one strong thread that runs through all Mr. Ramsey’s work. “Nearly everything I write,” he says, “is out of a sense of loss and nostalgia. I don’t intend it to be that way. But I put it down, and then I read it, and I see that it’s a lament.”

  Loss and nostalgia have always been the underlying themes of cowboy poetry. The old cowboys who wrote around the turn of the twentieth century were remembering the end of the era in which they rode. The long trail drives were past. The open range was fenced. The cowboy no longer was a solitary voyager on a vast sea of grass. So Mr. Kiskaddon rode up and down his hotel elevator dreaming of the vanished past and composing verses about it.

  “The boys could see their era comin’ to an end,” Mr. Allen says, “and that’s where a lot of real good poetry came from. They could see it coming to a halt.”

  Now another century is about to turn, and many of today’s cowboy poets feel the end of their era approaching. “Nobody has admitted it yet, but the West is comin’ to be more like England,” Mr. Allen says. “Li’l ol’ small places. A lot of big ranches is sellin’ off. Development, if that’s what you want to call it. Take a 80- or 100,000-acre ranch, and they’re sellin’ it off to people who want 10 or 20 acres. Who knows what they’ll use it for. And in these other western states where the guvmint owns nearly all the land, the feds are raisin’ the grazin’ fees so high that a lot of these boys is gonna have to turn it back to them. And all them boys have is 160 acres or 400 acres of deeded land, and they cain’t make a livin’ on it in this day and time. So it’s comin’ to a halt.”

  Millions have moved from rural places to urban places. Little ranch towns are drying up. “The pressures of the modern world—everything from politics to computers to bureaucracy and environmentalists—are closing in on the ranch country,” says Mr. Cannon. “It’s a very unstable time for people in the ranching West. There’s a lot of people who want to reinforce some stabilities, who are looking for some sense of tradition, something that will give them a little bit of a touchstone, something to hang onto in a strange and uncertain world.

  “When a culture is under a lot of pressure,” he says, “often that’s when art really flourishes.”

  December 1993

  I’ve known some tough guys in my time, but I never knew a crowd of them at once until I met the Dallas Harlequins Rugby Football Club. After you’ve watched a rugby game, regular American football, with those helmets and pads and timeouts and all, seems kind of, well, sissy. Funny thing is, off the field and away from each other, most ruggers seem fairly normal.

  I’m sorry to say the Quins didn’t win the national championship they had hoped for.

  The Mighty Quins

  The sun has sunk early into the winter gloom. The north wind is blowing stronger, and the joggers head for home. The only lights in Glencoe Park are from a deserted tennis court and the softball field, where a skinny teenager still hammers lazy flies to a few friends, who pound their gloves and shout at him in Spanish.

  On the darkling field between the lights, the Dallas Harlequins move through the evening like shadows. For two hours they run forth and back across the dying, brittle grass, from time to time falling to the ground for a quick bout of calesthenics, then up again, running, running, their breath still coming with no apparent labor.

  One of them, Mickey McGuire, is wearing a white T-shirt with a big red cross and lettering on the back. “Give Blood,” it says. “Play Rugby.” The others are dressed much as he, in skimpy shirts and shorts and cleated shoes. But they seem impervious to the cold, while the few watchers standing bundled on the sideline are shivering.

  “I’ll bet at least half these guys are in better shape than the Dallas Cowboys,” says Bill Smith, temporarily the Harlequins’ coach. “Rugby is a very hard sport, a harsh sport, geared to endurance.”

  Nearly every Tuesday and Thursday evening from September through May the Harlequins gather in this park, most coming straight from their jobs as attorneys, construction workers, teachers, dentists, bartenders, salesmen, doctors. A few are unemployed at the moment. Some are native Texans. But years or only a few weeks ago many of them arrived in Dallas from faraway countries—Great Britain, South Africa, Canada, Tonga, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand—and from the other American states, each for his own reasons winding up on the North Texas prairie.

  Mr. Smith says, “An Irish friend of mine was fond of remarking that rugby players constitute the world’s largest fraternity. ‘It’s bigger than the bleeding Masons,’ he would say, ‘and you don’t have to learn a funny handshake.’ He was right. If a Martian were a rugby player, he would have no trouble being welcomed anywhere on Earth, even if he were purple and had a couple of extra heads. He would be asked two questions: ‘What position do you play?’ and ‘Would you like a beer?’ If any of those guys out there were to go to Hong Kong or Japan or New Zealand, Zimbabwe, France, Romania, or Russia, if they went to the local rugby club they would meet guys who are very similar to the guys they know here. Rugby is a total ethos, a way of life. It’s a worldwide club.”

  Beyond North America’s borders the men running up and down Glencoe Park in the dark may be better known than any other Dallas athletic organization, including the city’s beloved Cowboys. Many of the Quins, as they call themselves, have played in international competition, and for more than a decade the Harlequins have ranked among the best rugby teams in the United States. They’ve toured other countries. They’ve been written up in the international rugby publications. Ruggers everywhere know who and what and where they are.

  Nelson Spencer, the Dallas real estate investor who started the club, says the Harlequins have benefited greatly from their fame within the fraternity. “We frequently get a call from some foreign rugby player at D/FW Airport who says, ‘I’m on my way to Somewhere. Could you guys put me up for
a few days?’ Sometimes the ‘few days’ lasts for years. They become Harlequins, they marry American girls, they settle down and become fully integrated into Dallas.”

  The Quins won the Texas Rugby Union Championship for the first time in 1975, four years after they were organized. Since 1981 they’ve dominated Texas rugby, winning the championship every year except 1985, when they lost to their cross-town rival, the Dallas Reds. The Quins second side—or B team—has won the state championship in its division seven times during the same period.

  The Harlequins are the only Texas club ever to win the Western Rugby Union Championship (the territory between the Mississippi River and the Rockies), and they’ve done it five times, including 1991 and 1992. “If we don’t win at least the Western championship, that’s a disastrous year for us,” says their captain, Mark Gale. “We’ve been in the Western Union final nine of the last ten years.”

  In the Final Four competition for the National Club Championship, they’ve placed third three times, including 1991 and 1992, and won the championship in 1984. Followers of the sport say their chances of winning their second national cup this spring are good to excellent. Four of their players—Mr. Gale, Mike Waterman, Brannon Smoot, and Greg Goodman—also play for the Eagles, the United States all-star national team, which competes against other countries in international matches.

  Yet, in a city noted for its love of sports and its adoration of winning teams, the Harlequins are almost a secret. For their regular cup games against their Texas Rugby Union opponents, maybe a couple of hundred fans turn out to Glencoe Park, the Harlequins’ home pitch (as a rugby field is called), despite the free admission and as much action and violence as the bloodthirstiest spectator could want. And most of those are the wives and girlfriends of the players (the Harlettes, they call themselves), plus whatever entourage the visiting team brings, plus a few rugby groupies and a loyal collection of displaced Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis who roam the sidelines shouting, “Rubbish!” and “Shocking!” at the referee.