[In the following excerpt, Stanley offers a review of the development of cowboy poetry, beginning in the years following the Civil War and continuing through the early twentieth century.]

When Charles Badger Clark, an Iowan‐South Dakotan living temporarily in southern Arizona, invented “The Legend of Boastful Bill” in 1907, he managed to synthesize half a dozen traditional themes that had long animated the home‐grown poetry of those who spent their working lives with cattle and horses in the American West. The great American heritage of braggadocio, so beloved of Mark Twain and the humorists of the Old Southwest in the nineteenth century, was combined here with cowboy socializing, tall‐tale telling, the ghost story, and the stubborn refusal of nature and animals to be mastered by humans:

At a round up on the Gily, [Gila River]
          One sweet mornin' long ago,
Ten of us was throwed right freely
          By a hawse from Idaho.
And we thought he'd go‐a‐beggin'
          For a man to break his pride
Till, a‐hitchin' up one leggin,
          Boastful Bill cut loose and cried—
          “I'm a on'ry proposition for to hurt; [ornery]
          I fulfill my earthly mission with a quirt;
                              I kin ride the highest liver
                              'Tween the Gulf and Powder River,
          And I'll break this thing as easy as I'd flirt.”

But the horse bucks so hard that Bill's cinches snap, and he is propelled skyward, so high that he never comes down.

Like his near‐contemporaries Theodore Roosevelt, who had glamorized cowboy life in the North Dakota Badlands in the 1880s, and Owen Wister, a friend of Roosevelt's at Harvard who “went West” and wrote the novel The Virginian in 1902, Clark both romanticized the cowboy way of life and gloomily predicted its end:

Stardust on his chaps and saddle,
          Scornful still of jar and jolt,
He'll come back some day, astraddle
          Of a bald‐faced thunderbolt.
And the thin‐skinned generation
          Of that dim and distant day
Sure will stare with admiration
          When they hear old Boastful say—
          “I was first, as old rawhiders all confessed.
          Now I'm last of all rough riders, and the best.
                              Huh, you soft and dainty floaters,
                              With your a'roplanes and motors—
          Huh! are you the great grandchildren of the West!”(1)

That theme of a disappearing way of life under assault from industrialized society is as much a part of cowboy poetry as its parallel celebration of organic wholeness, camaraderie, and individualism. Since cowboy poetry's first appearance after the Civil War, its practitioners have been ever‐alert for signs of its passing, expressed through a combination of romantic nostalgia, an unblinking description of the harsh realities of range life, and a tongue‐in‐cheek set of exaggerations. Back in the nineteenth century, the cowboy way of life was threatened by the Homestead Act, barbed wire, the end of the trail drive, and the closing of the open range, as Clark recalled in “The Old Cow Man”:

Oh, it's squeak! squeak! squeak!
          Close and closer cramps the wire.
There's hardly play to back away
          And call a man a liar.
Their house has locks on every door;
          Their land is in a crate.
These ain't the plains of God no more,
          They're only real estate.(2)

By the 1920s the gravest threat to the cowboy life—at least from the poets' point of view—was tourism and the ubiquitous dude ranch. Thereafter, much of the poetry alludes to the exaggerations and misrepresentations that Hollywood had foisted upon the cowboy and the resultant public misunderstandings of the economies of the West. During the 1990s, emphasis in the poetry shifted to the political, portraying environmentalists, vegetarians, animal‐rights activists, large corporations, and the developers of second homes and destination resorts as the destroyers of the range‐herding way of life. In truth, cowboys—and their poetry—have always struggled to stay afloat in the turbulence of western waters, and both have consequently become, in Clark's phrase, “on'ry propositions.”

The roots of cowboy poetry can be found in the post‐Civil War period, when the open grasslands of the American West, increasingly emptied of their Native populations by disease, assault, and forced movement to reservations, became available for exploitation by grazers and herders using cattle from Mexico and Texas and herding techniques learned in large part from the vaqueros of Old Mexico. Trail drives moved herds from Texas northward to railroad stockyards, summer grazing range, and Indian reservations. Along the way, a variety of poem and song traditions were recalled, modified, reinvented, and regionalized, particularly the verbal art of sailors and soldiers, largely English and Irish in origin, which combined with the songs and hollers of black cowboys and the corrido tradition of the vaqueros.³ In fact, the invention of poems and songs describing the hazards and triumphs of their occupation is remarkably common among herding people throughout the world and dates back hundreds of years in those cultures.⁴

Cowboy poetry and song are frequently interchangeable because poems were frequently set to music, often to traditional tunes or popular music of the day. Songs were sometimes recited, perhaps for greater dramatic effect or as a last resort by a tone‐deaf performer.⁵ The distinction between poem and song, in other words, has never been of much moment to working cowboys, except that some seem to define themselves as singers, others as reciters, and still others as composers of poetry. So cowboy singers, poets, and reciters adopted and adapted an enormous variety of materials as the basis for their occupational art: British and Irish sung ballads, a tradition of rhymed poetry created to memorialize an occasion or an individual, exaggerated tales for humorous effect, and considerable ribaldry. These materials they combined with the widespread Victorian affection for parlor and public—often schoolhouse—recitations, a mass of popular poetry from Shakespeare to Stephen Vincent Benét (particularly the outdoor, work‐related, exotically set poetry of Rudyard Kipling and Robert W. Service), and the ample opportunities for entertainment and performance afforded by chuck wagons and campfires, bunkhouses and line camps, and barrooms and hotel rooms.

From this complex matrix of verbal art, derived from Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales with a strong admixture of Mexican‐ and African‐derived performance traditions and popular culture, individual singers, reciters, and wordsmiths shape a lasting heritage of occupational verse. But singers and reciters from the nineteenth century to the present day have never adopted wholesale the traditions of the past, nor did cowboy poetry shift from an anonymous oral tradition in the nineteenth century to one that relied heavily on individual composition and publication in the twentieth.⁶ Instead, cowboy poetry and song have consistently combined time‐honored poetic forms, job‐specific language, and traditional metaphor with innovations by singers, reciters, and composers in expression, form, rhyme, meter, and subject matter. And although cowboy poetry was—as recently as 1985—defined as regularly rhymed and metered ballads composed and recited by men who have spent their lives in the cattle industry, rapid evolution since then has resulted in the use of unrhymed and irregularly metered open forms; in the expansion of subject matter to domestic, environmental, political, and personal topics; and in the increasing participation by women, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, Canadians, Hawaiians, and even children. At the same time, cowboy poets have become more aware of the traditional herding poetry of Australia, Argentina, and the British Isles.

Cowboy poetry has been primarily the province of literate people since the first publication of poems in western newspapers in the 1870s. That is true both of poets, who compose original verse, and of reciters, who memorize and perform poems composed by others (although certainly some reciters in the past were barely or not at all literate and relied on prodigious feats of memory to absorb the poems). Some people both invent and recite; others specialize. And although many contemporary poets compose their poetry in their heads, on horseback or while driving a pickup, and refuse to write anything down until the poem is complete to their satisfaction, writing has always been a vital part of an only partially oral tradition. The written poem is an aid to memory and a device by which poems are passed on to others, and publishing has aided the spread of specific poems and of poetry in general.⁷ Yet most reciters still value—and insist upon—memorization of any poem that they recite in public, in sharp contrast to the academic “poetry reading” in which poets seemingly read their poems, even if they are, in fact, memorized.⁸

Nor are cowboy poets primitive versifiers who create poetry instinctively from their working lives and experiences. Many cowboys of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been well read, sometimes astonishingly so. One of the best‐known nineteenth‐century poems, “The Cowboy's Soliloquy,” was composed by Allen McCandless, a working cowboy on the Crooked L Ranch in the Texas Panhandle, sometime before 1885. The third stanza reads:

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.

The imagery is taken directly from Shakespeare's As You Like It, in which Duke Senior, living in banishment in the Forest of Arden, exclaims:

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything:
I would not change it.

(II, i, 15‐18)

In his allusion‐filled poem, McCandless cleverly converts the forest wilderness of England into the harsh realities of the American West, wolf, bones, and all. The poem begins:

All day o'er the prairie alone I ride,
Not even a dog to run by my side;
My fire I kindle with chips gathered round,
And boil my coffee without being ground.(9)

The range of literary influences at work on cowboy poets is illustrated by the influential Texas poet Carlos Ashley (1903‐93), who wrote modestly:

I have never considered myself to be a real (certified) poet. Just a rhymer; some call it doggerel. Most so‐called poets fall into this category, even a few famous ones like Dorothy Parker, for instance. Some critics put Longfellow on that list.

Now who is a “real” poet? There are many, but as an example, how about the Richmond mystic, Edgar Allan Poe?¹⁰

More recently, contemporary cowboy poets have begun reading and reciting poets whose roots are deep in Anglo‐American literary history. Paul Zarzyski recites Dylan Thomas; Buck Ramsey borrowed stanza forms from Housman and Pushkin and liked to recite from memory Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; Andy Wilkinson and Teresa Jordan recite Frost; John Dofflemyer composes Shakespearean sonnets about cowboy life; and Wallace McRae confesses unabashedly to “plagiarism” of forms and rhyme schemes from half a dozen English and American poets.

Cowboy poets, in other words, don't conform to most readers' perceptions or expectations of who or what a folk poet might be. For example, T. M. Pearce's early (1953) formulation, “What Is a Folk Poet?” concluded that folk poets write often of community events and of the joyful or sorrowful experiences of individuals in their communities, using traditional poetic forms that are sometimes “irregular or modified in the direction of informal and freer communication.” The poet's “identity as an author is not suppressed, but his individuality as a poet is submerged in the stream of group or community feeling.”¹¹ That definition does fit some cowboy poets and some cowboy poetry, but it implies a lack of technical skill on the part of the poet and an effort to conform totally to group norms, neither being standards by which cowboy poets measure themselves.

Américo Paredes's 1964 review also describes the subject matter and form of folk poetry but goes beyond Pearce's discussion to identify the folk poet specifically as performer and the poem as an oral performance for a specific audience in which context is all‐important. The performer, says Paredes, is

an actor, a personality. In the comic song he may play the clown. In the folksong of high seriousness he will be serious; he will take a detached attitude toward himself as performer. But he is far from detached in respect to his subject … no matter how he submerges himself in his part, the performer will be effective to the extent that he is a personality in his own right.

Here of course is a fundamental difference between folk and sophisticated literature. Folk literature is always a vehicle for the performer, who supplies a feeling of immediacy—of passion and power—through his own performance.¹²

Roger deV. Renwick's study English Folk Poetry identifies three major types: orally disseminated, anonymous songs from the rural working class; local songs commemorating community individuals or occurrences; and local poetry closely tied to the poet's “bounded and knowable world.”¹³ Cowboy poetry probably has most in common with the third category, yet differences are readily apparent. Although some cowboy poetry is composed to mark community occasions—weddings, funerals, baptisms, celebrations of community history, commemorations, and natural disasters—other poetry is universal to the cowboy trade. Still other poems may be highly personal, even confessional. Beyond their geographic communities, cowboy poets increasingly consider themselves part of a large group spread throughout the West, a “family” who communicates constantly by letter, telephone, sometimes e‐mail.

Cowboy poetry, then, is elusive of definition and in constant flux. Although some poems originate in local circumstances and are centered on identifiable individuals and events within a community, many of the most lasting ones lack that sense of specific locality or perhaps lose their local references over time and through repeated recitation. The genre is writing‐ and print‐dependent yet remains intensely oral in performance. Nor did cowboy poetry originate in some preliterate, primitive culture, but instead has borrowed since its beginnings from the forms, metrics, and images of folk song, the Bible, classic literature, and contemporary verse. Cowboy poetry has over the years expanded rapidly in its use of available poetic forms, subject matter, and technique, moving outward from its balladic center to other fixed forms and, increasingly, to free verse. And although the most‐admired poets of the pre‐World War II era, Bruce Kiskaddon and Curley Fletcher, were experienced riders and stock handlers, ranching people have also embraced verse by non‐cowboys—James Barton Adams, Lawrence Chittenden, Charles Badger Clark, E. A. Brininstool, and Henry Herbert Knibbs—whose acquaintance with livestock and cattle management was mostly secondhand.

Many of the earliest cowboy songs and poems were anonymous in origin, but signed poetry began appearing in western newspapers during the 1870s. McCandless's “The Cowboy's Soliloquy” and Chittenden's “The Cowboys' Christmas Ball” were well known in the West before the turn of the twentieth century; Chittenden, in fact, published a volume of verse with a New York publisher in 1893. Yet by trade he was a dry‐goods salesman, then a correspondent for a New York newspaper; he got into Texas ranching in partnership with an uncle but after seventeen years gave it up and returned East in 1904.¹⁴

About the same time, James Barton Adams (1843‐1918), an Ohioan by birth, veteran of the Civil War and the construction of the transcontinental railroad, became a newspaperman, editor, and columnist in Denver, where he began publishing his own poetry of western life. In 1899 he published a collection called Breezy Western Verse, poems based on a bare two years of ranch employment in New Mexico when he was in his late forties. His poetry soon became known and recited by cowboys throughout the West.¹⁵

In 1889, N. Howard “Jack” Thorp set out on a year‐long, 1,500‐mile circuit of ranches in New Mexico and Texas, collecting songs and poems as he went. He was inspired enough to compose the well‐known “Little Joe the Wrangler” in 1898, and in 1908 he published, at his own expense, Songs of the Cowboys, the first important anthology of cowboy songs and poems collected from working cowboys—although Thorp himself wrote six of the twenty‐three songs.¹⁶ Despite his work as a cowboy, Thorp had been raised in New York City, the son of a well‐to‐do lawyer who suffered financial reverses. Forced to forgo the college education that he had expected, Thorp trained polo ponies, worked as superintendent of an Arizona mine, got involved in a South American railroad scheme, and eventually became a successful rancher.¹⁷

It may seem that cowboy poetry was a decidedly marginal avocation at the beginning of the twentieth century, given its partly oral roots and the apparently ephemeral nature of the few poems that did get into print in newspapers, magazines, and a few individual, mostly self‐published, collections. Yet in 1905 there appeared a mammoth (seven‐pound) publication, The Prose and Poetry of the Live Stock Industry of the United States. Sponsored by the National Live Stock Historical Association, the volume was intended to be the first of three that would provide a “complete, reliable and interesting history” of the cattle industry in the western United States. This first volume contained no poetry at all, however, and the second and third volumes were never published because of financial problems. Yet the very title of the publication demonstrates that cowboy poetry was already an established and significant part of ranching life by the turn of the century, recognized by the livestock industry as a vital chronicle of an endangered occupation.¹⁸

Most of the cowboy poets active in the period before and after World War I—those whose poetry still lasts—were not native westerners, Thorp being something of an exception in his successful adaptation to ranching life. By 1906, for example, Charles Badger Clark—the “Badger” is a family name, not a nickname—was sending poems to the Pacific Monthly from the Arizona ranch near Tombstone where he was caretaker. But like Thorp, Clark (1883‐1957) was not reared around ranching. His father was a minister in Iowa and South Dakota, and Clark was in Arizona primarily because his doctor thought he had tropical fever and that the dry climate might effect a cure. Thus, most of Clark's knowledge of the cowboy life was from observation rather than direct experience.¹⁹ Yet his “A Cowboy's Prayer,” “The Glory Trail” (“High‐Chin Bob”), and “A Border Affair” (“Spanish Is the Lovin' Tongue”) have become standards for recitation.²⁰

E. A. Brininstool (1870‐1957), a New York native, moved to Los Angeles at age twenty‐five, where he became a prominent reporter and editor for a series of newspapers. He wrote a daily column, feature articles, and verse, finally becoming a full‐time freelance writer in 1915. He was the author of dozens of books on popular western history, particularly the Indian wars, and also wrote in his lifetime some five thousand poems, most of them treating cowboy and range life.²¹ His Trail Dust of a Maverick (1914) was published in New York by Dodd, Mead with poems on a variety of topics, one of which, “The Old Trail Songs,” demonstrates Brininstool's familiarity with cowboy singing, possibly via Thorp's collection.

In 1910 John Lomax—one of the most important American folklorists—published his first collection, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Macmillan). Lomax had grown up near a branch of the Chisholm Trail in north Texas and had begun collecting cowboy songs as a young man. But it wasn't until he began studying for an M.A. at Harvard when he was in his late thirties that he received encouragement to spend the next three summers roaming the Southwest, collecting ballads, songs, and poems. The publication of Cowboy Songs—only a few had music accompanying the lyrics, and many were probably composed first as poems before being set to music—resonated with an American public preoccupied with urbanization, industrialization, and immigration and still imbued with a sense of inferiority with respect to Europe. Here, it seemed, was a native American voice of epic quality to challenge European culture.²²

The popular success of Cowboy Songs encouraged John Lomax to collect farther afield, and in 1919 he published Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp, not—as the title suggests—another collection of songs but an anthology of cowboy poetry gleaned partly from published collections. Included were two poems by Brininstool, eight by James Barton Adams, ten by Badger Clark, and four by Henry Herbert Knibbs, another easterner. A few of the poems were listed as “anonymous” or “from recitation,” which suggests that Lomax's collecting endeavors included transcribing poetry as well as song and recognizing that recitation was a popular entertainment and recreation among cowboys.

Not until after the publication of Lomax's first collection did the two poets who had the most experience with livestock, Bruce Kiskaddon (1878‐1949) and Curley Fletcher (1892‐1953), begin writing. Like most of the other prominent cowboy poets of the first third of the twentieth century, Kiskaddon was an easterner, born in Pennsylvania, although his family later relocated to the mining town of Trinidad, Colorado. Until his forty‐eighth year he was employed primarily as a range hand in Colorado and Arizona, with a short stint of work in Australia. Then, in 1926, Kiskaddon went to Hollywood to work in the nascent motion‐picture industry, where he wrote most of his reminiscent poems about his days as a working cowboy.

Information about Kiskaddon's life remains fragmentary, but he did develop a cooperative partnership with the magazine Western Livestock Journal and its publisher, Nelson Crow. Each month Kiskaddon would send Crow a poem that was then sent to illustrator Katherine Field for an appropriate sketch before publication. Western Livestock was a magazine of great popularity, subscribed to by thousands of ranch families all over the West, so Kiskaddon's poetry was often clipped, carried in purses and wallets and pocket notebooks, pasted into scrapbooks, and memorized. His lyric and descriptive powers and his technical abilities make him the most influential cowboy poet of all, as in the beginning lines of “The Creak of the Leather”:

It's likely that you can remember
A corral at the foot of a hill
Some mornin' along in December
When the air was so cold and so still.
When the frost lay as light as a feather
And the stars had jest blinked out and gone.
Remember the creak of the leather
As you saddled your hoss in the dawn.(23)

Carmen “Curley” Fletcher, the son of an English father and an Italian mother, grew up in farming country around Bishop, California, and became familiar with cowboy work through the Paiute cowboys in the area. He was a successful rodeo rider who scraped by on his winnings and wrote poems on the side, notably “The Strawberry Roan” and “The Flyin' Outlaw.” A slim booklet, Rhymes of the Round‐Up, was self‐published by Fletcher and his brother in 1917; apparently Lomax had not encountered it when he assembled Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp. Fletcher published a larger collection, Songs of the Sage, in 1931. He spent the remainder of his life promoting rodeos, developing mines, and advising publishers and filmmakers on western topics.²⁴

Prominent poets of the World War II era included S. Omar Barker (1894‐1985), a college‐educated New Mexican from a ranching background who spent most of his career as a freelance writer, and Dartmouth graduate Gail Gardner (1892‐1988), a rancher and postmaster in Prescott, Arizona, who wrote “The Sierry Petes” (“Tyin' Knots in the Devil's Tail”).²⁵ Carlos Ashley was a “country lawyer,” as he liked to describe himself, when he wasn't writing poetry, ranching, and developing real estate.

It must be apparent, then, that virtually none of the most respected cowboy poets of the last century have been itinerant working cowboys scribbling heartfelt verses in lonely line camps. Almost without exception, cowboy poets have been men and women of the world, aware of politics and economics, war and peace, environmental conflicts, shifting cultural values and mores. Despite massive misconceptions about the origins of cowboy poetry, it is clear that the great majority of poems are of known authorship; that they nevertheless exist in multiple versions; that they are widely transmitted by oral, written, and—now—electronic means; and that although the geographic origins and occupations of the poets are considered significant and relevant, it is a poem's fidelity to the cowboy experience and its ability to reflect accurately the ups and downs of the cowboy life that determine its lasting appeal.

In short, cowboy poetry seems to defy categorization. A hybrid of folk and popular kinds of poetry, it borrows deftly from popular and commercial images of the West, appropriating, parodying, and critiquing. Cowboy poets are intensely aware of their occupational traditions, poetic and otherwise, but they also read widely in the classics and popular literature. Like the rest of the cowboy's occupational heritage, cowboy poetry has borrowed heavily from a diversity of cultural backgrounds. Nineteenth‐century cowboys got their cattle‐herding techniques largely from the Spanish and Mexican practices of vaqueros. They learned horsemanship in many cases from Native Americans, and black cowboys, both slaves and freemen, were a vital part of the development of the cattle drive and roundup. By some estimates, African American and Mexicano cowboys may have made up as much as 37 percent of the working hands during the trail‐drive era that ended in the 1890s. And the continuing influence of Native Americans as horsemen, cowboys, and independent ranchers is just beginning to be assessed by historians of the West.²⁶

Similarly, the oral traditions of working cowboys represent an amalgam of cultural expressions and forms, not only the ballads and broadsides of Great Britain and the songs and poems of outdoor workers like sailors and loggers but also field hollers, spirituals, and work songs from African American cowboys; corridos, versos, and guitar‐accompanied singing from Mexicanos; and poems and songs from Native American cowboys.²⁷ It is not just a matter of cultural traditions and occupational skills influencing each other but a complex of traditions coexisting and sometimes hybridizing, even as far away as Argentina and Australia.

The subject matter of the poetry, once relatively narrow, has expanded radically since the mid‐1980s, yet familiar topics are still at the heart of the tradition. Work is, of course, the primary subject, but it can be treated in a variety of ways—with humor, as in poems about memorable “wrecks” (bucking accidents) or, more grimly, by capturing the sheer drudgery of long days on the range and the dangers that await unwary cowboys. Yet work‐centered poetry frequently has an instructional function as well and carries with it embedded debates over work techniques, appropriate dress, and preferences in gear that continue to animate conversations among cowboys throughout the West.

Thousands of poems, unsurprisingly, have been written about animals—favorite horses and dogs, notable bucking horses, and wild cows and steers with more‐than‐human intelligence and craft. Frequently the poetry celebrates the wildness still inherent in supposedly domesticated stock, a theme that recurs in a different form in the numerous poems about cowboys who try to rope truly wild animals: Badger Clark's “The Glory Trail” (sometimes called “High Chin Bob,” the name of the proud cowboy who ropes a mountain lion and is doomed to have it follow him for the rest of his days); S. Omar Barker's “Bear Ropin' Buckaroo”; and Curley Fletcher's “Yavapai Pete” (the cowboy who rides a grizzly bear for ranch work).²⁸

Much poetry has been composed in memory of fallen comrades as well, often when the death is the result of stampede, drowning, or other accident. Another favorite topic is the system of values prevalent among cowboys (usually referred to as “the code of the West”), which celebrates the virtues of bravery, loyalty, steadfastness, honesty, honor, and courtesy, especially to women and the elderly. Value‐laden statements—which may again provide instruction in norms and values to youngsters and outsiders—are often embedded in a set of traditional metaphors: “he'll do to ride the river with,” “he never sold his saddle,” “he'll make a hand,” and “he rides for the brand.”²⁹ More memorably, “Let me be easy on the man that's down / Let me be square and generous with all.”³⁰

Nature is, of course, central to the cowboy life, and it's a rare poem that doesn't include references to the rugged yet beautiful landscape and the fickleness of the western climate. The confinement of the city in contrast to the freedom of the outdoor life, the beauties of the changing seasons, the contrast between mountain and prairie or desert and river, the sun, rain, and open sky—these are major topics that portray the cowboy's harmonious interplay with nature.

Although rarely published until recently, bawdy poetry and song have been a vital part of cowboy expressive culture since the trail‐driving days of the nineteenth century. One of the oldest poem/songs, “The Old Chisholm Trail,” had hundreds of verses, many of them dealing with sex, masturbation, sodomy, and excretions, both human and animal. Vulgar parodies of well‐established cowboy poems and songs were also common, notably “The Castration of the Strawberry Roan,” a parody of Curley Fletcher's “The Strawberry Roan” and written by Fletcher himself.³¹ Bawdy poetry and song probably occurred in proportions similar to those in the repertoires of soldiers, sailors, loggers, college fraternity members, and other relatively isolated all‐male groups.

Bawdy poetry is still a common bill of fare among working cowboys, although the emphasis on “family entertainment” at poetry gatherings has mostly driven the performance of such materials back to line camps, bunkhouses, and saloons. The 1986 and 1987 Cowboy Poetry Gatherings in Elko, Nevada, each set aside a late‐night session specifically for men—and women—who wanted to hear and recite off‐color poems and songs, but protests by many attending the gathering ended the practice thereafter. Yet small groups of poets and reciters maintain the bawdy tradition by getting together in motel rooms and bars and by continuing to compose and recite such works.

Cowboy poetry has a social and domestic side as well. The cowboy's pridefully raucous social life is celebrated in dozens of poems about dances and other social gatherings, and love, courting, and family also play a surprisingly important role in the poetry. Although women poets were extremely rare during the “golden age” of cowboy poetry between 1905 and 1935, an increasing number of women have been writing and reciting and developing their own perspectives and styles. Women write of family and children, the unpredictability of ranch life (and husbands), and the frustrations and beauties of rural living. But they also write of their work as ranchers, riders, and working cowboys; their struggles to maintain their independence; and the limiting nature of traditional gender relations in the West. Women are now at the forefront of developments in cowboy poetry, adopting newer and more open forms and forging into hitherto untouched subject areas: domestic relations, family problems, and women's roles.

The ethnically diverse makeup of the West has been a topic, too, and despite the major influence of Mexico (and before that, Spain) on the gear, lingo, and working techniques of American cowboys, vaqueros (and other ethnic minorities) were generally harshly treated in the early poetry, both stigmatized and stereotyped. In keeping with widespread racist attitudes in the first half of the twentieth century, Mexicanos were treated with disdain but were also portrayed as exotic and sensual, as in Frank Desprez's well‐known “Lasca” and Badger Clark's “A Border Affair” (“Spanish Is the Lovin' Tongue”). Yet there were apparent exceptions. “The Texas Cowboy and the Mexican Greaser,” for example, which is anonymous, describes a cowboy's defense of a Mexican hand about to be murdered by a mob.³²

Clark's “A Border Affair” has often been bowdlerized to remove what many singers and reciters consider an offensive line in the last stanza:

Never seen her since that night,
                    I kain't cross the Line, you know, [the Arizona‐
                              Mexico border]
She was Mex and I was white;
                    Like as not it's better so.
Yet I've always sort of missed her
Since that last wild night I kissed her,
                    Left her heart and lost my own—
                    “Adios, mi corazon!”(33)

The resignation of “like as not it's better so,” however, suggests that it was social pressures—the embedded racism of American society—that militated against the pair, and the speaker's use of Spanish at the end of each stanza suggests that the “Mex” of the third line is not the cowboy's term but what he hears—or expects to hear—from others; thus the poem becomes an indictment of the racism that refuses to allow relationships of this kind. Yet as Jim Griffith has pointed out, the entire poem describes an American cowboy's crossing the border, meeting and possibly seducing a Mexican woman, getting in a “foolish gamblin' fight,” and fleeing back across the border, never to return: a powerful emblem of American imperialism that creates an unresolved political tension within the poem.³⁴

The belief that cowboy poetry is a vital means of expression of western ways of life, that it has political as well as aesthetic power, has meant that hundreds of poems throughout the tradition address the issues of a vanishing West—of the economic pressures on independent ranchers and cowboys and political tensions throughout the region. This awareness of poetry as speaking for an entire regional occupational group has led to a large group of poems that are highly self‐conscious and that speak of the nature of memory, of the process of writing poetry, and of the mystery of making poems that can have effect as well as affect in a difficult world.

Poems have been written about the debate between those favoring strictly metered and rhymed ballad forms and those who experiment with open forms. Other poems deal with the stark contrasts between the romantic Hollywood image of the cowboy life and its harsh realities, or between the easy humor of cowboy poetry and the struggle of many ranch families to hang onto their land and to make a living. Poems have taken sides on environmental questions, have castigated vegetarians, have commented on politics and international trade agreements, and have asserted the right of women to work and be respected as cowboys. As Sue Wallis has said, “cowboy” is a verb, not a gender‐exclusive noun. And poems have described cowboy poetry gatherings and the remarkable network of cowboy poets that has developed throughout the West.³⁵ …

Notes

1. Charles Badger Clark, “The Legend of Boastful Bill,” in Clark, Sun and Saddle Leather, Including “Grass Grown Trails” and New Poems, 5th ed. (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1920), 52‐56. The poem was composed in 1907 during Clark's residency near Tombstone, Arizona; it was first published in Pacific Monthly magazine in February 1908. Sun and Saddle Leather is still available, along with other works by and about Clark, from the Badger Clark Memorial Society, P.O. Box 351, Custer, SD 57730‐0351.

2. Charles Badger Clark, “The Old Cow Man,” in Clark, Sun and Saddle Leather, 5th ed., 88. This poem was first published by Clark in the 1915 edition, but it was probably written in Arizona between 1906 and 1910 (personal communication from Greg Scott, 25 June 1997).

3. Alan Lomax, “Introduction,” in John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), (New York: Macmillan, 1986), xviii‐xxix.

4. Lomax, “Introduction,” xxix‐xxx.

5. W. K. O'Neil, “Introduction,” in The Oral Tradition of the American West: Adventure, Courtship, Family, and Place in Traditional Recitation, ed. Keith Cunningham (Little Rock: August House, 1990), 14 and note 19.

6. This is the argument of Blake Allmendinger, The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

7. Compare Dianne M. Dugaw, “Anglo‐American Folksong Reconsidered: The Interface of Oral and Written Forms,” Western Folklore 43, no. 2 (1984): 83‐103.

8. For additional perspectives on recitation and monologues, especially in Great Britain, see “Monologues and Folk Recitation,” ed. Kenneth S. Goldstein and Robert D. Bethke, special issue of Southern Folklore Quarterly 40, nos. 1‐2 (1976); and Bethke, “Recitation,” in Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art, ed. Thomas A. Green (Santa Barbara: ABC‐CLIO, 1997), 2:695‐97.

9. In Cowboy Poetry: A Gathering, ed. Hal Cannon (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1985), 1. See also Harry E. Chrisman, Lost Trails of the Cimarron, 2d ed. (Denver: Sage, 1964), 284‐87; and Jim Bob Tinsley, He Was Singin' This Song: A Collection of Forty‐Eight Traditional Songs of the American Cowboy, with Words, Music, Pictures, and Stories (Orlando: University Presses of Florida, 1981), 1‐7.

10. Personal communication, 21 March 1988.

11. T. M. Pearce, “What Is a Folk Poet?” Western Folklore 12, no. 4 (1953): 248. Compare Duncan Emrich's narrow, erroneous description: “The folk poet is not conscious of form. He knows nothing of and is totally unconcerned about sonnets, madrigals, epics, quatrains, hexameters, free or blank verse, couplets, or whatever.” See American Folk Poetry: An Anthology (Boston: Little Brown, 1974), xxvi.

12. Américo Paredes, “Some Aspects of Folk Poetry,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 6, no. 2 (1964): 225. For more on the performative nature of cowboy poetry, see Carol A. Edison, Cowboy Poetry from Utah: An Anthology (Salt Lake City: Utah Folklife Center, 1985), 8‐14.

13. Roger deV. Renwick, English Folk Poetry: Structure and Meaning, Publications of the American Folklore Society: New Series, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 5.

14. Allen McCandless, “The Cowboy's Soliloquy” and Lawrence Chittenden, “The Cowboys' Christmas Ball,” in Tinsley, He Was Singin' This Song, 144‐47.

15. James Barton Adams, Some Letters and Writings of James Barton Adams, Publications in History (Socorro, N.M.: Socorro Country Historical Society, 1968), 4:5‐6.

16. Although Thorp is usually credited with publishing the first collection, a patent‐medicine salesman named Clark Stanley anticipated Thorp by producing in 1897 a pamphlet that combined cowboy songs with advertisements for “snake‐oil liniment.” See Glenn Ohrlin, The Hell‐Bound Train: A Cowboy Songbook (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), xvii. Even before that, in 1886, a cowboy named Lysius Gough printed a collection of his own poems; see Guy Logsdon's essay in this volume. See also Thorp's autobiographical sketch, “Banjo in the Cow Camps,” The Atlantic 167 (Aug. 1940): 195‐203, in N. Howard (“Jack”) Thorp and Austin E. Fife and Alta S. Fife, Songs of the Cowboys (1908), (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1966), 11‐27.

17. John I. White, Git Along, Little Dogies: Songs and Songmakers of the American West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 198.

18. Don D. Walker, “Prose and Poetry of the Cattle Industry: Fact and Image as the Centuries Changed,” in Clio's Cowboys: Studies in the Historiography of the Cattle Trade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 46‐60.

19. “Preface,” in Clark, Sun and Saddle Leather, 6th ed. (1922), vii‐xix. See also Greg Scott, ed., Poems of the West by Charles Badger Clark, Jr.: Previously Unpublished and Out of Print Poetry ([Nogales, Ariz.]: Moco Seco Press, 1997).

20. Charles Badger Clark, “A Cowboy's Prayer,” “The Glory Trail” (“High‐Chin Bob”), and “A Border Affair” (“Spanish Is the Lovin' Tongue”), in White, Git Along, Little Dogies, 126‐36.

21. Who Was Who in America (Chicago: A. N. Marquis, 1960), 3:104.

22. Lomax, “Introduction,” xi‐xxxvi.

23. Bruce Kiskaddon, “The Creak of the Leather,” in Rhymes of the Ranges: A New Collection of the Poems of Bruce Kiskaddon, ed. Hal Cannon (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1987), 41. Kiskaddon's biography appears in the introduction to Rhymes of the Ranges.

24. Hal Cannon, “Preface” to Curley Fletcher, Songs of the Sage: The Poetry of Curley Fletcher, ed. Cannon (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1986), v‐xiii.

25. See, for example, S. Omar Barker, Rawhide Rhymes: Singing Poems of the Old West (Garden City: Doubleday, 1968); and Gail I. Gardner, Orejana Bull for Cowboys Only (1935), 7th ed. (Prescott: The Sharlot Hall Museum Press, 1987).

26. Richard W. Slatta, “Cowboys and Indians: Frontier Race Relations,” Cowboys of the Americas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 159‐73. See also Peter Iverson, When Indians Became Cowboys: Native Peoples and Cattle Ranching in the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); and Morgan Baillargeon and Leslie Tepper, Legends of Our Times: Native Cowboy Life (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998).

27. See the program books from the Elko, Nevada, Cowboy Poetry Gathering, particularly those from the 1992 and 1993 gatherings that featured vaquero traditions and those from 1995 and 1996, which highlighted Native American contributions. See also Joe S. Graham, El Rancho in South Texas: Continuity and Change from 1750 and Ranching in South Texas: A Symposium, ed. Graham (both, Kingsville, Tex.: John E. Conner Museum, 1994). Also see Jerald Underwood, “The Vaquero: Forerunner and Foundation of the American Cowboy,” in The Catch‐Pen, ed. Len Ainsworth and Kenneth Davis (Lubbock: Texas Tech University, 1991), 171‐75; and María Herrera‐Sobek, Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), especially ch. 1.

28. Charles Badger Clark, “The Glory Trail” and “High Chin Bob” (two versions), in John A. Lomax, Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp (1919), (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 30‐35; S. Omar Barker, “Bear Ropin' Buckaroo,” in Cowboy Poetry, ed. Cannon, 14‐15; Curley Fletcher, “Yavapai Pete,” in Fletcher, Songs of the Sage, 15‐17.

29. See in particular the poetry of Red Steagall in Ride for the Brand (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1993); Eugene Manlove Rhodes, “The Hired Man on Horseback,” in Best Loved Poems of the American West, ed. John J. Gregg and Barbara T. Gregg (Garden City: Doubleday, 1980), 189‐93; Georgie Sicking, “To Be a Top Hand,” in Just Thinkin' (Fallon, Nev.: Loganberry Press, 1985), 8; Thorp and Fife, Songs of the Cowboys, 61‐65; and Jack Lamb, “American Cowboy Poetry: History and Orality,” unpublished essay.

30. Charles Badger Clark, “A Cowboy's Prayer,” in Clark, Sun and Saddle Leather, 5th ed., 36.

31. Guy Logsdon, “The Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing” and Other Songs Cowboys Sing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 60‐69, 86‐96. See also Clifford P. Westermeier, “The Cowboy and Sex,” in The Cowboy: Six‐Shooters, Songs, and Sex, ed. Charles W. Harris and Buck Rainey (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 85‐105.

32. “The Texas Cowboy and the Mexican Greaser,” in Lomax, Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp, 11‐13.

33. Charles Badger Clark, “A Border Affair” (“Spanish Is the Lovin' Tongue”), in Clark, Sun and Saddle Leather, 5th ed., 44; see also White, Git Along, Little Dogies, 126‐36.

34. Personal communication, 14 July 1996.

35. Sue Wallis, “Gatherings” in chapter 17 of this volume; Charles A. Kortes, “Poets Gathering, 1985,” in Cowboy Poetry, ed. Cannon, 110‐11.