The Long Trail: My Life in the West

by Ian Tyson

  Copyright © 2010 Four Strong Winds

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2010 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Lyrics reprinted by permission of Ian Tyson and Slick Fork Music.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Tyson, Ian, 1933–

  The long trail : my life in the West / Ian Tyson.

  Also available in electronic format.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-35937-7

  1. Tyson, Ian, 1933-. 2. Country musicians—Canada—Biography. I. Title.

  ML420.T977A3 2010 782.421642?92 C2010-901859-1

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1. Sunrise

  Chapter 2. West of the West

  Chapter 3. Drifting

  Chapter 4. New York

  Chapter 5. Horses

  Chapter 6. Sagebrush Renaissance

  Chapter 7. Cowboyography

  Chapter 8. The Changing West

  Chapter 9. Beef, Beans and Bullshit

  Chapter 10. Raven Rock

  Chapter 11. Closing the Circle

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  Sunrise

  It’s darker than three feet down a Holstein. Six a.m., Alberta daylight savings. Waking from a dream of Cabo San Lucas to a March north wind and five below. Everyone with half a brain and a Visa card has gotten out. Only us drones left to feed the livestock, so I make the coffee double strength and prepare to get at ‘er. Fifteen minutes stumbling around on frozen manure should do it.

  So begins the day.

  Used to be a rancher wouldn’t divulge the size of his operation, nor the numbers of his herd. It’s a longstanding tradition in cow country that’s based on making as little information available to the tax people as possible. Suffice it to say, my outfit is a modest spread near the southern Alberta town of Longview, just east of the Rocky Mountain foothills.

  During the ranch’s heyday in the 1990s, I ran between twenty and thirty horses. They were mostly mares, which meant there were lots of babies each year. That was back when my ex-wife Twylla and my daughter Adelita were still here. But they left a few years back, and these days it’s just me on the ranch — and only five horses to feed. There’s Bud, my cutting horse, a solid professional cowhorse, all business all the time. Then there’s Pokey, a bay mare, with all her feminine wiles, who loves to be the centre of attention. Every morning they’re lined up for their grain.

  On Pokey at the ranch. (LEE GUNDERSON)

  I feed my gentle grey mare and her half-broke daughter. The mare ran under the name Lika Pop back in her racetrack days and won her maiden at 350 yards. She’s eighteen now and crippled with a bad knee, but she’s been a good colt producer. Her daughter Doris is a big, pushy adolescent who’s never been properly schooled because I don’t have the time to do it. Finally there’s a new colt, a trim, good-moving two-year-old. He’s a blank canvas.

  As for my two big longhorns, Kramer is laid back and Billy is more snuffy. While I pour their crushed barley into the rubber feed tub, their great horns sway slowly around my head in the darkness. I’m damn careful because I never know what Billy’s going to do. I bought Kramer and seven other yearling bulls in the mid-1990s from the late Mitford Beard, who ran one of the last American open-range outfits (no fences) on the Utah-Colorado line. Billy came a few years later, from rancher Bill Cross.

  Billy and Kramer are my last two steers, and when it’s warm enough, they’ll wander out of their lot onto the prairie like a couple of old outlaws. Longhorns are like pets for ranchers, reminders of a bygone era when the trail herders drove cattle across the unfenced West. They’re almost conversation pieces nowadays.

  Kramer sure gave me something to talk about when he got his horns stuck in a round-bale feeder a few years back. I heard all this banging coming from his pen, and when I went up to see what was going on, there was Kramer waving around this 200-pound bale feeder like a damn party hat, repeatedly crashing it into the fence. Those feeders aren’t small. They’re five feet across, with diagonal steel struts around the sides above the base. I guess he’d stuck his head and horns between the struts, right inside the feeder — he was more than happy to get closer to the hay. But when he wanted to get out, he couldn’t. Then the wreck was on.

  I didn’t know what the hell to do. I called my neighbour Pete Wambeke, and he didn’t know what to do either. I couldn’t rope Kramer, because he’s too big and a horse couldn’t hold him. I considered getting some tranquilizers from the vet, but then I thought, I’m gonna take care of this myself. I got my hacksaw and approached Kramer warily, talking to him for almost half an hour before he finally let me stand beside him and start sawing away at the struts to free his horns.

  I knew Kramer had only so much patience and then he’d lose it again and start waving his party hat around — he was already stepping on my feet. But he’s intelligent, and I guess he understood that I was going to get him out. I kept sawing, sweating like crazy. “Christ,” I muttered. “If I don’t have a cardiac arrest, it’s going to be a miracle.” Finally I got two struts cut and out he came, horns and all. He wandered off, thankful for his freedom.

  Then the silly son of a bitch did the exact same thing the following year, and again I had to cut him free. After that I carefully eliminated all round-bale feeders from the longhorns’ pens.

  ———

  After feeding the horses and longhorns in the early-morning dark, I give a few leftover wieners to the kitty-cats in the barn and head back inside for breakfast. I live in a cedar-log house built in 1975. That’s a big reason why I bought this land in 1979, when I was forty-six — I liked the rustic feel, as well as the huge basement. (The romance fades, however, when you realize that logs are great dust-catchers.) I also liked the big living room with its west-facing windows looking out on the shining mountains.

  Today both the main floor and the basement are decorated with Navajo rugs, Mexican tile, eagle feathers, Indian artifacts and the western paintings, photos and horse sculptures I’ve collected over the years. In the kitchen hangs a framed poster from the inaugural 1961 Mariposa Folk Festival — a poster I designed — and there’s a brand new dishwasher, my pride and joy.

  I’m a bacon freak, so I fry up some bacon, boil a couple of eggs and have a grapefruit before taking my vitamin pills. I also have to take naproxen and hyaluronic acid for my hands and wrists — old cowboys have lots of aches and pains, and I’ve been dealing with arthritis for the past twenty years. I keep my fingers limber by practising the guitar for at least an hour a day; otherwise my hands might shut down entirely.

  Guitar practice is a daily discipline for me. I never was a night writer, never could pull a Hank Williams and stay up all night drinking whiskey and writing songs. In my world, mornings are for music and afternoons are spent doing the many chores that ranches require — moving hay bales, picking up feed in nearby Okotoks and making runs to the post office.

  The only way to get any real writing done in the morning, though, is to get out of the home place and away from the phones. So after breakfast, at around 8 a.m., I pull on my hiking boots and begin the walk s
outh down the gravel road to my stone house, where I do my songwriting.

  On days like this one, towards the end of winter, the sun is often late rising above the clouds banked over the eastern plains. There’s no wind. The only sound is the faint humming of the power lines along the road, until the silence is broken by a raven calling as he heads for the mountains, and the distant burble of my neighbour’s truck with its busted muffler.

  To the right is my hayfield, a great swath of buckskin grass delineated by thin snowdrifts along the fencelines. It was dry barley land when I first came here thirty years ago, and the black soil from that field blew like crazy. But when the rains came again, we seeded it all back to top-of-the-line grassland — the kind we need more of in this country. I’ve formed a loose partnership with my neighbour Pete to run grass yearlings from his outfit, the Diamond V, on the hayfield in May, and this summer will be no different.

  Beyond the hayfield and high above the rolling foothills, the Rockies stay shrouded in grey until the sun’s first rays bathe the snow-covered peaks in rose pink and the timber foothills below in deep purple, a scene almost too theatrical to be real. I’ve seen the sunrise here a thousand times and it still moves me.

  I arrive at the stone house after twenty minutes of walking. Built sometime in the 1920s, it has a green tin roof and sits on a wind-blasted little hill. The walls are sixteen inches thick. Originally I thought of it as a bunkhouse for itinerate punchers, but it soon became far more valuable as a music house. Now all my demos are done here — band rehearsals too. Guitars sound quite fine in the stone house in the morning, and lyrics are often found there soon after sunrise.

  Before I enter, I walk to a treed area farther down the hill, where there’s a group of tilting shacks that comprised the original homestead on this land. Those first homesteaders ran sheep. I knocked most of the shacks down a few years back but kept a few for the animals, and I like to see who’s around in the morning. Owls keep a nest in the nearby willows, and deer sometimes yard up down there — it’s great hideaway country for them when the poplars leaf out. The occasional elk wanders in, and once I even saw a big old black bear nosing around the place, a rare sight on the bald prairie.

  After visiting the animals — if the neighbour’s dog hasn’t scared them all away — I head into the stone house. Inside I’ve got a few couches, a couple of old rugs spread over hardwood floors and a big wooden table for writing. I make myself another coffee in the kitchen before getting out my guitar and running the scales, doing my best to warm up my stiff fingers. I slide a Mark Knopfler CD into my stereo system — I consider him my songwriting and guitar mentor, along with Ry Cooder — and try to keep up with him for a while before tackling my own material.

  It’s been a long trail that brought me here. It all started September 25, 1933, on Vancouver Island — “west of the West,” as my friend, the photographer Jay Dusard, put it — where I grew up in the Oak Bay area of Victoria with my mom, dad and older sister, Jean. But my earliest childhood memories are mostly lost, thanks to too many miles and too many whiskey bottles. Too many years of trying to figure out who I was — and who I wanted to become.

  CHAPTER 2

  West of the West

  I’ve always wanted to be where the sagebrush grows. When he was in his late teens, my old man, George Dawson Tyson, had that same desire. He’d been born July 4, 1889, into a large Victorian upper-middle-class family a few miles west of Liverpool, in the little seaside town of Hoylake, England. Somehow he got infused with the romance of the North American West — probably by reading about Buffalo Bill’s buffalo-hunting adventures — and he immigrated to Alberta in 1906 with dreams of becoming a cowboy. George arrived on the Canadian prairie green as a gourd, landing work as a ranch hand near Bowden, about sixty-five miles north of Calgary. He later told me he’d go to social events and almost freeze to death on the way back to the ranch, shivering under his buffalo robe.

  The winter of 1906–07 in particular was a killer on the northern plains. Entire herds of cattle died. “The year of the blue snow” is how Wallace Stegner described it in Wolf Willow: “That winter has remained ever since, in the minds of all who went through it, as the true measure of catastrophe.” My dad had gone to Alberta seeking the romance of cowboy life, not frostbite, and after a couple of harsh winters disabused him of his puncher plans, he drifted to the more moderate climate of the West Coast. Years later he told me he’d witnessed the last of open-range ranching in Alberta.

  My father, George Dawson Tyson, in Alberta. (COURTESY IAN TYSON)

  By his telling, he also saw the last of the real Native coastal villages in the Pacific Northwest — complete with totem poles — while working for a government survey crew on Nootka Island around 1910. After that job ended, he applied for a 160-acre homestead in the bush on Vancouver Island near Cowichan Bay. He liked to tell the story of felling a bunch of arbutus trees on that homestead and dropping them into the saltchuck, where, to his surprise, all the logs promptly sank. He had to dig a well and build a rudimentary shack to improve the homestead so he could keep it, but he never got it done; the land must have reverted back to the government.

  He hung out for a time with a bunch of English rounders on the island, and then the war came. In 1914 he enlisted with the Victoria-based 50th Regiment (Gordon Highlanders), which provided troops for the Canadian Expeditionary Force. My old man headed to France in April 1915 as a twenty-five-year-old private. (Many of the other CEF troops were British-born too.) Eventually he ended up as a captain in the King’s Liverpool Regiment of the British Army.

  I don’t know all the details of his war service, but at some point — I don’t know when or how — the Germans wounded him pretty severely in his neck and back. Shrapnel wounds, I suspect. After that the Germans captured him and kept him in a prisoner-of-war camp hospital for a few months. I do know that he struggled to communicate during that time because he couldn’t pick up German. Eventually he was repatriated to England, where he spent some more time in hospital recovering from his war wounds. For the rest of his life he always stood a little crooked because of his neck injury.

  My father said that when he got back to Duncan, B.C., after the war (that’s where he lived at the time), a cenotaph had been built to commemorate the dead. His was one of the few names of young men from the area that wasn’t on it. They were all killed in the early part of the war, those Canadian boys. My dad was lucky.

  The British Army gave him a Military Cross, with bar — the equivalent of a second MC. The citation said the medal had been awarded for “conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. After ably leading his company in a successful attack on the enemy’s lines, he advanced with his own and another company, filled a dangerous gap in our line and by excellent control firmly held his own against a counter attack in the face of very heavy shelling. Throughout the operation he displayed the utmost ability and skill, and kept his men’s spirits up by continually pressing along the line at imminent personal risk during heavy hostile shell fire.”

  When I was growing up, each November my dad and I would ride our horses through the meadows and oak trees of the Uplands, an area in Oak Bay dotted with English-style estates, on what he called Armistice Day. At 11 a.m. we would dismount and stand silently for three minutes. Afterwards he would tell me some of his battle memories, recalling the rats in the trenches and the snipers that had fired upon the Allied lines. He’d also talk about the Christmastime ceasefires with the Germans, when the snipers stopped shooting for a day. The next day they’d be right back at it, killing each other again.

  It’s amazing that the war didn’t destroy my old man the way it wrecked so many World War I vets. He saw lots of action but, for whatever reason, he didn’t internalize the experience. It probably helped that he never went through a gas attack. Growing up on Vancouver Island, I saw many of those old English guys who’d been gassed in the war, and a lot of them were crazy.

  After the war, George met my mother, Margaret Ge
rtrude Campbell, a native-born islander with a Scots Presbyterian background. (Her people had come to Victoria from Ontario — probably via San Francisco — in the 1870s, and her father, Duncan Campbell, ran a successful apothecary.) My mom’s parents owned a summer home at Cadboro Bay, just east of the present-day University of Victoria, and my dad often stayed at the nearby Cadboro Bay Hotel. Somehow my mom and dad met on the beach, and they married on June 18, 1930. He was thirty-nine; she was twenty-six.

  Their first child, Jean Tyson, was born the following year. Jean was always a shy kid. After I was born, in 1933, she felt I got all the attention from our parents, and she was probably right. We didn’t like each other very much as kids and we squabbled constantly, especially when we played Monopoly.

  It sounds strange, but I never really knew my mother. She wasn’t an extrovert by any means — she kept her thoughts and feelings pretty much to herself. She had four siblings, a couple of whom were alcoholics, and as a result my mom didn’t drink. Unlike my dad, she was pretty severe; she didn’t approve of “loose morals” at all. She was always there for me over the years, but poor Mother lived a pretty dour life.

  She had fully bought into Presbyterian doctrine, and at Christmas and Easter she’d drag Jean and me to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, a big brick building on the corner of Douglas and Broughton streets in downtown Victoria. I hated going there and really disliked the music — it was terrible. That poor organ at St. Andrew’s suffered great musical indignities in the cause of Presbyterianism. I would have much preferred it if Mother had hauled us to a Baptist or Pentecostal church, where the music was more rockin.’

  The first house Jean and I lived in was a bungalow on Dufferin Avenue, just west of Cattle Point. Our house was surrounded by big open fields, little oak trees and scotch broom — beautiful country, almost like range. The green meadows stretched right down to the ocean. It felt like we were out in the country, yet the Uplands just north of our place was furnished with paved roads connecting the houses, lit by ornate cast iron lampposts just like you’d find in a city. It was a lovely arrangement, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since. That entire area is now completely developed, but back then the suburbanization of Victoria, a civil-service town of old brick and wooden buildings, was only just beginning.