by Ian Tyson
People living there when I was a kid liked to pretend they were British; they thought of their city as a bastion of the British Empire, strong and loyal. My earliest memory is of bonfires burning all along the rocky coastline of Cattle Point in 1939 as people eagerly awaited the arrival of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, whose steamship was to come up the coast and into Victoria Harbour. There the royal party would mingle with their loyal subjects. I was five at the time, and I seem to remember people waving little Union Jacks as they waited for the ocean liner, a surreal scene that plays like an old movie in my mind.
In addition to the anglophile culture, a whole other class of people thrived on the island. Immigrants — Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Irish — drove the economy, working as loggers, fishermen and miners. And as you went north up Vancouver Island, the pretensions of mock empire rapidly gave way to a working-class ethic that attracted me even as a little boy. Those guys were out in the fresh air doing hard labour, and it seemed like a lot more fun than working in a stuffy downtown office as a civil servant. Of course, as a kid I didn’t realize just how hard their manual labour was.
Even in the depths of the Great Depression, the feeling on Vancouver Island was one of optimism. There would never be an end to the big timber. The salmon and other fishing stocks were inexhaustible. The natural resources would last forever. A strong man would always find work. This was not the Dust Bowl.
My old man managed the Monarch Life Assurance Company’s Victoria branch, which sold life insurance to loggers. That wasn’t a bad idea, since those guys were always getting killed in spectacular accidents. He’d go up the coast on a little steamer to Port Alberni and Port Renfrew to do business. When he was home, he was always busy, a hyper banty rooster of a man. He wasn’t that big — five foot eight — and had black hair very much in the style of the 1930s, like British-American actor Cary Grant’s. He was very proud of his hair.
When Jean and I were really young, Dad used to take us up to Smugglers Cove, on Ten Mile Point, a peninsula that sticks out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We’d all stand on the rocks and watch the killer whales going north in their spring migration as seabirds wheeled overhead. The old man would bring along some glittery jewellery he had bought at Woolworth’s, which he’d bury in the sand. Then he’d tell Jean and me that if we dug deep enough we might find treasure. That memory has stayed with me; I wrote a song about it (“Smugglers Cove”) more than six decades later:
Father took me by the hand
Down through the rocks and driftwood
And pirate gold from the five and dime
He caused me to discover
All in a morning’s wonder
The old man never came to church with Mom, Jean and me. His church was the great outdoors.
We’re pretty similar, the old man and I. He approached life in a very visceral, non-intellectual way, always living in the moment and having fun. He loved fishing and riding horses, though he wasn’t very good at either. He was certainly no horseman. I haven’t a clue how he got into horses — he might have learned when he went to boarding school on the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea — but his idea of riding was simply to hop on and go fast. He didn’t know anything about a horse’s mind.
When I was about six, the rodeo came to Vancouver and my dad took me on the ferry over to the mainland to see it. I met my first cowboy at that rodeo — a Native, dark as mahogany. He was wearing a purple satin shirt, and when he lifted me up and stuck me on the saddle, I said to myself, This is it. That saddle was where I was meant to be.
My dad usually kept two or three ponies of his own — mostly cayuses (low-quality horses) — for playing polo on. Dad was always scuffling around looking for pasture for his polo horses, and I remember them being tethered around the open fields surrounding our house.
I was scared to death the first time a horse broke into a lope while I was being ponied by my dad. When you’re a little kid, it feels like you’re way up in the sky on that saddle. Some people give up altogether after a scare like that, just as some people give up on hockey the first time they’re checked into the boards. Not me. I got back on.
Me at nine. (COURTESY IAN TYSON)
The old man was always on the lookout for a cheap horse, and I encountered more Native cowboys on trips up into the British Columbia interior with him. We’d head off to Clinton or 100 Mile House and stay at dude ranches and reservations. The cowboy culture in British Columbia those days was heavily Native, and the colourful characters fascinated me. Their demeanour was so different from the suits in Victoria, and they also worked with their hands like the labourers I admired. The Natives would cowboy in the summer and in the winter they’d work as loggers. That Native cowboy culture I knew as a kid is now gone, completely gone.
Some people are born to live with horses and others aren’t. I believe that with my whole heart and soul. I know ranch families in which one kid can’t wait to be a cowboy and the other kid is counting the minutes until he can get the hell off that ranch and never come back. They’re both growing up in the same environment, but one kid is born to be with horses and the other isn’t. In my family, Jean had a passing interest in horses, but I was the one born to live with them. It’s in my genetic makeup. Simple as that.
As kids, Jean and I spent our summers at my maternal grandmother’s three-storey summer home on a small farm at Cadboro Bay — the same place my mom was staying when she first met my dad — a few miles up the coast from our place. (My mom’s siblings had all left Victoria by then, which meant we were the only ones around to borrow the house.)
It was a wonderful place for a kid. My room, on the second floor, opened to the sea through a large half-moon aperture covered only by fly screening. The floor was corrugated tin that had warped considerably down through the years. Walking on it created a cacophony of metal sounds and rumblings, probably very much like an old ship. When I climbed into bed, I would fall asleep listening to the soft waves lapping on the shore of Cadboro Bay. The sound of the waves and the rumbling tin floor are still as vivid as yesterday.
The farm had apples, corn, peas, beans, a greenhouse with grapevines and a Jersey cow named Nelly. And, of course, my father’s uninvited guests: his horses. The in-laws didn’t like the old man, and he didn’t like them much either. They were Scots Presbyterians and he was a Brit, and they regarded him as a man of no account. I think he just dumped his horses, Ginger and Steel, in with the Jersey cow until he rented a nearby pasture with a barn, a stable and a big chestnut tree right in the middle of the field. He always planned to buy that land but never got it done.
At Cadboro Bay I’d ride the old man’s horses bareback, messing around trying to get them to do something athletic. They were gentle creatures but if you tormented them enough, they’d move. (Eventually I’d learn to ride bareback like a Comanche.) My dad loved to run his horses on the beach at Cadboro Bay, and I’d ride with him, happily galloping through the salty surf.
A laconic Chinese man named Lee cared for everything on the farm. We were very fond of each other, old Lee and I. He lived alone in a shack at the end of the lane that led to the backside of the farm. There he’d eat his meals of rice on the porch. Lee later claimed I knew how to speak Cantonese when I was very young, but I can’t recall that.
I do remember, years later, his producing a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .38 revolver from a hidden drawer in his table and giving the gun to my father. Many Chinese lived on the island, and the tongs — secret societies for Chinese immigrants — were ever present. Most of their members were gamblers, and I guess Lee was too, but I don’t think he was in a tong. One of Lee’s Chinese buddies had been murdered in a big wealthy house up the hill; afterwards he obviously felt it was necessary to keep a gun. But its usefulness eventually passed, and that’s when he handed it off to my dad. (He liked the old man a lot, just as he liked me.)
My only memory of the Second World War is at Cadboro Bay. There was an army base a couple of miles away at Gordon
Head, and I remember the enlistees marching along the narrow country roads on hot summer days in 1940, when I was six years old. Jean and I took a break from fighting over Monopoly to stand at the side of the road with baskets of apples from our orchard, passing them to the tall soldiers as they marched past.
I got hooked on the cowboy way of life thanks to my dad’s horses and the Will James books he gave me as presents. In the early 1940s the prolific James became the mythic western figure in North America, presenting himself as an authentic drifting cowboy from Montana. I was totally captivated by his highly skilled drawings and colourful stories of buckarooing in the West. His illustrations of horses in all kinds of action set him apart from other artists. James drew the western horse, the shaggy and unpredictable bronc, the precursor of what we know now as the American quarter horse — a small, strong horse bred for short bursts of speed. Nobody could draw them like Will James.
James’s books came out at the rate of about two a year, giving the old man the perfect, inexpensive solution for his kid’s birthday and Christmas needs. The wild tales totally captivated a whole generation of young gunsels—wannabe cowboys — including me. But even as a boy I sensed there was something wrong with James’s stories. He never named any towns. He never named any actual ranches. His locations and geography were always vague. His fellow punchers seemed to have no surnames.
Years later, in 1967, when Nevada writer Anthony Amaral put out his book Will James: The Gilt Edged Cowboy, we Jamesian cowboys found out that our hero was actually Ernest Dufault from Quebec, who around 1907 had hopped on a train for Saskatchewan and set about learning the cowboy trade. He soon drifted south across the porous Saskatchewan–Montana border, renamed himself Will James and worked hard at leaving his accent behind and reinventing himself as the quintessential drifting cowboy.
As his fame grew, so did his fear of being exposed. He must have bought into the Texas myth that real cowboys were all third or fourth generation, born and bred in the West, even though there were lots of legitimate cowboys from other places — including France. At one point James even tried to have the official records of his birth destroyed. He used to explain the remnants of his Québécois accent by saying that after his parents were killed, a French-Canadian trapper had adopted him. James wasn’t an honest guy. None of us are, but he didn’t want to admit to any of the facts about his life.
He also claimed to be a great bronc rider, and to this day nobody really knows if he was any good or not. He had a lie for everything, but the son of a gun could draw. I wrote a song about him in the 1980s (“Will James”):
I’ve memorized those pictures, boys,
They’re still the very best, If whiskey was his mistress,
His true love was the West.
There’s a lot of love and sympathy for James in that song, and there’s definitely a lot of me in those last couple of lines too.
After James became successful, he went to Hollywood and hung out with Tom Mix, Yakima Canutt and all the other cowboys. They made tons of money and partied all the time. James’s drinking got heavier and heavier, and his life started to unravel. When I met western actor and stuntman Dick Farnsworth at a Wild West event in Princeton, B.C., years later, I asked him whether he’d ever met Will James.
“I did,” he said.
“Did he have a Québécois accent?”
“No, he sounded like a Texas cowboy to me. But you know, when I met him, he was so drunk he pissed himself. He was wearing a black suit and he pissed himself.”
James drank himself to death in 1942, the year I turned nine.
Around this time I first encountered western music on our old wooden tube radio. I distinctly remember taking a wire connected to the back of the radio and grounding it on the iron radiator. Somehow I picked up WSM’s broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville, and I listened intently as Roy Acuff sang “Wreck on the Highway.” The wailing, keening sound of the dobro guitar really blew me away. I’d never heard anything like that before — that high, lonesome sound.
I’d had no real access to western music before that. Most of my friends were into the pop music of the time. In our home, music consisted of my dad singing in the shower and my mother playing classical music on the piano. She’d once had ambitions to become a concert pianist and had studied piano in New York for a season, but she just didn’t have the chops. Later in life she developed a hand condition that forced her to stop playing, and she gave up her music dreams. As for me, back then I had no aspirations whatsoever of becoming a professional singer. I sang along with the music on the radio, but that was it.
A couple of years after I first heard Roy Acuff, I went to a Saturday afternoon matinee with a friend to see Tex Ritter and his horse White Flash, along with the original Sons of the Pioneers, at the Rio, an old vaudeville theatre on Government Street downtown that had been converted into a movie house. This was in the mid-1940s, when the Saturday afternoon western movie matinee was at its peak, and we kids loved seeing Gene Autry and Roy Rogers on the Rio’s big screen. My friends and I went to the movies by ourselves and no one thought anything of it. We would roam all over Victoria — into the woods, through the fields, downtown — without anybody worrying about us. It was a different time.
I don’t know how we found out about the Tex Ritter show, but I’ve carried the memory of the experience with me into adulthood. The 450-seat theatre was half full — all boys, Saturday afternoon western movie freaks like myself. The show’s primary draw was Tex Ritter and White Flash, but the Sons of the Pioneers stole the show. Their harmonies resonated strongly in my twelve-year-old ears, though I didn’t know what they were doing. It was the original group, with Bob Nolan, Tim Spencer and the Farr brothers. I don’t think anybody can do harmonies better than those guys did.
Bob Nolan was a pretty imposing figure standing there at the microphone with his arm crooked, displaying the many mother-of-pearl buttons running up the sleeve of his tailored western shirt (I think the shirts impressed me as much as the music). Afterwards Tex Ritter rode out onstage on old White Flash and sang in his great baritone voice.
I don’t know why the Sons of the Pioneers and Tex Ritter came to Victoria — probably for an el cheapo publicity tour. It would have been a unique musical act for the city; the bands of the day were imitation society bands that played dance music with as much sophistication as they could muster, which wasn’t very much.
After the show my dad asked me, “You want to go see that horse?”
I didn’t need to think. “Sure.”
Turns out White Flash was stabled at the Willows Racetrack, near our place. A cowboy let me sit on the horse, and I felt a big rush as I settled into Tex Ritter’s silver-mounted saddle. For a horse-crazy kid like me, that was as good as it could get.
At the end of the Second World War and the beginning of my teenage years, we moved to a funny little Oak Bay house on Wilmot Place, a beautiful street lined with oak and walnut trees. The window of my bedroom was ideal for sneaking out — I could get onto the sloping roof and then drop down to the ground. We lived next door to a Gothic mansion with a big wooded area that abutted our back door, and I would drop into those trees to meet my friend Bugs Bigelow at night. He was a big, tough kid, wilder than hell, and we’d go knock off a few candy bars from the local confectionary.
Bugsy and I were constantly getting into trouble together. Sometimes my parents would catch me sneaking out to meet him. They put up a pretty concerned front, but I don’t recall them laying down the law. They were just trying to hold on to me so I could make it through adolescence without getting myself killed.
My parents sent me to all-boys private schools, which meant that when I hit puberty and became interested in girls, I’d had little contact with them. I first masturbated to Émile Zola’s Nana. How I came into possession of that book I haven’t a clue. But in my upstairs bedroom under the eaves of that little house on Wilmot Place, I had my first orgasm, inspired by the passage where a beautifu
l Nana stands naked before a warming fire, displaying her voluptuousness. I was thirteen, full of adolescent angst, excitement and wonder. Getting off was a big deal, second only to the real thing (still a couple of years down the road).
Though widely practised, jacking off was not widely discussed by us boys. It was performed under the covers and was nobody else’s business. Still, I was proud to be pleasuring myself to classic literature rather than cheap pornography or the trashy paperbacks of the 1940s, stuff like Irving Shulman’s The Amboy Dukes. I viewed my choice of Nana as an indication of my superior taste in literature. The years at Wilmot Place were a challenging time for our family. I think Dad felt that he was stuck in the insurance business and that he wasn’t very good at it. After the war everybody was lining up to buy their postwar cars. Some of the old man’s buddies were becoming very successful car dealers, and he felt that he was missing out. While they were making a pile of money, my dad was eagerly awaiting his inheritance, like a typical Englishman. But thanks to the longevity of my grandfather, my dad didn’t cash in until much later in life. And by then the inheritance had been whittled down to a modest sum that he used to pay off some bills and buy a new car.
Dad was always bitching about having to go up the coast for work. I think he had a girlfriend on the east side of the island, at Ladysmith, but that’s conjecture. Jean thinks he did too. We didn’t suspect that anything was going on back then; it’s something we surmised later on while reminiscing about his trips. We even think we know who the girlfriend was; when I was in my twenties, Dad asked me to look her up for some kind of horse deal. I ended up meeting her a few times — a tall lady with dark hair and thick glasses.