by Ian Tyson
While Dad complained about the insurance business, I was having a rough time at home too. As a young boy I had always got along with the old man, but in my teenage years we started to fight, mostly about trivial things like my messy hair or muddy boots. It got really bad, sometimes to the verge of violence. My mother tried to be the U.N. envoy but it didn’t work.
Jean and I were both suffering from island claustrophobia — we wanted to get the hell away from home. The only problem was that neither of us knew where the hell we wanted to go. There was nothing rational about our rebellion; it was just hormonal. When Jean was thirteen, my parents sent her to Shawnigan Lake School, a private boarding school located between Duncan and Victoria. She didn’t enjoy that at all. She too had a difficult adolescence.
In 1949, when I was fifteen, I got to escape the island for a summer by working in the mountain town of Banff, Alberta. My aunt Mame worked at the Banff Springs Hotel as a hostess during the tourist season. Through her I got a job working on a pack string for outdoor adventure freaks, back and forth to Mount Assiniboine, on the Alberta–B.C. border.
There were only two ways to reach Mount Assiniboine back then: by foot or on horseback. Helicopters weren’t an option. We’d start at Brewster Creek, a few miles outside of Banff, and head south up the creek. The weather was treacherous out there. Often we’d start off with a lovely morning, then by eleven o’clock it would be snowing and we’d be freezing cold. It was fine if you were dressed properly, but I never was. Whenever we encountered cowboys coming from the B.C. side of the mountain with their pack strings, I was jealous of their good saddles, slickers and hats. I was just grubbing along.
I worked under Erling Strom, a fabled mountaineer and ski guide. He didn’t like cowboys much but he needed them, since he had a whole string of horses. He’d usually hire an experienced cowboy and two gunsels. The experienced cowboy’s name was Al Johnson and he became one of my early mentors, teaching me all about packing and shoeing horses.
After a day of travel we’d overnight at the halfway cabin, a gorgeous jewel of a place tucked away in an alpine meadow. The packer — that was me — was responsible for preparing supper. Looking back, the thought of me at fifteen cooking for all those tourists is ridiculous. The bread was all crushed from being packed on horses, and I relied entirely on a can opener for those meals.
At night I’d sleep in the saddle shack under the sweaty horse blankets. It was a pretty unsophisticated setup, but I didn’t care. I was in the Rockies with horses — what more could I ask for? The next day we’d leave the halfway cabin, go over a couple of mountain passes, cross a big alpine basin and finally reach Mount Assiniboine.
My dad didn’t at all understand what I was doing in Banff. The leisure industry was just taking off, and he thought my work was going to be like Alberta in 1906, when he froze his ass off. He didn’t understand how I could run packhorses and come back with money in my pocket. In his mind the only way to make money was through drudgery — selling insurance or cars. You could ride horses for your own amusement, but that was it.
The notion that somebody could make a living playing music was even more foreign to him. Everything I would end up doing in life was part of the leisure industry that my dad couldn’t wrap his head around. Today, of course, that industry is responsible for countless jobs, but during my old man’s childhood there wasn’t any of that. There were no outdoor adventurers paying guides to take them deep into the mountains, nor were there cowboys hauling their horses around in trailers behind their trucks. When I drive from my place into Calgary, I’ll see about twenty of those trailers — and that’s all part of the leisure industry.
My dad had always admired the cowboy life, but he was scared that if I became a cowboy I’d be as unsuccessful as he’d been at it. He worried that I was frittering my life away. “You’ll end up with a worn-out saddle and an empty whiskey bottle,” he’d say. It was kind of true, but I didn’t hear him when he said it — I’d tuned him out.
When I returned home after my summer in Banff, my dad and I continued to fight. Eventually it got so bad that my parents made me board at the all-boys school I had been attending. Then I really went nuts. It was just a place where people who had enough money could send their incorrigible kids. Schools like that are completely different now, co-ed and scholastically sound, but back then it seemed to me that the administrators didn’t give a shit about whether you learned anything or not; they just took your parents’ money. The good students learned and the bad ones didn’t, and all of us had to eat the lousy food.
We chased girls when we could but there wasn’t much opportunity for that, since the school wasn’t co-ed. We had one co-ed dance, a weird event for us boys. I danced with this one girl I was smitten with, but I knew nothing about dancing. There was no music program at the school; instead we had programs such as rugby, boxing and rifle practice — an educational opportunity that’s made life hard for the gophers on my ranch. But with no arts program, I had no idea how to dance. We just walked on each other’s feet.
In class I stared out the window and daydreamed. I was good at sports because I was athletically more gifted than most of the kids, but when the other kids started working harder, I didn’t, and I started getting beat. I wasn’t bearing down on anything.
My friend Bugsy got sent to the same boarding school, which meant we kept getting into trouble together. We were both good at sports, but he hurt his back, which finished him. I blew my knee out, which ended football for me too. If you were helping the school on the sports field, then they cut you some slack, but after we got injured, the free ride was over.
The headmaster didn’t believe in sparing the rod. He beat up on us kids with a switch. If we caused any trouble, down came our pants. I got sixteen lashes one time along with Bugsy, probably for stealing change in the locker rooms or sneaking out at night. I think we held the record for most cuts from the cane. They really laid it on, leaving big welts on our asses. I think they even drew blood from Bugsy. They thought they could break us through force, but it didn’t work.
We kept getting in trouble at home in Victoria too. When I was about sixteen, Bugsy and I borrowed my mom’s car after we got drunk. I missed a curb and crashed the car into a stone wall, severely denting Mom’s vehicle. She was very upset and I felt pretty bad about the whole thing.
I don’t remember my graduation ceremony. What I do know is that the staff of the boarding school had definitely had their fill of Ian Tyson and Bugsy Bigelow. We were persona non grata and they wanted us out of there. So we left.
CHAPTER 3
Drifting
Through my late teens I drifted aimlessly. After spending a couple of weeks at Victoria College (I decided the academic life wasn’t for me), I got a job at an Esquimalt sawmill. I worked the midnight shift, sorting two-by-fours and other raw lumber off the green chain. It was a tough job and I worked hard at it until the sawmill laid me off, just a few weeks after I started. After that I knew I didn’t want to do hard labour all the time, but I still didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do. I wasn’t lazy, just restless. I lacked focus. The concept of applying myself to reaching a specific goal was completely foreign to me.
In 1952, when I was eighteen, my parents, Jean and I took a trip to England to visit relatives. Old George wanted to reconnect with Grandpa and check up on his inheritance. The trip was a pretty dour affair. The war still felt pretty fresh and the food was awful. I love the English, but that wasn’t the England of today.
For me the highlight of the trip was discovering the basement clubs on Oxford Street in London, the brassy girls and the guys with their drainpipe pants and long sideburns. I can still remember the stale beer smell that pervaded those places. The whole Teddy Boy scene was just taking off and the bands weren’t yet into the blues rock they did so well later on. When we were there the big thing was skiffle, a hokey combination of country and Dixieland. But still I thought I’d like to play drums in one of those bands. On the boat
ride back to Canada I befriended the orchestra drummer. He worked very hard at selling me a set of drums but never got it done.
After the trip Jean returned to England, where she married a guy who’d followed her from Victoria. (They had four daughters before they split up.) We didn’t see each other much for a long while after she left home, but we became very good friends later in life. She lives in Victoria, where Dad and Mom stayed put until they died in 1966 and 1984 respectively. Jean and I visited Smugglers Cove after Mom died, letting the wind take her ashes out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
After I got back from England in 1952, I drifted into the B.C. bush, landing a job with the provincial forest service, first at Port Alberni, on Vancouver Island, and later at Harrison Lake, on the mainland. The forestry work didn’t interest me very much. I took humidity readings and did odd jobs such as mowing lawns, and I’d do the occasional stretch on a lookout when a regular got injured or went nuts, as some of them did.
I kept causing trouble at Port Alberni by stealing away to dances at nearby Beaver Creek. I wasn’t allowed to use the government trucks but I drove them a couple of times anyway, disconnecting the odometer so nobody could tell I’d put on any miles. I thought it was a good plan, but one time the odometer cord was swinging under the dash and hit metal, blowing out all the fuses. Despite my shenanigans I never got fired. I was a pretty likeable kid, so my bosses would just roll their eyes.
All the island dances I went to in my early years have been puréed into one vague memory that involves a piano, an accordion and a fiddle — all of them out of tune. The dances were pretty wanting musically, but we had a good time anyway. At Beaver Creek I met Annie Kalugin, a compact, good-looking Ukrainian gal. I had the hots for her and did my best to get into her pants. She liked me a lot too, but not enough to give up her virginity.
We had a lot of downtime at the forest service since we were basically on call 24/7. I spent most of that time reading and daydreaming about girls and rodeos and bucking horses. That’s when I got bit by the rodeo bug. I wanted to be a saddle bronc rider but couldn’t afford the saddle, so instead I made myself a pair of bronc chaps in do-it-yourself gunsel style. I had no idea what I was doing, but I got a pattern from somebody and cut out the chaps from reddish purple leather, holding the pieces together with rivets and stitching. Then I added some white lettering with my initials.
Next I got a set of Jerry Ambler–style Crockett spurs and borrowed a Dixon bareback rigging. At nineteen I rode in my first rodeo in Duncan, on Vancouver Island. It was a small-time rodeo, but for us rubes on the island it was a big deal. All the Natives came and Dave Perry from Cache Creek won all the money. As for me, I didn’t fall off the horse — I was hooked after that. My old man even showed up. Being a cowboy at heart, he got a great kick out of watching me ride.
After that first rodeo, my logger friends and I would go to other rodeos in the B.C. interior when we had the spare time, scraping together the fifteen bucks we needed to enter. I’d always run into Annie’s three brothers, the Kalugins, at the various rodeos. They were small, friendly guys who wore funny old-fashioned hats — little munchkin-type characters, almost like cartoons. I wish I’d spent more time with the Kalugins, but I got transferred to Harrison Lake pretty soon after I got to know them. Somebody gave me a horse at Harrison Lake but I didn’t have a well-fenced area to keep him in; after he trashed a couple of vegetable gardens I had to get rid of him.
I kept rodeoing after my transfer. In those days locals could enter the pro rodeos. The hometown boys acted as cannon fodder — or comic relief — before the pros came out. I local-entried all over the place, so Ian Tyson ended up being a “local boy” from a lot of different towns.
I described the key to riding in a 1964 piece for Maclean’s magazine: “Good rodeo riding is, like most other sports, a matter of timing. The rider has to find his horse’s rhythm and swing with it for the whole ride. In saddle-bronc riding, the cowboy makes a series of sweeps, or ‘licks,’ with both spurs, from the horse’s shoulders back to the cantle board, a piece of wood that sticks up in the air from the rear of the saddle. The licks are timed to the horse’s jumps — one jump, one lick — and there are about ten licks in the ten seconds he’s supposed to stay on board.… Most of the horses are psychotic farm animals although a few are genuinely wild ones. Both kinds usually survive in rodeo longer than the riders.” Nowadays I wouldn’t call farm animals psychotic — I’d call ’em spoiled.
Bronc-riding at the rodeo in Cloverdale, B.C., in 1955. (COURTESY IAN TYSON)
I was basically an amateur who had a lot of fun. I couldn’t ride a really rank one, although I know cowboys who still think I was once a great bronc rider. They’ve made it all up in their minds. They wanted me to be a great rider, so I was. I know one cowboy who swears I rode with him at this rodeo years ago, had this great ride and so on. In reality I wasn’t even there.
While working for the forest service, I decided to apply to the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art + Design). As a kid I could always draw, right from the beginning. Inspired by Will James, I’d draw horses, horses and more horses. There was one exception: when I was eleven or twelve I entered an airplane-drawing contest and won. Drawing has always been present in my life, but as a kid I had no aspirations of becoming a great artist.
Now, in my late teens, I wondered if horseback life and the art world could be compatible, and even energize one another creatively. The possibilities in my head were very vague at the time but, unbeknownst to me, Joe Beeler was thinking along the same lines in Arizona. He’d go on to co-found Cowboy Artists of America, a group that would become hugely successful, as would Joe. We didn’t know it back then, but by mixing horses and art we were precursors of the cowboy renaissance that would sweep the West thirty years later.
Marrying cowboys with art wasn’t exactly new; Charles M. Russell, the greatest western painter of them all, was doing it way back in the 1880s. But while today it’s easy to find probably twenty different Charlie Russell art books — full of scenes with violent action upfront and, in the distance, faraway mountains diffused with blue and rose — Charlie’s work was still pretty underground when I applied to art school in the 1950s.
I’d discovered Charlie in Victoria, after my summer wrangling in Banff in the late 1940s. I had come back with something like fifteen cavities and had to go get them fixed. In those days it was a painful business. The dentist’s office had an old, beat-up copy of Good Medicine, a book of Charlie’s illustrated letters, full of cowboys and Indians and coyotes and horses. This guy’s even better than Will James, I thought. I loved that book. Good Medicine got me through all that drilling.
Somehow, at twenty-one, I got accepted into art school, so in the fall of 1954 I moved to Vancouver. The whole city was basically made of wood back then — a damp, mouldy place. I rented a room in an old boarding house in the west end, the area where most of the other students lived. Our rooms had hotplates in them but usually no fridge. It was pretty primitive, nothing like the glitzy high-rises of today.
The Vancouver School of Art was very post-impressionist in the 1950s, as I quickly found out. Literal art such as Charlie Russell’s — the stuff I liked — was very much frowned upon. Instead we studied the cubists, the abstract expressionists and the post-impressionists.
I shared studio space in a big old dilapidated wooden building near Victory Square with Nancy Patterson, a brilliant artist who won all the scholarships. I couldn’t come close to competing with Nancy as a painter, since she was miles ahead and actually applied herself to her craft. Instead I hung out with her boyfriend, Gordie Cox, a stocky little disbarred jockey and wannabe hipster from Hamilton, Ontario. While Nancy diligently worked on her art, Gordie and I occupied our time by goofing off and stealing jars of peanut butter from the stores on Robson Street. We were poor art students, living from hand to mouth.
Whenever we got some money, we’d go to beer parlours where the waiters had
to buy beer from the bartender and sell it around the room, carrying it on wide-rimmed trays. All the beer parlours had a side for men and a side for “ladies and escorts,” based on a weird puritanical take on morality. And there was absolutely no music, not even a jukebox. The beer parlours were very controlled — you didn’t bend the rules in there. If a Native man got out of line, all the waiters would put down their trays and converge on the poor bastard, kicking the living shit out of him before throwing him in the alley and returning to work. They didn’t fart around or even bother calling the cops. They took care of it themselves.
I mostly went through art school the same way I went through high school — daydreaming. Most of my effort focused on a spectacularly beautiful Greek girl who came to the school a year after I enrolled. Dark, gorgeous and wild, Evinia arrived in Vancouver fresh from Vernon, where she’d broken hearts the length and breadth of the Okanagan Valley. With her jet black hair and dark eyes, she looked like a Bollywood star. Her dad, Curly, was an iconic guy in the Okanagan, a classic immigrant success story. He had arrived in Canada with no money and started a Greek cafe in Vernon, which eventually became profitable. He and his wife had just the one daughter, and they gave her everything she could possibly want. She came to Vancouver driving a brand new Impala convertible that her daddy had bought her.
She was like me, like the rest of us — trying to figure out who she was and where the hell she wanted to go. It didn’t take long for Evinia and me to fall for each other. We had a volatile love affair that ultimately ended in a catastrophic breakup. I’d also been trying to get into the pants of another spectacular-looking art student — and I succeeded. When Evinia found out about my shenanigans, she broke it off and split for California without finishing art school. She was very hurt. Evinia was an accomplished heartbreaker, but she didn’t like being on the other end.