The Long Trail: My Life in the West

by Ian Tyson

  Each July during the Calgary Stampede, Ranchman’s became crowded, hot and sticky — full of girls chasing guys with gold buckles. I always looked forward to seeing one of our fans during Stampede week. Casey Tibbs — the most charismatic bronc rider of them all, a legend of rodeo — would tap on the back door of Ranchman’s, I’d let him in and he’d sit in a dark corner and listen to us play. Calgary was a big town for Casey; he won the saddle bronc championship at the Stampede two years in a row, in 1949 and 1950.

  Casey had a girl in every port, and when he came to Ranchman’s he’d bring along his blond Alberta girlfriend. He had put on weight — no longer the slender young athlete who had won the world saddle bronc riding championship at nineteen. But he was a cool guy, and I knew old Casey would be there to see us every year. We always seemed to play better when he was around. I wrote a song for him before he died in 1990. I’m the number one fan of the rainbow man, I wrote, referring to his trademark colourful garb. He’s the wildest of ’em all.

  A mysterious Irish horse-shoer named Noel Hope also hung around Ranchman’s. He was a fan of mine, and he’d often come out to the ranch to visit Twylla and me. One time he even flew out in a helicopter. He wanted to make a grand gesture, and it worked — he landed right in the corral. The ponies freaked, but Twylla thought it was great. She would cook us dinner and Noel would ask to hear the old Irish songs. Twylla also loved the old ballads and cowboy songs, and I’d play for them both.

  Twylla was the one who got me into recording western music again. She believed in my songs when no one else did, and in 1983 I put out Old Corrals and Sagebrush for Columbia, singing about horses, ponderosa pines and the old Double Diamond Ranch in Wyoming. My friend Jay Dusard shot the cover photograph — a fine black and white picture of me sitting on Smoky, my circle horse, in front of the Diamond V weigh scales. Old Corrals was a cowboy record through and through, recorded in the basement of my ranch house. I dedicated the album to Alan Young.

  When I first met Alan, he partied hard but also knew how to handle his life and work. He was likeable in so many ways and had plenty of loyal friends. But in the 1980s his life began to unravel. The drinking got heavier and heavier. Uncle George rodeoed and drank whiskey too, but he kept his eye on the ball the whole time. Alan just couldn’t — the party always won out. It would cost him.

  In the early 1980s Twylla and I made a habit of escaping the lousy Alberta winter by taking our vacation in January and February. We’d get some local guy to take care of the ranch — usually Twylla’s brother Gord — pack up the truck, head south and find a little cowtown with a good bar and a restaurant. We’d hole up there for a day or two and then go on to the next cowtown and do the same thing. I didn’t have to worry about playing gigs, and because there were no cellphones, my agent, Paul Mascioli, couldn’t get hold of me. We’d just drive, totally carefree, all the way from Longview down to Prescott, Arizona, and on to Tucson.

  Those winter getaways are some of the best memories of my life. We saw a lot of old friends and made a bunch of new ones, including Jay Dusard and another western photographer, Kurt Markus. We met them through the cowboy underground —Jay in Prescott and Kurt in Colorado Springs, where he was working for Western Horseman magazine.

  Kurt had been an up-and-coming tennis player when he got whacked in the eye with a ball, which ruined that career. He wasn’t a cowboy of any kind, but he had married one of Dick Spencer’s daughters back when Dick owned Western Horseman. The magazine sent Kurt on an assignment to shoot some old cowboy in Nevada. He disappeared into the sagebrush of the ION — southern Idaho, eastern Oregon and northern Nevada — where he discovered a lost world of buckaroos, all-night saloons and whorehouses. That culture was still very much alive in northern Nevada, even in the 1980s. There was hardly any barbed wire north of Elko, all the way to the Idaho line. Kurt had found the Old West (just as Bing Crosby had a generation earlier when he bought the sprawling PX outfit, out on the Owyhee Desert, to contain his four Hollywood sons).

  Environmentalists hadn’t shut down the big cattle outfits yet, and operations such as the Allied Land and Cattle Co. could run cattle on federal rangeland in Nevada for a token fee. Herds of twelve thousand mother cows weren’t unusual. Those operators would hire a tough cowboss and eight buckaroos, get ten horses for each kid, and send ’em out into the sagebrush with a chuckwagon cook to brand calves for three or four months. Every now and then the cowboys would head into town, buy a new hat, get drunk and go to the whorehouse. When Kurt found this lost world, it completely blew his mind. Being a really smart and inquisitive guy, he snapped pictures of everything, and in the process he became a brilliant photographer.

  Kurt really showed me the ION, the buckaroo West. I’d fly into Boise, Idaho, where he would pick me up in his old brown Chevy van with his bedroll and saddle in the back. We’d head out to visit all the classic ranches — Maggie Creek in Nevada and Whitehorse in Oregon. Cowboys really liked Kurt because he’d stay out there with the buckaroos, freezing his ass off in some snowed-in cow camp when it was twenty below. They didn’t know who the hell I was, but because I could ride and was with Kurt, they accepted me pretty quickly.

  When we headed into the desert together, I was very careful to back-trail my landmarks. Out there you can get lost, really lost. Some of the kids I rode with told me they’d gotten lost and spent many hours finding their way back to camp. I didn’t want to end up like that.

  Half the time when Kurt and I were riding, I wouldn’t even know he was shooting. That’s what makes him great: the cowboys didn’t know he was shooting either. He was like a quick-draw gunfighter. A bucking horse doesn’t wait for a photographer to give it the cue, but Kurt could get the shot right away. He’s the only guy who can do that, so he quickly made a name for himself in the West.

  I was still working on making a name for Ian Tyson in the West. I went on tour with Ricky Skaggs — a fabulous picker — in both 1983 and 1984. The day before one of those tours, I broke my toe. My dog was messing with the cattle at the round pen; I went to kick at him and hit the gatepost instead. But on tour, my band and I more than held our own. One kind Ottawa reviewer even said we played better than Ricky. In 1984 I put out another record, titled Ian Tyson. (Stony Plain Records later merged Old Corrals and Ian Tyson into one album, Old Corrals and Sagebrush & Other Cowboy Culture Classics.)

  Something strange happened in the 1980s. Cowboys became increasingly fashionable, thanks in part to John Travolta’s Urban Cowboy, which came out at the beginning of the decade. But there was little reality in the urban cowboy trend. Those guys in the bars in Houston and Galveston weren’t cowmen but day workers in the oil industry, working in processing and compressor plants during the day and putting on their cowboy hats at night before heading to the dancehall. It was all about dressing up. I think that’s why I started emphasizing authenticity so much in my music. There were too many fakes around, too many people trying to convince the world they were cowboys.

  It was the start of a weird dichotomy for me. I didn’t like the phony cowboy movement at all, yet I directly benefited from it. Suddenly everybody everywhere wanted to know about buckaroos. When I went to Toronto with my band to play some club, young people came out in large numbers to hear us. Some of the girls were even wearing Dale Evans gingham. It was all pretty weird, considering I couldn’t even get a job in Toronto a few years earlier. Now journalists were bugging me for interviews, wanting to talk about the West.

  A cowboy renaissance was blooming in North America, and Elko, Nevada — one of the towns Twylla and I regularly hit on our winter road trips — would soon become ground zero for the movement. In 1980 it was a cowtown and railroad town with fewer than nine thousand people living there. There was a lot of Basque influence, from settlers who had come from the Pyrenees (between Spain and France) for the express purpose of herding sheep in the American West. I love that culture, and parts of it are still preserved in Elko. For example, Picon punch — a Basque drink made with
a bitter orange liqueur — is the local drink of choice.

  In January 1985 I travelled to Elko for a new event: the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, organized by Utah folklorist Hal Cannon along with buckaroo poet Waddie Mitchell. Oral traditions were alive and well in that part of the world back then, since there was no TV and not much radio reception on those remote Nevada ranches. Hal, Waddie and a few other cowboys thought it would be great to get a few grants and celebrate those traditions by throwing a big party where cowboy poets could recite their verse. Hal had heard Old Corrals and invited me to come down and play.

  The poetry gathering — or simply “Elko,” as it came to be known — was also partly a reaction to the urban cowboy trend. “Though we didn’t know it at the time, 1985 was ripe for ranching culture to reclaim its own story, to find the touchstones of its culture,” Hal wrote in an essay many years later. “Cowboys had always allowed their story to be told publicly by others — songwriters, scriptwriters, novelists — but increasingly that story, told in popular culture, became a monolithic Arthurian myth, far from the breadth of the real life.”

  That first January, Hal and Waddie set up sixty chairs in the Elko Convention Center. Then they got nervous and put half of them back because they thought there weren’t going to be enough people to fill them. Sure enough, their prediction had been way off — but not in the direction they expected. Somewhere between five hundred and a thousand people showed up for the damn thing. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time — again. My satchel was stuffed with western songs I’d written but hadn’t yet found a market for. Elko changed everything for me.

  Magic happens sometimes, and for me it happened that January. I had gone down with the perfect band. They looked great all dressed up. Neil Bentley, the chubby little bass player, wore a bowler hat; he played the role of storekeeper. Then there was drummer Thom Moon with his big handlebar moustache and black hat; he was the outlaw. Jeff Bradshaw, the pedal steel player, was the hillbilly. Myran Szott on fiddle was the dapper westerner who always wore a good hat and a sports jacket. And lead guitarist Gary Koliger was the wild Jewish guy from Edmonton. He didn’t have a costume, but the buckaroos loved him anyway because he was crazy. All those guys could play. It was one of those bands that just have it.

  With Hal Cannon, co-founder of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. (HEATHER NAFLEIGN)

  Some of the folklorists got their noses out of joint when I showed up in Elko. They said, “Ian Tyson’s a professional musician, hardly an authentic Nevada buckaroo.” They didn’t want me there and did their best to keep me out. There was a lot of controversy about it at the time, but Hal and Waddie stuck up for me, saying I was the real deal. We finally circumvented the whole controversy by playing Stockman’s, a funky rundown casino, and blowing the roof off the place. Not only did people really listen to us, everyone loved us. The buckaroos and their girlfriends danced as if they couldn’t get enough. Better still, none of them had heard of Ian & Sylvia, which was like getting a brand-new start.

  The poets read what they had written at cow camps. None of them were musicians; you don’t find many cowboys who play. You’re either a cowboy or a musician, and there are very few who do both. Cowboys don’t play instruments too well because their work is hard and their hands get all banged up. (There are some exceptions, of course, such as Mike Beck and me.) And then this Canadian cowboy shows up with five guys who can all play. That band’s chemistry was serendipitous, and you couldn’t stop it — it was like a tide. I must have had a hand in it, since I was the bandleader, but I know that the parts coming together like that was pure luck.

  The next year we went back to Elko and played to even bigger crowds. The place was crawling with writers and media types representing everyone from the New York Times to People magazine. And it kept on growing every year. I realized, Hey, I can make records of this music and there’s going to be an audience. I felt that there hadn’t been a large audience for western music since the 1940s, when I saw Tex Ritter and the Sons of the Pioneers in Victoria. In my mind the only people who would pay attention to my music were a few cowboys in a bar in Elko, Nevada. But suddenly cowboy poetry gatherings were sprouting up all over the place. Some of them were just dumb low-budget events that were run so badly they died off, but others survived. I realized I could finally leave my Ranchman’s days behind. The time was perfect for me and my songs.

  Elko was the hub of the wheel, and the spokes went out in all directions. I started playing more gigs in California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. Back at home, my band and I played the local bar in Longview and had people dancing in the street — literally. The cowboys and the girls from nearby Okotoks all came to see us. The crowd kept getting bigger and bigger, spilling out onto the deck and into the street. The cops came and shut it down while it was still light out, even though the whole thing was pretty mellow. I don’t remember any fights. People dancing in the street is as good as it gets in Longview.

  It would be a simpler story if I had gone to Elko, got excited about the possibilities of western music and returned home to write a bunch of songs. But that’s not how it went down. My serious efforts in that regard actually preceded Elko; my satchel was full of western songs when I got there. It’s really kind of spooky. It’s almost as if I was being prepared to be the poet laureate of that sagebrush renaissance.

  For most of my life I’d just drifted whichever way the wind blew. Now I had found my true voice in the West. I don’t mean to trivialize Ian & Sylvia by saying that, but our duo was based on Sylvia’s concept of harmony. Take that away and you’d be taking away the whole soul of the Ian & Sylvia sound. I hadn’t found my own voice back in the folk days; it took years for my vocal style to evolve into something that was truly my own.

  As a singer you start out trying to emulate your idols (the same is true of writers and other artists). I had several idols — Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash and Jack Greene, to name a few — and for a long time I was trying to sing like them. I was conscious of my vocal style, always trying to make it better, but I had to make my style my own. When a singer completes that evolution, the final voice is an amalgamation of a lot of influences, yet it somehow stops sounding like any of those influences and becomes itself. That’s what happened to me in the 1980s. My style was almost there when I recorded Old Corrals, and by the time Elko rolled around, I really had it down.

  Then I forgot about style altogether. I just opened my mouth and sang. I told stories. For better or worse, I didn’t have to worry about finding an Ian Tyson style anymore. It was already there — I just had to use it.

  As the West opened up to me, I wanted to learn more about it. A lot of people at Elko were writers, and the poetry gathering became a conduit for all this material I’d never encountered before. I’d return home from Elko with books by American writers including Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy and J. Frank Dobie. (I don’t think I read any Canadians back then. It wasn’t a conscious decision — I just couldn’t find anything that blew me away.)

  Guys like McMurtry and McCarthy know how to write about the authentic West. McMurtry was ranch-raised and seems to come by it naturally in books such as Lonesome Dove, though I later learned that he based that story almost entirely on J. Evetts Haley’s biography Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman. The writers I like are all research freaks. McCarthy isn’t a cowboy and wouldn’t pretend to be one, but he does his homework. If I had to write a book about a subject I knew nothing about — ore boats on the Great Lakes, for example — it would be a daunting task to do it credibly, since I don’t know one end of a boat from the other. But McCarthy gets it right in books such as Cities of the Plain. I like his almost biblical narrative style, and he goes to great pains to describe the country and the flora and fauna, the flocks of birds flying at dawn. That really appeals to me; he’s influenced me a lot.

  I remember hearing an interview with Charles Frazier about his novel Cold Mountain,
a beautiful piece of writing. I was deeply impressed by the authenticity of that book and wondered how he could portray the Civil War so realistically and credibly. In the interview he gave his answer: “Research, research, research.” That was a big revelation to me. I can do that, I thought. I couldn’t do it back in boarding school on Vancouver Island, because it would be about math or something I didn’t care to know. But if it was about the West, I was more than eager to do the research.

  I soon discovered fabulous bookstores in the U.S. such as Guidon Books in Scottsdale, Arizona. The store isn’t that big but it’s jammed from floor to ceiling with books on the West and the Civil War. That’s all the owner, Aaron Cohen, carries. If he ain’t got it, it ain’t been written. Then there’s the Tattered Cover in Denver, four storeys of great books. It’s such a trip to go there. If the West is your mistress and lover, as Charlie Russell said, those are the places to be. I collected more and more books, building a western library. Today it’s probably as good as any collection on the North American West. It’s not massive, but every important book on the subject is in there.

  Before Elko, most of my ideas about the West had come from my own experiences of it and from Will James — and obviously he wasn’t a very reliable source. Now I was learning about the profound impact the horse had on Plains Indian culture, the glory years of the fur trade in the mountain West, and the monumental years of the cattle drives in the nineteenth century. That cattle-drive period, though brief—possibly only fifty years — had a tremendous impact on people’s perceptions of the North American West. The cowboys herding cattle from Texas through Comanche country didn’t know if they’d get to Colorado with their scalps intact. The drives spawned countless stories of western adventure, and as a result the cowboy and his horse captured the imagination of the world.