The Long Trail: My Life in the West

by Ian Tyson

  I finally came loose when my boot came off. I asked myself the usual question: Am I alive? Quickly followed by What’s broken and what’s not? I staggered back to the house, took a big double shot of vodka and said to myself, “Well, you’ve survived another one!”

  For the next few days I looked like I’d been through five rounds with Evander Holyfield. The tissue around my replacement metal knee was all beat up too. I called my sister Jean in Victoria and asked if she had any plans for the next couple of weeks. No, she said. Within days we were on a plane to Barcelona, Spain, where I hobbled around on crutches, visiting the museums and tapas bars until I could walk crutch-free again.

  With horses you have to make a decision: is it worth getting hurt or not? I certainly believe it’s been worth it.

  After Twylla’s accident in 1992, a Montana saddle-maker friend of mine, Chas Weldon, invited me to a calf branding to be held at cowboy poet Wally McRae’s ranch at Forsyth, Montana. This convivial May affair, aptly named “Beef, Beans and Bullshit,” brought together about a dozen artists in the western disciplines — saddle makers, rawhide braiders, painters, assorted shady characters — for three days of riding, roping and raconteuring. Everyone brought along his own horses. The gathering quickly became an annual tradition, something we all looked forward to every year.

  Because of Twylla’s injury, I wanted to find Pin Ears a new home, and what better opportunity than Beef, Beans and Bullshit? I had Wally McRae in mind as a potential buyer. But, having had a Scots mother, I should have known that McRae would be as Scottish as his name and that selling Pin Ears to him would be tough.

  Pin Ears killed the sale for good by blowing his cork as we trotted up the ridge the next morning to begin the gathering. If ever there was a time for an Ian Tyson bronc ride, this was it. Horse sale or no horse sale, I didn’t want to get bucked off in front of these guys. So I stuck my feet up front and made a ride, spurring the shit out of Pin Ears. All the guys — Chas, Joe Beeler, Les Best, Bill Reynolds, T.D. Kelsey, Hank Esp, Bob Douglas and Don Butler — looked on, oohing and aahing as Pin Ears farted around in a circle. I got him rode, and I was feeling jazzed about it.

  At the Beef, Beans and Bullshit gathering at the OW Ranch in Montana. I’m the one holding the branding iron. (COURTESY IAN TYSON)

  Giving a concert before supper at Beef, Beans and Bullshit. (COURTESY IAN TYSON)

  But Wally said, “You’re not injecting that bronc into me, laddie!”

  The next day I quietly approached Bob, a horse trader. “I don’t want to take this horse home and Wally’s not going to buy him. Can you use him?”

  “I think I can get three thousand dollars for him. Sure, I’ll take him.”

  So Pin Ears left Twylla’s and my life and we were three thousand dollars richer. That was the end of that — or so I thought.

  Years later I was checking out boots at the Paul Bond Boot Company shop down in Nogales, on the Mexico–Arizona border. That’s an important place in the West; Paul Bond is the iconic boot maker for working cowboys, and his shop is a depot for the cowboy underground. As I browsed I heard someone calling my name in a southern drawl.

  “Mister Tahson! Mister Tahson!”

  I turned around and saw two cowboys.

  “My name’s Rusty,” one of them said, “and this here is Spider. When I’s at the Matador in Montana, I had a horse in my string with your brand on his left hip.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding! Did he have frostbit ears?”

  “Yessir.”

  “By God, that’s ol’ Pin Ears! Did he buck any guys off?”

  “Yessir.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Bob had sent Pin Ears out to the big outfits, and that troublemaking little bastard had become a legend, trotting across the whole expanse of the West as if he came right out of a Mike Beck song.

  Beef, Beans and Bullshit was always a lot of fun. We’d go to a different piece of cattle country every year and we’d have a good chuckwagon cook who used a Dutch oven to prepare the beef and beans over the fire. It was a classic tree-house deal — no girls allowed — so the cook was always a male. The other guys drank whiskey and beer and ribbed me for drinking my Chardonnay. And every night I’d give the boys a concert. They were a wonderful audience. If a couple of guys wanted to talk, they’d go do it someplace else.

  One year we had the gathering at a ranch about three miles from Bannack, Montana, the capital of Montana Territory in the 1860s. That’s the best ghost town I’ve ever seen. We rode over through the sagebrush — it grows chest-high in that area — to investigate the old buildings. Bannack is in high-altitude country, cold and dry, which explains how the buildings have kept their integrity after all these years. The hotel is still there and the jail even has the leg irons in the floor.

  In later years we met up at the OW Ranch in southeastern Montana — another historic place, birthplace of the Kendrick Cattle Company. The owner, Jim Guercio, had lovingly restored the buildings of the headquarters, and we stayed in the beautiful old bunkhouse, which looked as if it had come right out of a classic western film. The barn had enormous old cottonwood beams that were quite low, and Bob told the story of a buckaroo who came to work for the ranch and bought a new saddle. He cinched it to one of the broncs in the barn, and immediately the horse came apart, bucking into the beam overhead and smashing the saddle tree (its wooden framework) all to hell. Apparently the cowboy sent for another saddle, and the exact same thing happened again.

  At the end of every Beef, Beans and Bullshit, Joe Beeler would make a pen-and-ink sketch of a face or a bronc and we’d all sign it. Those drawings were highly prized, as Joe had become a successful artist. He’d gone out to Arizona in the 1960s as a two-hundred-dollar-a-month cowboy while he learned how to draw and paint. Then he got into real estate and became wealthy, which enabled him to focus on his painting. He ended up living a pretty idyllic life.

  Joe was just hitting his stride artistically when, in the spring of 2006, he slipped off his horse while dragging a calf to the branding fire. It was a heart attack, and they say he was dead before he hit the ground. Old Joe lived the classic cowboy rags-to-riches story, and he ended it with the perfect cowboy death.

  Beef, Beans and Bullshit finally ran out of gas around the time Joe died. Chas was doing all the organizing but got too overloaded. He went through a hard divorce, and his recent years have been like mine.

  In the early 1990s, around the time Beef, Beans and Bullshit began, Adelita started going to Longview School. This really connected us to the Longview community. Before that, as far as local social life went, Twylla and I would go to the bar and that was pretty much it. The only people I knew were the cowboy friends I rode with — the wild bunch. I didn’t know any of the farmers and didn’t really want to know them. But through Adelita, Twylla and I discovered what a nice little town Longview is. It’s a close-knit community, though it has its share of gossip and small-town politics too.

  Many of the parents were heavily involved with the elementary school. Rosemary Bews — who was married to bronc rider Tommy Bews, who helped me in the OH Ranch fight — drove the school bus. Twylla and her friend Delilah Miller helped out with all kinds of school projects throughout the year, especially at Christmas and Easter. And I’d play the guitar at Christmas pageants, where Adelita and the other kids would stand onstage forgetting their lines and looking cute.

  Longview School was without peer back then. Schools are only as good as their staff, and Adelita benefited from the luck of the draw, attending the school when some good people were working there. Staff members such as Karen Wight and Jim Critchley really got involved in the children’s lives. Their dedication and work ethic set the tone for the rest of the school.

  Unlike her old man, Adelita did very well scholastically: she is very bright and has a lot of drive. And she didn’t excel only at school. She’s a born horsewoman, a cowgirl right from the start. A chubby-faced little girl with blond hair, she did everything right — except
for putting on her spurs. For some reason she had trouble with that for a while, and it would make her furious. She’d sit on the bed of the truck cursing and swearing and working up a sweat trying to put them on. “You’ve got ’em upside down,” I’d tell her. She would just keep growling and trying to do it herself.

  Once I tried putting her on one of our young horses, Randy. It was a stupid thing to do but I really thought he’d be fine. Instead he got offended that this little kid was on him and he started to go back to the barn. Then he began to buck a bit. Adelita grabbed that saddle horn in a death grip. She eventually came off, but she darn near got him rode.

  When we had our last big calf branding at the ranch in the mid-1990s, down in the willows east of the stone house, Adelita was riding a little horse called Spinner. I’d bought him in Wyoming from the Miller Ranch. He was a softhearted little guy, a real child’s horse, and he gave her his whole heart and soul. But at the branding, Spinner got spooked and came apart on her. This time she rode him. Any other person probably would have fallen off, but Adelita hung on as he bucked around. All the cowboys who were there for the branding thought it was great. She was only eight or nine at the time.

  In junior high Adelita didn’t get into trouble like other kids. She didn’t get into fights and she and her buddy Hannah certainly weren’t into smoking or drinking. (Hannah still comes by the ranch occasionally and brings me vegetables from her mother’s garden. She’s a good kid.)

  Unfortunately, Adelita didn’t like Clay very much when she was younger. She had no reason to dislike him but she’d always say, “He’s not my brother.”

  “He’s your half-brother, Adelita,” I’d reply.

  She’s past that now, but back then the idea of having a half-brother in Toronto who was almost twenty years older was too much. Today Clay and Adelita don’t see each other. I’d love to get them together at the ranch but I’ve never been able to orchestrate it. I’m sure they’d get along great if I did.

  Twylla and I did everything we could to spoil Adelita rotten as she was growing up, giving her skis, televisions, horse equipment and clothes by the ton. But it just didn’t take. She has a strong character. It’s not that she doesn’t like the finer things in life or doesn’t have a well-developed sense of entitlement. She does, but she’s very level-headed too.

  Adelita started riding the amateur circuit in Alberta while she was in junior high, and she found success pretty quickly. At the Writing-on-Stone Rodeo, when she was twelve or thirteen, she won a beautiful buckle embedded with emeralds. That sort of thing puts stars in a kid’s eyes. It also put stars in her mother’s eyes — maybe more so than Adelita’s.

  I had stars in my eyes too. All through the ’80s and into the ’90s I was doing a lot of cutting contests, trying to balance music and horses and family but ultimately having little success with the balancing act.

  The reality is that you can’t be the best at everything you do. I’ve learned that the hard way, and I’ve tried to tell that to my friend Wylie Gustafson, a Montana western singer who also got snakebit by the cutting bug. “You can’t be at the top of your game cutting horses and at the same time be at the top of your game in the entertainment business,” I told him. “It can’t be done.” Something inevitably slides, whether it’s the music or the cutting or the marriage. Top cutters show all the time — at least every weekend. How can you do that, play concerts and spend time with family?

  I tried but I could never find the right balance. I was away from home a lot as Adelita was growing up, and with the horses I couldn’t show successfully. My hand would move or something else would go wrong and I’d get disqualified. I went to the Fort Worth futurity numerous times but made the finals only once, in 1989, under the guidance of my friend Bill Glass. Finally I realized that being as good as I was at music had taken me a long, long time — not just years but decades. I wasn’t a natural musician, so I had to work very hard to become successful.

  With my big ego, it took me a long time to put all this into perspective. I finally resolved that I would get my satisfaction from training a nice horse. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the essence of the cowhorse endeavour: making the horse a willing partner instead of just forcing it to do something. You can make them do it, but that’s certainly not the way I want to be with my horses in my declining years.

  You’ve got to take joy in making really good ponies, because the world out there is not fair. The pros have to ride sixteen or even eighteen hours a day to stay competitive. It’s an exhausting life. The workload is absolutely crushing, and that’s why it’s better to be a non-pro like me — I can sell and train horses and compete with the pros if I want to. (The significant distinction between a pro and a non-pro cutter is that a non-pro can’t take money for training somebody else’s horses.) I realized that I could stay a non-pro and still be reasonably competitive.

  In the music world in the early 1990s, I was riding a post-Cowboyography wave, doing my best to take western music to the next level by mixing reggae and other forms with cowboy music. A classic example is the song “Jaquima to Freno,” off my 1991 record, And Stood There Amazed. I really pushed the envelope with that song. Jaquima is bastardized Spanish for a hackamore, a rawhide bridle without a bit that eliminates potential damage to the horse’s mouth from a metal bit. The use of the hackamore is a secretive old tradition in the West, and just like the legendary cutters, the old Californio hackamore men would never freely divulge those secrets. They kept their knowledge to themselves.

  I based “Jaquima to Freno” on Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” dream fantasy concept. Essentially I had decided to do a cowboy version of Dylan’s song, but I made it completely different musically. The lyrics of that song are pure fantasy:

  Jaquima to Freno

  He’s an old vaquero

  From another time

  Hands as fine as the dealers of Reno

  He been to the ocean

  He been to the sea

  Big long tapaderos hangin’ both sides

  Of an old Visalia tree

  Hey Mr. Vaquero

  Put a handle on my pony for me

  Teach me the mystery

  I knew the folklorists might not approve of the song, but the buckaroos loved it, which meant there was nothing the folklorists could do about it. To this day “Jaquima to Freno” is one of my most requested songs.

  I wrote and recorded some of my best work in the 1990s. But as the decade wore on, my record sales slowly declined. Each new album sold fewer copies than the previous one. Nobody stays hot forever, and cowboy singers are no exception.

  Eighteen Inches of Rain (1994) was my last record that got regular airplay. The radio stations played the hell out of “Alcohol in the Bloodstream,” which is good country rock. My cowboy fans’ favourite song, “MC Horses,” is also on that record. I wrote it in the little cabin behind my corrals, an old line shack I had brought up from someplace near Chimney Rock. Sam Bush’s groove on the mandolin really brought that song home in the studio.

  “MC Horses” is about the breakup of the legendary MC Ranch in Oregon, one of the biggest cow outfits in the West. When they sold the MC in the early ‘90s, somebody sent me a catalogue of everything they were selling, including the horses. It was a sad event for the West. I decided to write the song after I overheard two cowboys talking about the sale in a bar.

  Yeah the people they come from everywhere

  Just to bid on ’em high and low

  And thereby own a piece of the legend

  With the cowherd all dispersed

  The ol’ cavvy, she had to go

  Back in August — 100 head and more

  After I wrote “MC Horses,” I learned a lot about the MC’s history from William Kittredge, a grandson of Oscar Kittredge, the man who oversaw the MC. Bill is a former University of Montana English professor and a fine novelist. He’s another of my favourite western writers, and his book The Willow Field is a modern classic, even though it
has yet to get the recognition it deserves.

  I’m fascinated by the story of the MC. Bill Kittredge was raised there, and like everyone else in his family, he thought he was doing God’s work on the ranch. But after he left he realized how much environmental degradation his family had caused by adopting industrial-style ranching methods. To get more farmland they’d drained all the swamplands, with terribly disruptive results. “It turned out we had wrecked all we had not left untouched,” Kittredge writes in his book Owning It All. “The beloved migratory rafts of waterbirds, the green-headed mallards and the redheads and canvasbacks, the cinnamon teal and the great Canadian honkers, were mostly gone along with their swampland habitat.” The only holistic aspect of the MC was its buckaroo division, out on the desert moving the cattle the old-time way. Everybody who’s anybody in the American West buckarooed at the MC for a time, just as they probably buckarooed at the Spanish Ranch in Nevada.

  In my song I describe the sale of the MC horses without passing judgment on how the ranch was run. I’ve never been preachy in my songwriting. The writers I admire just say what’s going down; it’s the way they describe it that makes it art. In Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, for example, you can see the evolution of California and agriculture through what happens to the characters in the novel. In the same way I do my best to describe the land, the animals and the people who have made their homes in this beautiful, difficult territory. I’d rather tell a story than preach.

  That’s one reason (among many others) why I’d be a terrible politician. For some reason, a few of my listeners have thought otherwise. Around the time Eighteen Inches of Rain came out in 1994, I received the Order of Canada and they wined and dined me in Ottawa. Soon afterwards, the federal Reform Party started sniffing around, wondering if I’d run for them. A bunch of provincial parties were curious about me as well. I never gave the idea much thought. I knew myself well enough by then to recognize that I’d be the worst politico in the country. I don’t have the right chemistry. You have to make big intellectual compromises to go into politics. Plus, I don’t suffer fools well. I don’t have the patience and I’m not a good schmoozer — two key requirements for a politician.