The Long Trail: My Life in the West by Ian Tyson

Author:Ian Tyson [Tyson, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-35937-7
Publisher: Random House Canada
Published: 2010-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

When we first arrived at the ranch, I was regarded as something of an outsider by the local community. It wasn’t long before I fell in with a group of local cowboys: Bob Spaith, a sculptor; Steve Hoar, another sculptor; Rich Roenisch, yet another sculptor; and Gaile Gallup, who’d go to art school later and become a painter. It’s not that unusual for a group of cowboys to be artists as well, although it’s less common in Canada than it is in America. Some guys are rawhide braiders, some guys do horse dentistry, and a lot of them are artists.

It’s hard to say how the cowboy–artist connection started. Maybe it goes back to the horse. Or maybe it goes back to Charlie Russell, who amazed all of us in the West with the genius and romance of his paintings. In any case, it’s tradition now. Art is woven into the tapestry of the cowboy life. And it’s not just a hobby, either. Cowboys need other arrows in their quiver because they can’t make it on cowboy pay alone, and they often get screwed over by the ranches where they work. The owner will say, “You’ll always have a home here, Bob,” and then, six months later: “You’ve got two weeks to get the hell out of here.” It happens all the time.

The local cowboys I met all worked at nearby ranches. I bred a lot of colts at the ranch back then, and each September I’d have a really cool branding where we’d all get together and break out the Scotch and brand colts. Later, people got married and had kids, and eventually some got divorced, but at the time it was a cool, freewheeling group. We were the “wild bunch.”

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