Editor's note: This story was originally published in the Daily Yonder, and appears here under a Creative Commons license. For more rural reporting and small-town stories visit dailyyonder.com.
Every year for a school field trip, my fellow students and I would pack our lunches and load into buses for the winding drive from Reno to Virginia City, where we would be set loose onto the wooden sidewalks to raid the retro candy store, the year-round Christmas ornament shop, and peer through the windows of the Bucket of Blood Saloon (the neighborhood watering hole since 1876!)
We would also stare at the people who frequent this small town because for many of us, they were the first real life cowboys we’d ever seen. These old men with long leather chaps, silver buckle belts, bolo ties, and wide-brimmed cowboy hats would walk bow-legged through town, a toothpick or cigarette shoved between their teeth and a pistol jammed in the holster at their waist. Most exciting was when they’d tie their horses in front of whichever establishment they were visiting, proof that these were indeed authentic cowboys.
When people imagine the American West, particularly a state like Nevada, cowboy culture often comes to mind. Everything I just described – the hats, the belts, the boots – are key visual aspects of the cowboy identity, and it’s a look I see play-acted all over the country. Hell, I even bought my first pair of cowboy boots last year, although I’ve found styling them to be exceptionally difficult.
But what makes a real cowboy? This question was on my mind last week when I visited Elko, a mid-sized town in northeastern Nevada about as far as you could get from a big city (the nearest one is Salt Lake City, and that’s a three-hour drive). I was there for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, an annual celebration of the rural West that brings together artists, musicians, craftsmen, and, of course, cowboy poets, for a week of skill-sharing and arts appreciation in the high desert.
People travel from all across the country to participate in the gathering, making one of the frequently asked questions by performers – “Who here was born in Nevada?” – a brag-worthy moment when you’re one of the few people who can raise their hand in a sea of western wannabes.
This pride isn’t just mine: any born-and-raised Nevadan has it, even if they, like me, hightailed it out of the state as soon as they could. Love for Nevada is built into the curriculum all students are taught in fourth grade; it’s why I know Nevada was admitted to the Union on October 31, 1864, our slogan is “All for our country,” the state bird is the mountain bluebird and the state flower the sagebrush. When I’m old and my memory begins to fail, these are the facts I will recite.
But the somewhat undefinable thing that is cowboy culture never felt central to my Nevada experience, except those times visiting Virginia City as a kid. It took leaving the big city of Reno to remember that this state is indeed home to rough and tumbling cowhands – or at least used to be.
The number of generational ranches like the 100-year-old ones you can find outside of Elko, for example, is dwindling as the average age of ranchers rises and the likelihood that younger generations take over the family business diminishes. In Elko County, hundreds of thousands of acres have been bought up by foreign investors from Canada, Hong Kong, and the Virgin Islands for either agriculture use or mineral rights access (or a mysterious third reason that’s withheld from public knowledge). To be a cowboy in the 21st century means contending with billionaire-entities and an ever-consolidating beef industry.
The Cowboy Poetry Gathering didn’t directly address these threats to cowboy life (or at least not at the events I attended), but it didn’t need to. Most anyone working in agriculture already knows the challenges of a business built on livestock and land.
And for the folks at the poetry gathering – a medley of artists and writers and guitar-picking western romanticists – their way of life has always been counter to what society expects of them. Wandering the world with one eye on your notebook and the other to the hills has never fit the white-picket-fence mold. These are the cowboys for whom the range is a place in the mind, one you could get lost in for infinity.
So did I get my answer to what makes a “real” cowboy? I didn’t get an easy answer, that’s for sure. What I found in Elko was that a cowboy way of life means a life driven by your love of a place, your loyalty and willingness to protect it even when all signs point to money, money, now. It also means creating a life even where it might not be easy, whether that’s the literal place you’ve called home in the harsh, unforgiving high desert, or a figurative home amongst the artists, the creators, the people for whom being lost in the mind is a good thing.
The poetry gathering, I found, is for all those wandering cowboys to find a home in each other under the wide blue skies of the Silver State.