The Long Trail: My Life in the West (15 page)

After
Cowboyography
came out, I loaded up the twenty-four-foot aluminum gooseneck stock trailer with our equipment and headed out on the road with my band. When you get hot, you’ve got to take advantage of it or get out of the way. We did a lot of hard travelling and I loved being out there on the road. There aren’t very many secondary highways in the West I haven’t been down.

We really ripped it up in Medicine Hat, Alberta, at a place called the Westlander Inn. It was always party time at the Hat, and I think the people there considered me one of their own. The music was upstairs and the strippers were downstairs, all under one roof. Ronnie Hawkins, one of the original rockabilly guys, used to play there, and it would get really wild because he loved to party. He caused more trouble than I ever dreamed of.

In certain towns people just took to us, such as Billings, Montana; Bend, Oregon; and Sheridan and Jackson, Wyoming. I vividly remember playing the Wort Hotel in
Jackson. You could tell something was happening when the people there heard our music. It was as if they had been waiting for it for a long time but hadn’t known what they were waiting for. When they heard us play, everybody smiled from ear to ear. The music clicked. In Bend I was almost like Elvis — the girls all crowded the stage and the organizers had to schedule another two shows in the high school auditorium to accommodate all our fans. The drama teacher was pissed about it, jealous that we were intruding on her territory, but we played anyway. Then we’d go a hundred miles down the highway and couldn’t draw twenty people. We never could make it happen in places such as Casper, Wyoming. (Dick Cheney is from Casper, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about that town.)

Not everyone who came to see us was impressed with what I was doing. We’d get into fights over “Claude Dallas,” a song on
Cowboyography
about an Idaho buckaroo and trapper charged with killing two game wardens in Owyhee County in 1981. I wrote it with Tom Russell and we had got a bit carried away with the imagery, describing how the wardens were gunned down at Dallas’s camp while trying to arrest him for trapping out of season. You could make a case that he had shot those wardens in self-defence or that he had murdered them. It wasn’t clear at all, and that’s what we said:
There’s two sides to this story, there may be no right or wrong
. We didn’t realize how sensitive the subject was. Dallas was in the news again because he’d escaped from prison in 1986. In those days you were either for the forest service or against it, and our take —
he may be the last outlaw
— was very controversial in the West.

The FBI caught Dallas in California in March 1987, a year after his escape. After he was released from prison in 2005, he phoned me once in the middle of the night. I was half asleep and I don’t remember much of what he said. I think he was asking about the Chilcotin country in British Columbia, and I probably told him that it was gone — overrun with civil servants — that there was no frontier left there.

As we kept touring
Cowboyography
, I had an important epiphany. We were scheduled to play a rodeo dance in Kelowna, B.C., only it wasn’t at the rodeo. It was at a big old roller rink on the strip north of town.
Oh shit
, I thought,
this is going to be another dumb gig
, and I bitched to Thom, my drummer, about how we never should have booked it. Back then, if I was in a bad mood I’d let it show on stage. One of the poets at the first Elko put it pretty well: “Ian Tyson’s terrific, but he’s so damn irascible.” That poet had me figured out.

Well, that night at Kelowna, after all my complaining about how we shouldn’t have come, the roller rink was packed. And not only was it packed, as the couples danced by the stage I could see them mouthing the lyrics to my songs. That was a big surprise — I’d never seen that before.

I had just enough brains to realize I had been given an incredible gift.
You can’t be negative on stage like you used to be at Ranchman’s
, I told myself. I’m not going to take the whole rap for being negative at Ranchman’s — it was a damn negative place—but I decided there in Kelowna that, no matter what was going down in my life, I wasn’t going to let it intrude on the shows. I resolved to be a professional. To this day I’ve stayed true to that. That choice has done wonders for my singing and my playing, and probably for my writing as well.

M
y corner of the West has been good to me over the years. But it’s a young man’s country. I can’t help but curse the Alberta weather when it’s thirty below zero and I’m out trying to fix a gate hinge and can’t feel my fingers. This land is a little too far north. The winters are hard on the livestock. I don’t care what anybody says — when it’s forty below and your horses and cattle are out in that cold, it’s tough on them.

We’re absolutely shaped by the weather, and you’ve got to be a survivor to make it through. In winter all we talk about around here is when we are going to get some spring. Chinooks bring days of relief with their warm winds from the west, but even chinooks are a mixed blessing. They melt everything, and then at night, when the temperature goes down a few degrees, it all freezes again. My yard becomes a skating rink. That’s okay when you’re nineteen, but when you’re my age, you have to be careful. I only have to slip once to do some real damage.

The winter conditions here can turn on a dime, sometimes with deadly results. In 1900, for example, two home-steading ranchers in this area — Jack Nichol and Gordon McConnell — left for High River with a wagon to fetch supplies. They set out in the middle of a chinook and were likely ill-equipped and unfamiliar with the country, so they didn’t realize how fast the temperature could drop. A blizzard hit and they never made it back home, even though the trip was only about twenty miles. They froze to death at Stimson Creek, which is across the Highwood River just south of my place. It’s a classic indication of the violence of our weather.

I’ve experienced some of that brutality first-hand. On the way back from Elko in the late 1980s (after selling some five hundred copies of
Cowboyography
at yet another sold-out show at Stockman’s), I phoned Twylla as we passed through Dillon, Montana, to check in and see how she and little Adelita were doing.

“We’re fine, but you’d better hurry home,” Twylla said, “because there’s a big Alberta clipper coming down from the north.” At this point the storm was up around Red Deer or Edmonton.

“Okay, we’ll hook it.”

We kept driving and did fine until we got north of Great Falls, Montana, where we hit a big windstorm. Great, ghostly tumbleweeds came rolling straight at us down the interstate, harbingers of things to come. I’ll never forget those tumbleweeds bouncing off the truck. They came right out of the night — a very Gothic and surreal scene.
We’re in trouble here
, I thought.

We gassed up at Conrad, just south of the Alberta border.
It felt like a chinook but you could tell the temperature was dropping fast. Sure enough, by the time we crossed the Medicine Line the temperature had plummeted. The border guy that night wasn’t an asshole — he must have been an exception, because most of them are — and just waved us right through. “You guys better get going,” he said, “because this is going to hit hard.”

At Milk River — still 170 miles from my ranch — it hit. That blizzard was one scary son of a bitch. The snow flew horizontally and we couldn’t see the road. Our windows iced up. Thom and I had to take turns walking on the shoulder of the road, shouting directions while the other guy drove, just so we could keep the truck out of the ditch. We were pulling a trailer with our equipment and the rest of the guys were behind us in the dually truck, which has four rear wheels. We were helpless out there in the twenty-below cold (about minus thirty Celsius). You can’t survive in that kind of weather for very long. If you run out of gas or go off the road and aren’t picked up right away, you’ll be dead in hours. A lot of cattle died that night, both in rigs and on the range.

Finally we made it to the little town of Granum, where we checked into a motel. The next morning as we limped up the highway, we passed numerous cattle trucks jack-knifed in the ditch. We made it home safely, but the experience shows how dangerous the northern plains can be. We could have perished in that storm. If a truck had come along and run into us — which could easily have happened, because the other drivers couldn’t see out their windows either — we’d have been knocked into the ditch and we’d have died. Ian Tyson and Thom Moon would have become
a modern version of the two homesteaders who froze to death at Stimson Creek in 1900.

The climate hasn’t changed much since I moved here — it’s still violent as hell — but a lot of other things have changed. When Twylla and I moved here in 1979, our local village, Longview, was a sleepy little town with an elementary school and very few services. The bar was the social centre, of course. It was run by a bawdy old gal who always had boyfriends about twenty years younger than she was. An aged Chinese woman ran a convenience store, although that label was an oxymoron. It was in no way convenient. I don’t think the proprietor had ever heard of best-before dates; you had to check those yourself.

An excellent mechanic from Saskatchewan ran the old-time stucco gas station on the corner; Bruce could fix any truck of any vintage. The highway that ran through town was unpaved back then, and south of town, more gravel roads led to the ranches. Logging trucks drove those roads but there was hardly any commercial traffic.

Today Longview has a paved highway but nowhere to get your truck fixed. We’ve got a liquor store, a post office and a wonderful steakhouse. And then there’s the Navajo Mug, the coffeehouse I opened in a rickety old saddle shop in 2002 to give visiting fans an opportunity to buy Ian Tyson paraphernalia. (Pat and June, the ladies who run it, make delicious mince pies too.) But you can’t even get a flat fixed in Longview anymore the way you could in the old days. You’ve got to go ten miles up the highway to Black Diamond.

The country around Longview has changed too. When I moved to the T–Y, the agricultural land in the area was all in quarter-sections — 160-acre parcels. Twylla and I used to ride our horses across the Highwood River to visit friends. But within a few short years, developers found ways to circumvent zoning bylaws and break many of the quarter-sections into smaller parcels, some even smaller than ten acres. And then the country really got fenced up. Now there are lots of five- or seven-acre properties, and around every one of those little parcels is a four-strand fence.

It’s not just my part of the world that has altered like this. Such changes have spread throughout the West, and there’s a simple explanation for it: people. It’s a tired old refrain of mine that we never thought the West would fill up with people, but it did. And it took only twenty or thirty years. Open country is essential to the culture of the West, but a growing population means those wide-open spaces are doomed.

Back in the 1980s I could see that confrontations were on the horizon. I’m no genius and I’m not a tree hugger, but I could see that the destruction of the West was on the way. In southern Alberta that destruction announced itself in 1987, when the Canadian Forces revealed plans to buy the historic OH Ranch near my place and turn it into a military training ground. A lot of guys around here thought that if they pretended the threat wasn’t there, maybe it would go away. But it wasn’t going to go away, and I knew it.

The OH is one of the oldest ranches in this area, home to all kinds of wildlife: wolves, cougars, bears, elk, eagles, owls and so on, as well as native fescue grass. That fescue rangeland is vital for wildlife, livestock and the entire prairie
ecosystem (fescue roots grow up to three metres deep, storing carbon and water underground). Once that native grass is ruined, it’s very hard to restore — the thistles and weeds take over. Regardless, the army was poised to push all the wildlife out of that country and rip up the land. You couldn’t come up with a more inappropriate or ignorant plan if you tried.

There are certain people in the world who like to find a little paradise like the OH and completely change it. I don’t know why that is, but it’s a sad reality. In the case of the OH, the owners were having financial trouble — ranchers always are — and they saw the government’s offer as a solution. I decided to step in, along with Tommy Bews, a well-known cowboy in the Highwood Valley, and his brother, Joey. Their ranches bordered the OH, so their involvement was based on self-interest (but what isn’t?). We were up for a fight, and we went at it.

Tommy and I did our best to get the situation into the papers and on TV. I had a conduit to the media because
Cowboyography
was hot, and Tommy, a Canadian rodeo legend, was a real hero in those days too. We made a pretty good combination, and we stood off the Department of National Defence until a local oilman, the late Doc Seaman, stood up and bought the OH. There’s a definite irony there, because Doc was an oil and gas man if ever there was one. But some of those guys love ranching and the cowboy lifestyle too. That’s how the OH got saved. Now the provincial government has protected parts of the ranch as a conservation areas, allowing for traditional ranching methods to carry on there.

It’s good for cattle country when extremely wealthy people want to be cowboys. In fact, it’s the best thing that
could happen. It’s been proven time and time again that deeded land in the West is always stewarded better than public land. People such as Ted Turner and Ralph Lauren may have an excessively romanticized vision of the West, but by controlling huge blocks of good rangeland they’re helping the environment. Those rich guys may not be environmentalists, but the environment still wins. We need more guys like that here in Alberta.

The traditional ways of herding are good for the land. In purely ecological terms, the old style of open-range ranching — in which the cowboy moved with the cattle across vast territory — was exactly what nature wanted, because it mimicked the buffalo migrations. The cattle grazed and moved on, and the buckaroos were migratory herdsmen just like Mongolian nomads. Those old-time buckaroos were, perhaps without knowing it, friends of the grass, friends of the ecosystem.