The Long Trail: My Life in the West (16 page)

Truth be told, there’s no way that free-range era of moving with the cattle could have lasted for any length of time. In the early 1900s, big American outfits such as the Matador and the XIT briefly leased huge chunks of prairie range from the Canadian government for cheap. But then Ottawa decided the government didn’t have enough control over that arrangement. It was too unruly and fast-moving and free ranging, and they were paranoid about American cowboys packing guns in Canada.

Ottawa didn’t want wild young troublemaking guys coming across the border and bringing lawlessness to this country. Instead they wanted to open it up for the homesteaders, give them their 160-acre parcels and make those poor sons of bitches pay taxes before they started eating
gophers and starved to death — or ended up broken in the flophouses of the West Coast. That’s how it went down; the Canadian government has never regarded cowmen with much respect.

So we won a big victory when we saved the OH from the government’s absurd plans. But that was immediately followed by another fight. The Mormons in the Cardston area of southern Alberta wanted irrigation water, so the Alberta government planned to build a dam on the Oldman River to give it to them — another terrible idea. When you dam something up, especially on the prairie, it fills with sediment. A steady flow of sediment nurtures the riparian areas alongside the rivers and creeks, and that’s how cottonwoods grow. Take away the flow of sediment and you aren’t going to have any cottonwoods. But those Mormons wanted irrigation water, period. I started working with Cliff Wallis of the Alberta Wilderness Association, a group that was leading the fight against the government’s dam plans. Again I figured that my role was to bring attention to the situation.

My old friend Alan Young respected my stance on the Oldman Dam but didn’t understand what was at stake. He had no problem with the extractive industries ripping up the West. Back when we were at Pincher in the late 1970s, Shell had built a big plant nearby and the company was laying pipelines all over the place. “Don’t let them do that,” I’d tell Alan, and he’d just roll another cigarette. It never occurred to him to put up a fight. I had always looked up to Alan, but his indifference saddened me. He could have been a positive role model, a force for good, but he just wouldn’t take that step.

By the time the Oldman Dam fight rolled around, Alan had been ravaged by cigarettes and whiskey. After years of living the quintessential western life, he died in an old-time cowboy way, drinking himself to death like Will James. Alan died in a Calgary hospital the night of March 13, 1989. Days later, I sang “Amazing Grace” at his funeral in Pincher Creek. I still think about Alan a lot. He was a good friend, always fun to be around and always there for me, as much as he could be.

As the fight over the Oldman Dam heated up in 1989, I came up with an idea: we could throw a hell of a concert right by the river at Maycroft Crossing, make it free and ask for donations for the cause. To this end I brought in Gordon Lightfoot, Murray McLauchlan and Sylvia, among others. Somebody donated a sound system and power generators and we set up on a couple of big old flatbed trucks. People in the music community will usually give to a good cause, but often you’ve got to prod them, give them a plan and a vision. So that’s what I did.

We got lucky with the weather on June 12, 1989 — it was perfect. Thousands of people came out, tree huggers and cowboys alike, and camped out at the crossing for the day. The buckaroos from the Waldron camp, a few miles away, loped over on their horses and rode around looking colourful. The local Peigan Natives, who opposed the dam project too, set up their tepees. Gordon performed his “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” Murray sang “The Farmer’s Song” and Sylvia and I did a few songs together too — one of those impromptu Ian & Sylvia reunions. During the concert we passed around the hat, and we pulled in around twenty thousand dollars for the fight.

We did come pretty close to stopping the dam. The fight went all the way to the Supreme Court — which ruled that an environmental assessment for the project was necessary — but those Mormons were bound and determined to get their water. In the end they prevailed, despite all the good arguments and evidence against it. Even though we lost, the attention we brought to the dam forced the government to take more seriously the needs of fish and trees — and to change the way it operated the dams in light of those needs. That’s been good news for the cottonwoods downstream.

After the Oldman loss I started becoming more cynical about this country. I’m talking about the way it operates, not the rocks and the trees. I had never been a political guy before and I’m a little sensitive about politics, probably because Sylvia and I always got a bad rap in the folk days because we were more into music than protest. But when it came to my beloved open West, getting involved in political causes just felt natural.

Ever since the late 1980s I’ve taken on the role of celebrity spokesperson for ranchers in this area. In 2006, Compton Petroleum Corporation of Calgary wanted to drill exploratory wells in the eastern slopes of the Rockies west of my place. The locals wanted me to get the situation into the media, so I took up the cause and headed into Calgary with John Cross of the a7 Ranche (he’s the grandson of Alberta ranching pioneer and Calgary Stampede co-founder A. E. Cross) and Pokey, my mare.

I was supposed to ride Pokey at the McDougall Centre, the provincial government’s headquarters in downtown Calgary. I was apprehensive because I thought she would spook on the pavement and tear my knee up, and then run
over a bunch of people. Pokey’s like that — she’ll buck you off at the drop of a hat. But my worries were unfounded. She thought the whole thing was great. She loved all the noise and the clatter and the big tall buildings. We rode right up the building’s front stairs. Bud, my gelding, would not have tolerated it, but Pokey absolutely loved it.

It turned out that the event didn’t have media legs. It didn’t matter, though, because Pokey made the experience a lot of fun. Hell, she wanted to go out for lunch and drink martinis afterwards. It was another reminder that horses are nothing if not mysterious. You never know what’s going on in their heads.

These days I’m still helping out local ranchers and conservationists who are trying to preserve the eastern slopes for future generations. Suncor, a Calgary oil and gas company, wants to drill sour gas wells and build a big pipeline out on the slopes that would cut through pristine land. The damage would be incalculable. All these oil and gas projects require new roads, and it’s the roads that really screw everything up. They get built along the line of least resistance — in other words, in the wildlife and water corridors. I’d been hoping the government would have the sense to not approve the Suncor project, but then it went and did it — business as usual in Alberta.

I try not to get too preachy about all this. You can’t blame the people working in the industry for these problems — they’re just trying to make a buck. But if you rip up the eastern slopes of the Rockies for short-term profit, what have you got then? That’s the heritage of Alberta.

———

It’s not just the landscape that’s changing. The entire field of agriculture has undergone radical changes in the past couple of decades. I didn’t know anything about large-scale agriculture when I started ranching, probably because there wasn’t much of it around here then. But then the agricultural industry exploded. Companies figured out ways to house chickens in huge numbers — in the most inhumane way — and then how to do it with hogs, in equally inhumane ways. Now there are feedlots for cows and even horses. But nobody thought about what to do with all that manure. No one considered the runoff into the rivers and riparian areas, and what effect that would have on the ecosystem.

We North Americans want an endless supply of cheap food, and we want it retailed to us in the most convenient manner so that everything is just as simple as can be. But that simplicity comes at a big cost, and now it’s all coming back to bite us on the ass. We’ve got all kinds of environmental problems and we’re injecting hormones and steroids into these animals — all for corporate moneymaking. Consumers, meanwhile, are completely removed from the realities of what’s going on. They don’t see the poor chickens or hogs in those inhumane conditions. Out of sight, out of mind.

Ranching as I learned it was much more holistic — and still is. In the cow–calf business, cattle have a couple of really nice years before they walk that last mile. Even cattle in feed-lots live in way more humane conditions than fowl and hogs.

If I were starting over again, I would put more time into working for the humane treatment of domestic animals. The way we treat them diminishes us as human beings capable of creative thought and compassion. Adelita used
to comment on that when she was a little girl. “It’s terrible the way they treat those animals,” she’d say. (I’ve always hoped that Adelita will find a career working for the welfare of animals, maybe as a lawyer. She’s certainly bright enough to do it, and is now working on a master’s degree at a college in Texas.)

There’s a push now to eliminate cattle branding as inhumane, but that’s nonsense. The brand is momentarily painful but those calves are pretty tough — an hour or two later they’re sucking on their moms’ udders and they’re okay. Branding is nothing compared to the terrible existence of industrially raised chickens and hogs, but that industrial system is dug in pretty deep now, and the farmers and ranchers find themselves stuck in a bad situation. It’s the corporations that are crunching the numbers and setting the methods.

If I can find free-range chicken breasts at the grocery store, I’ll pay the extra money. And if enough consumers decide they don’t want to buy chicken that has been raised inhumanely, the system will change. It’s as simple as that. You can see it already with companies such as McDonald’s that are slowly changing their practices.

We need a major agricultural revolution. I’m fascinated by the grass-finished beef movement, in which ranchers raise livestock on marginal grasslands — terrain that’s not prime agricultural land. Canada’s got lots of that marginal land; Ontario, for example, is full of it. The area where I used to farm there is short on quality topsoil, it’s very rocky and it’s thinly covered. Cows can be finished on that grass instead of being stuffed with barley in a feedlot — it just takes longer. (In the old cowboy days it was common to
raise steers for three years, but today most North American hamburger comes from sixteen-month-old steers. That’s as far as they get before they’re slaughtered.)

People in Morocco have the right idea. I visited the country in early 2010, and I could see that, unlike North Americans, Moroccans utilize
all
their land. Sheep and goats are everywhere. If Canada followed Morocco’s lead, all our grassy ditches would be full of animals (and in Morocco I never once saw a sheep or goat step into traffic). That land would be more productive.

Ironically, it’s the city dwellers who seem to be catching on to the need for an agricultural revolution. In Detroit, for example, people are turning vacant land into urban gardens. There’s also a big movement supporting people in cities who want to keep chickens in their backyard for the eggs. And why the hell shouldn’t they? I think it’s great. Have a goat back there too, for milking. That’s why I love Tucson, Arizona. The Mexican-Americans there all keep chickens in their yards, and the first thing I hear in the morning from my downtown hotel room is cocks crowing. I can’t think of a better way to wake up.

While urbanites are learning to raise chickens in their backyards, ranchers are driving cattle with ATVs and training horses in big indoor arenas. That was never my idea. I always wanted to be out on the hills, in the mountains, on horseback. But there are very few real cowboys left. New Mexico still has a few because they can’t grow wheat or anything else down there; the land won’t permit it. My friends John and Jean Brittenham run cattle on many sections of New Mexican mesas and canyons and don’t even own a tractor or a baler. John does, however, use a rickety grader
to keep the red clay roads open when it rains. Other than that, it’s a horseback deal.

That’s what I love about New Mexico: nature has made sure that all you can do is run livestock — sheep, goats and cattle. And the terrain is such that you can’t herd the animals with ATVs. You’ve got to do it either on horseback or on foot. You might be uncomfortable but at least you’re outside, which sure as hell beats being stuck in some dark arena.

Being outside is a romantic element of the cowboy life, just like the six-gun. You can’t divorce romance from reality in the West, because the whole deal has been romantic right from the beginning, all the way from Manifest Destiny onwards. The romance stretches from gunslingers such as Pat Garrett and Jesse James right up to today.

I was lured to the West by Will James, by Native cowboys in purple satin shirts, by the paintings of Charlie Russell and the cowboy photographs of Jay Dusard, Bank Langmore and William Allard. Allard’s photos of people in the West startled me when I first saw them. Although they were taken in the 1960s, they looked like they were from the 1880s. I thought,
Who are these people?
I had to find out. And a bunch of other people — photographers, songwriters, painters and so on — had to find out too.

You can’t separate romance from the West in the same way that you can’t separate Hollywood from the West. They constantly feed off each other. Hollywood reinvented the West and kept on reinventing it, and then the characters of the West started imitating Hollywood cowboys. It’s life imitating art. That’s what the folklorists didn’t understand
when they tried to keep me out of Elko in 1985. They didn’t want me around because, in their minds, there was a true West and a fake Hollywood West, and they thought I was part of the fabrication. But there is no pure West. You can’t make a credible case for that separation.

In my part of Alberta, for example, the movie industry is huge. A lot of westerns have been filmed in the Longview area, including Clint Eastwood’s
Unforgiven
. Hollywood is a big part of Longview’s economic existence. There are operations out here, such as John Scott’s ranch, where the cowboys and the longhorns are maintained just for the movies. If it wasn’t for the movies, they wouldn’t be working. And when the movie people come to town, they buy their gasoline at the local Fas Gas, their steak at the Longview Steakhouse and their coffee at the Navajo Mug. Hollywood stimulates the local economy in a very direct way. It’s all part of that leisure industry that my dad couldn’t get his head around.