Because Montana, like Ireland, is considered chic these days, people often ask me if I've ever fished the Blackfoot River running through my native state or if men really do whisper to horses beneath the Big Sky.
The answer is in the affirmative in both cases, although Robert Redford actually used the Madison River - an 83-mile stretch of Blue Ribbon trout fishing in southwestern Montana - for his film, rather than Norman Maclean's Blackfoot, and the cowboys doing the whispering out on the range don't - and never did - use Hollywood dialogue.
But because of the season that's in it, a recent question about the way Montanans celebrate Christmas brought to my mind the lines above, written by a newspaperman of Irish descent named Ed Cooney, who never forgot his cowboy background even after becoming an outstanding editor in the 1930s, and, ultimately, governor of the Treasure State.
The Little Brown Gingerbread Man became especially popular with cowboys after the poem was put to music by my Uncle Rob, my father's composer brother who came from Illinois to visit us in Great Falls one weekend and stayed for the Depression. So whenever people ask me about Christmas in what the Blackfeet call the Land of the Shining Mountains, the strains of that song immediately come to mind. I have always associated Ed Cooney's lines with the range-men who often rode into town to "winter" at the White Elephant Stables on the south-side - and especially with one particular cowboy who chose to stay with us, since he was yet another uncle on my mother's side. Uncle Harry was the genuine article, from his Colt six-gun worn low on his left hip to his red bandanna, out of the Madison Valley by way of Silver Star.
One Christmas, when Uncle Harry heard Uncle Rob play The Little Brown Gingerbread Man, he laughed and told me how he had heard the cowboys singing it while "riding the line". And once Uncle Harry got started on the high-jinx of his fellow vaqueros (which gave birth to the colloquial term, buckaroos ) there was no civilising him. He could go on for hours about the black wind high in the Rockies that could freeze the words out of your mouth, of the time he allegedly traded jackknives with the Landusky Kid (he gave me the suspect knife when I was eight years old, which didn't exactly please my mother because it was as sharp as a dude's accent and shaped like a floozy's leg). His admiration for his campfire pals was as broad as the range they rode.
"They worked the Highline for low pay," he would say, "and there ain't no denyin' they were exploited aplenty by the big drovers and ranchers. They spent most of their hard lives in leather - but I'll tell you somethin': I never met one who didn't love it in spite of some ornery bosses and the lonely nights ridin' herd."
To dramatise the point, Uncle Harry described a Christmas night on the banks of the Missouri River, when he and his pals had gathered around a roaring campfire that went up faster than a haystack gone wild. They had been ordered out on a long cattle search after a storm had turned the fencing into toothpicks, and they seemed to have brought the range right down to the water's edge with them.
Uncle Harry described how they joked and chided one another as they crowded around the fire. Their eyes glistened as they watched the shower of sparks that soared skyward and blended mysteriously with the descending snowflakes. Beyond the rim of firelight, he could make out great cakes of ice scudding on the river's leathery surface, and the tenderfeet among them secretly welcomed the trail boss's announcement that they should head for the mountain cabins soon. An arctic gale would be settling in, he warned, with a cold front crossing the Missouri that no chinook could thaw out until St Patrick's Day.
By the time they had remounted and ridden up into the hills, the big freeze had arrived with a vengeance. Once the snow stopped, the temperature plummeted, and Uncle Harry noted that every cowboy on that December trek knew by heart the story of the legendary blizzard of 1886-7 when one of the coldest winters in memorable history nearly wiped out the cattle industry in Montana.
That was the winter when Great Falls cowboy artist Charlie Russell made his reputation by drawing a sketch of a cadaverous-looking steer on its last legs in a ferocious storm with a hungry coyote waiting nearby to finish him off. Some said Russell drew it on a piece of writing paper about two by four inches in size. He called it Waiting for a Chinook. He had drawn it for his boss, who was reporting to cattle owners in Helena on the terrible effects of the winter, so the ranchman sent the sketch instead of a long, drawn-out account. It was subsequently called The Last of the Five Thousand and launched the young artist into fame.
Between such stories and the fact that their eyelashes were beginning to stick together, they were anxious to reach the end of the trail (besides, Uncle Harry claimed, he was riding a nag as slow as the one I was allowed to ride at the White Elephant Stables - that was Snowball, probably the fattest and laziest mare ever saddled).
"Well, sir," Uncle Harry continued, "we soon saw a welcome series of crude log cabins scattered among pines shrouded with snow. Reminded me of the ghost children of the Sleepin' Giant of the Rockies on the other side of Wolf Creek Canyon where Gary Cooper used to hunt rabbits as a kid."
Since Uncle Harry was in charge of the vittles, he was the one to announce they would have a Christmas barbecue as soon as the remuda (a pack of spare horses) was taken care of for the night, and no doubt a cheer went up from the tenderfeet.
There was no turkey on that Christmas ride, of course, but those cowboys seldom had a chance to enjoy town grub anyway. A feast to them would be venison, sourdough bread (if anyone had a starter), beans, maybe some bottled tomatoes and ranch coffee. A speciality would be some buffalo-calf veal, a favourite on the old Miles City Trail, but it was hard to come by. Dessert was either dried peaches or apples.
Even at my young age, I had seen a few western movies, and I can still remember thinking how different Uncle Harry and his pardners were to the cinematic version. But although he shared the view of most plainsmen that the rhinestone cowpokes portrayed in a John Ford horse opera seemed better off riding barstools than the range, Uncle Harry grudgingly acknowledged that occasionally the movies actually got things right. That was especially true concerning a cowboy's preference for "pretty" when dressing up for a rare Saturday night at the Red Feather Inn.
"After all," he would say, "Russell himself noted that Texas and California started the cowboy tradition before it got north to Montana." Most cowboys he knew had a liking for "California" pants - they called them "shotgun pants" because of the straight legs (prototype of "stovepipe" Levi's). They wore chaparejos (chaps) of course, but they were seldom those wide, ornamental wings you would see at the Savoy cinema during a tworeeler featuring Victor Jory as Chief Falling Rock. Uncle Harry's own chaps were made of leather and usually tightly worn - practical garb to protect the rider's legs in brush country.
A few of the cowboys on the Christmas ride wore "seven-dollar Stetsons," but most of them wore hats with small brims that wouldn't flap down in an annoying way as they rode. Many of them, he admitted, had a taste running to flash in string ties and leatherwear. And it was true that they took pride in being tall in the saddle - especially a western saddle with a high horn, a braided rein and a 45-foot lasso on the right side. Every cowboy wore a six-shooter in a holster, but if a youngster showed too great a curiosity in it, he was quickly reminded that it was no toy. It was something the cowboy had to carry "because of rattlers and bears on the hunt after hibernation".
When it came to gun-play, cowboys were ominously silent. More than external nature was red in tooth and claw.
Occasionally a cowboy down at the White Elephant Stables might make a jocose reference to some scuffle at the Augusta rodeo or maybe "an entanglement at the Mint," but it was clear violence was something these men preferred not to discuss with youngsters around. They took a dim view of the kind of shoot-em-ups you could expect in a Clint Eastwood matinee. The same went for gambling and swearing. They were proficient at both, but never around women and children. The first time I heard a cowboy using foul language was when I was a full-grown reporter covering a small riot at the Cowboy Museum Bar in West Great Falls. The fight was over the merits of a horse called Spokane, the only Montana horse ever to win the Kentucky Derby.
But among all differences between these men and the myths that have surrounded them ever since Ned Buntline and other writers romanticised the adventures of the plainsmen, is one that Hollywood has, to my knowledge, never properly explored. That was their deep sincerity - a sincerity that tolerated no hypocritical social talk and no double dealing. An insult was settled promptly and surely. There was a terrific sense of humour among them, and practical jokes (a favourite was the placing of a lady's intimate garment in one of the bunkboys' saddlebags) were accompanied by faces straighter than any you'd find in a poker game. But heaven help anyone who misinterpreted such levity as an opportunity to patronise a cowboy with a subtle insult.
The real test of his integrity, however, was when a cowboy was in the presence of the clergy. A trail rider down to his Spanish spurs and one of the best shots I ever knew was an Irish priest named Father Joseph Crowley from Cascade (near Great Falls). The cowboys called him "Cowboy Joe," and they could have a good laugh with him when the appropriate time But, Catholic or Protestant or nothing at all, cowboys never failed to rise when Father Crowley or any other priest or minister or rabbi was on a clerical errand in their midst.
Perhaps the best evidence of a certain religious instinct - an instinct all Montanans can immediately recognise - in the cowboys I knew can be found in a letter Charlie Russell wrote to a pioneer Montana preacher named Rev. W. W. Van Orsdel, known affectionately as Brother Van.
The preacher was celebrating an anniversary in the river town of Fort Benton. It was a rough-andtumble hangout when Brother Van first preached there in 1872, only five years after Thomas Francis Meather died tragically (and mysteriously) in the swollen Missouri. The slogan of the place was "Keep Moving, Mister - This is a Tough Town". Recalling their first meeting in 1881, Russell wrote: ".. . and when we all sat down ... under the rays of a bacon grease light, these men who knew little law, and one of them I knew wore notches in his gun, men who had not prayed since they knelt at their mothers' knees, bowed their heads while you ... gave thanks, and the hold-up (highwayman) said `Amen.' ... I was 16 years old then, Brother Van, but have never forgotten your stay at Old Bab's with men whose talk was generally emphasised with fancy profanity; but, while you were with us, although they had to talk slow and careful, there never was a slip. The outlaw at Bab's was a sinner, and none of us were saints, but our hearts were clean at least while you gave thanks ... I have met you many times since ... sometimes in lonely places, but you never were lonesome or alone, for a man with scarred hands and feet stood beside you, and near Him there is no hate, so all you met loved you .."
The cowboys I was lucky to know, I have no doubt, thought like Kid Russell. I sensed that even as a boy riding on a short trail. So when people ask me about Christmas in Montana, I can still see Uncle Rob sitting at the huge Mason and Hamlin grand piano in our living room (it now rests appropriately in the Russell Museum in Great Falls) with Uncle Harry smiling at a particular Christmas song his pals used to sing by the campfire:
"The joybells of Santa ring sweetly today
As he calls in his aeroplane van.
But memory drifts back
To that old wooden shack
And the little brown gingerbread man."