Hays and Kiskaddon

Reflections by Mee and Me

Hays and Kiskaddon

Poets Laureate

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

     How about . . .

“It’s likely that you can remember

                                             A corral at the foot of a hill

Some mornin’ along in December

                                            When the air was so cold and so still.

                                            When the frost lay as light as a feather

                                            And the stars had jest blinked out and gone.

Remember the creak of the leather

                                            As you saddled your hoss in the dawn.”

     Or,

                                           “Early in th’ morning when th’ ground is froze

                                            An ’th’ water runs from th’ end of your nose,

                                            You saddle a horse that’s full of grain,

                                            You sure better watch th’ crazy ol’ thing.

                                            He’s all swelled up an’ your saddle won’t fit

                                            Til you lengthen your cinches a little bit.

                                            He’ll grunt an’ groan but he won’t untrack,

                                            An’ there’s a hell of a hump there in his back.”
.

     Were these scripts written by writers who envisioned being a cowboy, or were they men who had actually reached to pull a bit of mane before they took a big breath and stepped up into those stirrups?

     The craft

     The modern Cowboy Poetry genre has the last quarter of the 20^th Century written all over it.  I know exactly when my interest in the art form took root.   It was when a nagging insistence in my head began to elevate thoughts of home and heritage.   

     The commercial world of the poetry tends to romanticize the work on the basis that it is an art form which grew out of a tradition of extemporaneous composition.  It evolved from cattle drives, the big screen, and western mystique. 

     I don’t agree.  It is a deep thought process into a very esoteric world.

     Kiskaddon

     Bruce Kiskaddon became known to the world as one of America’s premier cowboy poets a generation ago.  His work remains a mainstay at the big poetry venues. 

     In 1991, my wife gave me the book Rhymes of the Ranges and, in a twenty minute read, I had rediscovered smells and sights that gave me goosebumps.  I had forgotten the smell of the aerosol spray my Grandpa’ carried in a homemade leather boot on his saddle to spray on the navels of baby calves to protect against screw worms so long ago.  He’d rope those calves without a miss and get down and commiserate with those protective horned Hereford cows as he doctored their babies.  I wonder now if his willingness to put up with me at that age was the job he then gave me . . . to hold that cow up and away from him while he sprayed her calf!

     The rhyming verse from Kiskaddon reflected the points of ranch life that could not come from anything but living it.  He knew what he meant when he wrote, “I liked the way we used to do, when cattle was plenty and folks was few.”

     Hays

     Dick Hays was born in Kansas but was in New Mexico by 1919. He was in Grant County before he was old enough to be out of high school.  In fact, his life is interwoven into my family when it was apparent to my paternal grandmother that Dick, for his own good, needed to finish school.  She and Grandpa’ took him in.

     Where Kiskaddon reminded me of the inner workings of heritage at play in my life, Dick Hays was the flesh and blood model that led me to view Kiskaddon in a different light.  Dick doesn’t have national recognition, but his life provides a legible road map of what makes their work so similar.  

     The rhyming verse from Hays reflected ranch life that could not come from anything but living that life.  He knew exactly what he meant when he wrote, “Now people seem to sit an’ dream that a cowboy’s life is play.  They cuss their luck ‘cause they are stuck in a city far away.”

     Their lives

     Kiskaddon and Hays were cowboys.  They were born, as Dick would describe, without a father who could buy them a horse trailer.  As a result, their accumulated wealth during their active cowboying days would fit “in a Bull Durham tobacco sack in (their) jacket (jumper) pocket.” 

     They eventually left the life that defined their existence to endure jobs that would “pay four or five times more in eight hours, than cowboying paid in sixteen.”  It sounded good to both of them at the time, but neither would ever be whole again.   

     Kiskaddon would cowboy a swath across various ranches, into Australia, and back to the Hollywood to ride horses in the movies.  One night, while he was drinking with some friends, a bottle of whiskey was ordered from a bell hop.  When the bell hop arrived and announced the price, Kiskaddon asked how much of the price the tip was.  When he learned, he announced, “That sounds like a job for me!”

     He went to work at the Mayflower Hotel in old Las Angeles.  For years, he ran the elevator in his little “monkey suit”.  It was there that Kiskaddon defined his identity in poetry.  He wrote for the rest of his life.  He garnered a cult following among the readers of a monthly livestock magazine.

     Hays would follow a similar path.  He was a full time cowboy by age 10.  He became a sensational cowboy, a war hero, a gifted saddle maker, a prolific well driller, and a cowboy poet long before it was even defined.  His path into poetry was born against the warmth a wood stove in a railroad switch shack in the copper mines of southern New Mexico.  It was there that he would chronicle his life through his characters in the unexpected dimension of poetry.

     Separating myth

     I have read the notion that Cowboy Poetry is an outgrowth of the attempt to entertain historical events with tall tales.  There is also discussion in the literature about the presence of illiteracy within the underpinnings of the craft.  I find insult in both assertions.

     I didn’t know Bruce Kiskaddon, but I knew Dick Hays.  Although he might disagree as a matter of humility and fear of disclosure of fact, Dick suffered neither from illiteracy nor from any shortfall of wit.  He was one of the most brilliant and capable men I ever knew.  Anything Dick pursued, he did with remarkable skill.

     Kiskaddon proved the point, similarly.  There is literature reference about the idea that poems were employed to aid in memory.  Perhaps that could be true in free verse, but not in rhyming verse. 

     The accounts of Kiskaddon sitting there by his open elevator door on his haunches, waiting for the next rider, and writing poetry with that little stub of a pencil on the little tablet he kept stuffed pocket was an exercise in memory alright.  It was competition he had with himself to set forth that memory in the most honest terms. 

     He found delight within his mind of outdoing himself in descriptions of humor . . . and he prompted outright emotion similarly when he discovered passages through written verse that ushered forth unexpected insight into ranch life. 

    “It was Christmas then fer the rich and pore, and every ranch was an open door.  The waddy that came on a company hoss was treated the same as the owner and boss,” he wrote.  Such phrasing was profound.  It shouted to the world of the matter of equality that only life spent horseback could create.

     Hays countered back.  From his chair there by the heater in the shack at the crusher switches, he remembered the arrival of the monsoons, “When the thunderheads loom behind the hill, and it sultry hot and deathly still, no rustling leaves for the breeze has laid, and the stock is all brushed up in the midday shade” . . . only someone who lived without that monsoonal flow arriving understands what Dick wrote.

     Mee and me

     Tom Mee’s dad owned the Los Angeles Cattle Commission during the years Kiskaddon wrote.  Tom knew Bruce Kiskaddon.  One night Tom and I were talking and I lamented how those years must have been torment for Bruce.  Tom disagreed heartily. 

     “Hells bells,” he said.  “Warm weather, three squares a day, and the camaraderie he shared with the Commission cowboys . . . what else could an old cowboy want?”

     Maybe Tom was right.  What we can discern from the lives of these men, though, was that very specific circumstances prompted their poetry.  They responded with self effacing honesty that epitomizes their cowboy legacy.  Their work is a tribute to a way of life that could only be understood by full exposure to the subjects of which they wrote.

     One is discovered.  The other ought to be.  Both are . . . national treasures.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico.  “The older I get the more I have come to admire Dick Hays.  American needs to discover him just as it did Bruce Kiskaddon.”

THE WESTERNER sez:

Looks like Wilmeth and I share an admiration of Kiskaddon's poetry.  Below is a short bio and a list of his books available at Amazon.com, a free download from USU, and a new video of the Cowboy West.  Katherine Fields illustrated each of his poems in the Western Livestock Journal.  I couldn't find a bio of her online, but Hal Cannon writes:

"Katherine Field was born about 1899 near Magdalena, New Mexico. As a young girl, she contracted polio which left her crippled. Living on a large New Mexico ranch as a crippled child mush have been hard, though I've heard it said that ranch kids learn to walk late because riding always comes first. This was absolutely true for Katherine, and she was always at home on horseback. Her family remembers that she always had a great love and admiration for horses. As she grew older, her artistic talents grew, and she started drawing scenes from the life around her. Frank King, who wrote a popular gossip column for Western Livestock, was impressed with her talents and encouraged her to send her work to the magazine."

Cannon goes on to say that though Kiskaddon and Field never met, "the both understood the western land and ranch life." A mutual respect grew between them that lasted until they both died less than one year apart. She was paid $10 dollars for each illustration and Cannon surmises Kiskaddon received about the same.

From TomFolio.com America’s premier cowboy poet and storyteller. Bruce Harvey Kiskaddon (1878 - 1950), often called the cowboy poets cowboy poet, was born in Foxburg Pennsylvania. The family moved to southwest Missouri sometime before he was ten years old, and then moved again in the early 1890s to Trinidad in southeastern Colorado. He never completed grammar school, but it was here as teenager that he gained his education in wrangling, roping, and other ranch work before starting his cowboy career in 1898 as a wrangler in Southeastern Colorado's Picket Wire Canyonlands. He later worked in New Mexico and then served with the cavalry in the First World War in France. After the war, he worked as a buckaroo or "jackaroo" in Australia before returning to Arizona in 1915 to work at George "Tap" Duncan’s million acres Diamond Bar Ranch in Mohave County. Duncan, previously a notorious gunfighter and the "last two-gun man in Mojave County", bought the ranch in 1904 to escape from his previous "profession." By the time Kiskaddon arrived, Duncan had become a widely known and respected cattleman. It was here that he began to write poetry with Duncan's encouragement. As he later wrote, "During the summer of 1922 I was working for G. T. (Tap) Duncan in northwestern Arizona. Sometimes I would parody songs to suit local happenings or write verses and different jingles about what took place on the work. Duncan insisted that I try writing some Western Verse. `Just what really happens,' he said". His Rhymes of the Ranges published in 1924 is about his life at the Diamond Bar Ranch. In 1926, Kiskaddon left the ranch with several friends to seek his fortune in Hollywood where his first job was driving a chariot in the original silent version of Ben Hur. After playing some other bit parts in movies, he found a better livelihood as a bellhop. He remained in Los Angeles for the rest of his life working as a bellhop and writing poetry about his experiences as a cowboy for Western Livestock Journal, a monthly magazine aimed at western ranchers. His first book of poetry, Just As Is, was published in 1928. This was followed by three other volumes, Western poems published by 1935, and Rhymes of the Ranges and Other Poems issued in 1947 and included additional poems not in the 1928 volume. The The Los Angles Union Stockyards began featuring his poems on its calendars in 1939 and continued doing so through 1959. Less known are Kiskaddon's prose sketches and short stories of cowboy life published in the Western Livestock Journalbetween 1932 and 1939. Almost lost, they have been collected and edited by Bill Siems inShorty's Yarns: Western Stories and Poems of Bruce Kiskaddon.

Rhymes of the Ranges: POD: The Cowboy Poetry of Bruce Kiskaddon [Paperback]
Rhymes of the Ranges: A New Collection of the Poems of Bruce Kiskaddon [Hardcover]
Shorty's Yarns: Western Stories and Poems of Bruce Kiskaddon [Paperback]
Shorty's Yarns: Western Stories and Poems of Bruce Kiskaddon A free download in pdf format from Utah State University

Now watch this video:  The Cowboy and the Canadian West by Stephen J. Thorne



http://youtu.be/aATF0Qacsa0