Have you ever heard of Henry Herbert Knibbs? Or cowboy poetry? Or a chuckwagon cook? I hadn’t either. At least not until I met John and Randy, who are cowboys. Actual cowboys, as in leather chaps, frisky horses, and open spaces.  

The marvelous thing about poetry is that it bursts out of every seam of human experience. Look to the Wild West. Their poetic tradition—heart-wrenching, hilarious, and humble—captures a reality of life we city-dwellers could never begin to understand on our own. My short time working alongside John and Randy revealed how cowboy poetry turns a hard life into one that is humorous and beautiful through moments of rest and reflection. John and Randy’s lives, their work, and the poems they shared, melded into one simple story that I must unfold.  

John dug. I watched him dig into the ground and laugh as he formed earthy nests around the fire pit. He placed the dutch ovens, surrounded by smoking coals, into the misshapen holes. There, in nature’s oven, he cooked potatoes, biscuits, and peach cobbler. The riders would arrive at noon for lunch and I was there to help John with the meal. While I pummeled and breaded the chicken, he set up the grills, tended the coals, made coffee cowboy-style (a handful of Folgers thrown into a cast iron kettle over the fire), and cooked chicken-fried steak. I chuckled happily throughout the day as John told joke after joke. He met me through his tales—eighty years of them! The riders came, ate, and went, and our day ended. We, sunburnt and spent, packed up the tent, drowned the coals, and with the chuckwagon crammed in the back of his golden minivan slipped into the valley quite ready for supper. 

That evening, John would recite cowboy poetry. One poem I remember was Henry Herbert Knibbs’ “Boomer Johnson.” The poem recounts an ex-outlaw turned chuckwagon cook, who, thankfully, bore little resemblance to John. Old Boomer had:

…done his share of killin’

and his draw was gettin’ slow,

So he quits a-punchin’ cattle 

and he takes to punchin’ dough.

In the rolling lilt and loose rhymes, Knibbs asks what happens to the ramblin’ man once he is past his prime. Knibbs uses the ridiculous as a way to answer. Boomer can’t leave behind his wild ways, or help but break sanitary rules as he would “stir frijoles/ with the barrel of his Colt.” Knibbs continues:

He built his doughnuts solid,

and it sure would curl your hair

To see him plug a doughnut 

as he tossed it in the air.

He bored the holes plum center 

every time his pistol spoke,

Till the can was full of doughnuts

and the shack was full of smoke.

One can’t help but chuckle at the unanticipated violence of a chuckwagon cook. Knibbs continues with dark humor and uses playful images of death throughout the poem, like when Boomer “took to markin’ tombstones/ on the covers of his pies” or when the wranglers “a-settin’ at that table/ [were] like ridin’ in a hearse.” The cowboys are faced with a cook who would rather kill them, than feed them. Here, the unexpected replaces the expected, and the unknown the known. Knibbs uses these extreme comedic turns to reflect the unexpected nature of a cowboy’s work. A cowboy never knows what danger might meet him on the frontier. To make this reality less terrifying, Knibbs tames the danger through the absurd. The poem reveals and humorizes the confounding unpredictability of cowboy life, urging one towards a life of laughter instead of fear.

Randy, tall, slightly bent, with a thick white mustache and stiff blue jeans, spent his days breaking the ranch’s colts. I sat on the back of a trailer in the rain, watching him familiarize the young mares to human touch. They were wary, wild, and skittish, running this way and that. Like John, Randy worked hard and wove poetry into his life. He spent his evenings reciting poems and singing ballads for the group. He ended with Knibbs’ poem “Where the Ponies Come to Drink,” and it forms a different picture of the cowboy experience than “Boomer Johnson.” The listener follows the speaker into a hidden wood to spy upon wild horses’ refuge. Knibbs begins:

Up in Northern Arizona

there’s a Ranger-trail that passes

Through a mesa, like a faëry lake

with pines upon its brink,

And across the trail a stream runs

all but hidden in the grasses,

Till it finds an emerald hollow

where the ponies come to drink.

Through the images of a stream “hidden in the grasses” and an “emerald hollow,” Knibbs brings his listener out of the artificial world of the “Ranger-trail” and into the wild, magical natural world. The horses’ drinking hole is a place set apart, a place where freedom and beauty reside. The speaker watches the horses’ “Wind-blown manes, and forelocks dancing,/ –Blacks and sorrels, bays and pintos,/ wild as eagles, eyes agleam” and delights in their “orderly disorder” as they playfully and haphazardly charge through the valley. The poem takes a personal tone as the listener learns that the speaker, an old cowboy, has come to the hollow because he released his own cow-horse of eighteen years to run with these horses. With a pang of wistful reminiscence, the cowboy watches his horse “acting proud, and with good reason;/ Though he’s starched a little forward/ he can fan it with the best.” Briefly, a moment of recognition flashes between the cowman and his horse: 

Then he eyed me some reproachful,

as if making up his mind:

Seemed to say, “Well, if I have to – 

but you know I’m living single…”

So I laughed.

In just a minute he was pretty hard to find.

This remembrance of past duties ties the two of them together, but in the hidden hollow, work is 

 put aside. Their eighteen years were well spent, but not the end. Exalted here is the freedom and fulfillment of rest. Knibbs concludes the poem with the speaker musing:

Some folks wouldn’t understand it, – 

writing lines about a pony, – 

For a cow-horse is a cow-horse, –

nothing else, most people think, –

But for eighteen years your partner,

wise and faithful, such a crony

Seems worth watching for, a spell,

down where the ponies come to drink.

The cowboy’s career and companionship with his horse ends in this moment of rest and reflection. His memories commemorate the virtues of his faithful steed, but from the hidden hollow springs a new gratitude that rejoices in the horse’s final freedom. In this way, Knibbs praises a value found beyond work, a value of the still simplicity of rest. 

It is from this rest that cowboy poetry flows. Only after a day under the sun, drenched in sweat and smeared pell-mell with grime, can the cowboy step back and become a poet. In moments of rest, he looks at what he has done and rescues the meaning living among those recollections. This process sanctifies rest and recollection for cowboys and city-slickers alike. To write poetry, to step back and make art, is a declaration that the work and trials of life are not for the sake of themselves, but for bringing about something greater. What was then hard is newly seen beautiful in contemplation.

Cowboy poetry, from my experience, takes on two different forms. It dances amongst absurdities to make laughter a weapon against the harsh realities of life. It also dwells sweetly in the spare moments of busy days, recalling adventures and resurrecting meaning to renew the spirit. Cowboy poetry impresses upon us that the things we encounter in life are “worth watching for a spell,” whether a horse, an abbey, or a drop of dew. The cowboy poet clings to a world full of infinite blessings and finds the splendor in his saddle, the sunset, or the inescapable stars. Though so different from the poets taught and studied at schools, the cowboy poet crafts his art faithfully and beautifully. I think of John and Randy. These are two humble men who work hard and write poetry, persistently revealing and wondering at the joys of their way of life. I left the ranch with two mementos from them. John gave me a collected edition of Henry Herbert Knibbs’ poetry. Randy gave me his CD of classic cowboy poetry recordings, and signed it with a phrase that so encourages my pursuit and growing love of western verse: Press On. 

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Alydia Ullman is a junior studying English from Alexandria, Virginia. Besides working at dude ranches, she enjoys baking scones, hanging with siblings, and plotting against her nemesis Hamilton, her family’s cat.