The Podcast Spreading the Love of Cowboy Culture

In the first two decades after the Civil War, more than 10 million cattle were driven north from Texas to railheads in Kansas, where they could be shipped to larger markets in the east. Fighting boredom on the trail, cowboys would often improvise poems and songs. They’d sing on horseback and around the campfire, collectively writing verse, adding a new line or amending an old one, usually in the form of an English ballad. Thus cowboy poetry was born.

While the cattle-drive era has long since passed, the poetry hasn’t stopped. In the early 1980s, of folkloristshaving stumbled upon this underground genre, sought out cowboy poets from all over the west. In 1985, the Western Folklife Center hosted the results at the inaugural Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. This year, the center hosted its 33rd gathering, a weeklong event that now annually attracts, a refreshingly diplomatic effort to connect today’s vibrant cowboy culture with a world only vaguely aware of its existence.