DON WELLER
ROWING UP IN PULLMAN, WASHINGTON, DURING WORLD WAR II, WESTERN ARTIST Don Weller lived an idyllic childhood: hot dusty summers riding horses, YMCA camp, fishing Idaho lakes, and cold, snowy winters filled with perilous sledding excursions. Buffalo, Indians, cattle, and cowboys were long gone from the picturesque college town, but that did not thwart the youngster’s relentless quest to learn all about them. Weller and his horse Sandy would roam the rolling hills of the Palouse region around his home in pursuit of cowboys, but to no avail. When he wasn’t searching for them, he was drawing, painting, reading about, and studying them in movies and book illustrations, constantly fueling his imaginative pursuit of the bold, romanticized Western lifestyle.
“My problem when I was a little kid was that I had a horse and I had the fantasy that I was going to be a cowboy, but there weren’t cows around Pullman,” Weller says from the Utah ranch he shares with his wife, Cha Cha. “There were some farms to the south around the Snake River in Idaho — that was cattle country, and you’d get cowboys there. So, there were cowboys around, but not right by where I was. I found out where and when the rodeo team practiced, and I’d ride my horse out to the country and look across the fence to watch them and see what they were doing. It wasn’t long before they were teaching me to rope calves. They weren’t real cowboys, they were students, but they had come from ranches, they knew how to rope calves, and that was as close to cowboys as I could get. That was how I got started roping calves and learned a lot of cowboy behavior.”
He roped calves in high school and competed as a member of his college rodeo club.
“When I was in college on the rodeo team and the other guys would go home to their ranches for Christmas and spring break, I’d go with them and live with their families for a few weeks on the ranch. We’d rope calves every day and ; illustrations for , , , , among others; posters for the Hollywood Bowl, the NFL, and the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics; art for three children’s books; and five stamps for the U.S. Postal Service.
