WHEN JUSTIN REICHERT was 18, he caught a ride with a friend from his family’s farm in McPherson, Kansas, to Elko, Nevada, 1,200 miles away. It was 1992, the seventh year of Elko’s National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a series of readings and musical performances created to celebrate all the Westerners whose lives revolve around raising cattle. Reichert had never been to the event, which its fans call, simply, “the gathering,” but he’d heard a lot about it. The son of a horse trader, Reichert competed in rodeos — he could, he said, “ride anything with hair” — but he wanted out of Kansas. He wanted to live and work as a cowboy out West.
Reichert arrived in Elko, a cow town in the sagebrush flats at the foot of the snow-capped Ruby Mountains, with $10 and a book of his own “shitty poetry” to read at the gathering’s open mic events. “It was electric,” he
