"Cowboys and Poets"
By C.K. Williams
The first book I ever passionately, desperately loved, and which I read devotedly, probably a dozen times, purported to be a true story but I found out later was almost entirely a fabrication, a lie. The book was Lone Cowboy, the autobiography of the Western writer and artist, Will James. Not William James: I realized that when I looked Will up in the encyclopedia in my grammar school library and found only the uninteresting William.
I came across Lone Cowboy when I was eleven or twelve. I was mad about horses then, all I wanted to do was ride and have a horse, one of my own, not a very likely prospect in Newark , New Jersey . So what I did instead was to read obsessively about horses and their riders; everything in our school library, then in the branch library not far from our house, and finally in the big central library downtown. I think I read literally every book I could find that had anything to do with horses, the way ten years or so later I'd read everything I could find on the Holocaust, and after that everything by and about the various poets whose work I'd fallen in love with. But right now it was horses, and especially it was Will James; in some ways I think I almost assumed his biography as my own. As some children have imaginary playmates, I had James, and that book, which recounted a real cowboy's life: being born under a wagon in Montana, the mother dying in childbirth, the cowboy-father so distraught by her death that he became careless of his own life and was killed a few years later by a raging steer. Then being adopted by a French Canadian trapper, Bopy his name was, a diminutive I think of "Beaupre," who was also a cowboy during the warm months when pelts were thin.
I still remember so well. The winter one had two wolf-cubs as pets. The gift of a little horse for a birthday. Saddles. Boots. The slow wanderings down out of Canada. The herds of cattle, wild horses, round-ups and line-camps. Then the trapper, too, disappeared, probably drowned fetching water from a flooded river, and you were on your own, to wander and work as a cowboy all over the West, from Montana even down into Mexico. Then, as vengeance for some sort of affront, you stole a herd of cattle, were caught, and ended up in prison for a time, where you begin to draw and paint seriously, and so started another life as an artist, then as an artist-writer.
The part about prison, the most seemingly unlikely yarn, turns out to be almost the only thing in the book up until then that was true. I found out years later in a study of James I happened on in another library that he had actually been a French-speaking Canadian from Quebec, who'd conceived a passion for cowboy life, and had gone West when he was sixteen—this would be around 1908—and become one. His tragedy begins when he comes to believe that in order to be an authentic Westerner you have to have been born to it, so he makes up that biography, which he swears is the truth no matter what, though it means cutting off all but the most furtive communication with his original family, and though his marriage to a woman he's obviously very attached to falls apart, because he's taken to serious drinking, the reason for which, the author of the study hypothesizes, was that he couldn't bear the split between his real life and his ravaging lies. He would actually drink himself to death not many years later.
By C.K. Williams
The first book I ever passionately, desperately loved, and which I read devotedly, probably a dozen times, purported to be a true story but I found out later was almost entirely a fabrication, a lie. The book was Lone Cowboy, the autobiography of the Western writer and artist, Will James. Not William James: I realized that when I looked Will up in the encyclopedia in my grammar school library and found only the uninteresting William.
I came across Lone Cowboy when I was eleven or twelve. I was mad about horses then, all I wanted to do was ride and have a horse, one of my own, not a very likely prospect in Newark , New Jersey . So what I did instead was to read obsessively about horses and their riders; everything in our school library, then in the branch library not far from our house, and finally in the big central library downtown. I think I read literally every book I could find that had anything to do with horses, the way ten years or so later I'd read everything I could find on the Holocaust, and after that everything by and about the various poets whose work I'd fallen in love with. But right now it was horses, and especially it was Will James; in some ways I think I almost assumed his biography as my own. As some children have imaginary playmates, I had James, and that book, which recounted a real cowboy's life: being born under a wagon in Montana, the mother dying in childbirth, the cowboy-father so distraught by her death that he became careless of his own life and was killed a few years later by a raging steer. Then being adopted by a French Canadian trapper, Bopy his name was, a diminutive I think of "Beaupre," who was also a cowboy during the warm months when pelts were thin.
I still remember so well. The winter one had two wolf-cubs as pets. The gift of a little horse for a birthday. Saddles. Boots. The slow wanderings down out of Canada. The herds of cattle, wild horses, round-ups and line-camps. Then the trapper, too, disappeared, probably drowned fetching water from a flooded river, and you were on your own, to wander and work as a cowboy all over the West, from Montana even down into Mexico. Then, as vengeance for some sort of affront, you stole a herd of cattle, were caught, and ended up in prison for a time, where you begin to draw and paint seriously, and so started another life as an artist, then as an artist-writer.
The part about prison, the most seemingly unlikely yarn, turns out to be almost the only thing in the book up until then that was true. I found out years later in a study of James I happened on in another library that he had actually been a French-speaking Canadian from Quebec, who'd conceived a passion for cowboy life, and had gone West when he was sixteen—this would be around 1908—and become one. His tragedy begins when he comes to believe that in order to be an authentic Westerner you have to have been born to it, so he makes up that biography, which he swears is the truth no matter what, though it means cutting off all but the most furtive communication with his original family, and though his marriage to a woman he's obviously very attached to falls apart, because he's taken to serious drinking, the reason for which, the author of the study hypothesizes, was that he couldn't bear the split between his real life and his ravaging lies. He would actually drink himself to death not many years later.