Category Archives: People

Buckaroo Style

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If Winnemucca isn’t prime Buckaroo habitat, it’s pretty darn close — especially during Ranch Hand Rodeo. Town fills up with big trucks, big hats, big mustaches, and big fun on the first weekend in March.

Part of the fun is the shopping. Western trade items line the upstairs balconies and front aisle of the cavernous Winnemucca Events Center. Outside, it’s still Nevada winter — gray skies, hard-used snow, and brown dirt — but inside it’s another story.

Check out this booth selling wild rags. (For the uninitiated, these are the generous, billowy, silky scarfs worn by Buckaroos and Buckarettes — and you thought they just wore plain old blue bandanas?!?)  If you lived in a landscape of monotones all winter, by early March, you’d be after color — any color. And patterns? Wild is where it’s at. Don’t worry if the colors clash. This is no time to be subtle.

For you Fashionistas, here’s how you put the style together. This upstart Buckaroo may not have won the kid’s roping contest this year but he sure looked good swinging a loop in his square-toed fancy-stitched orangey-colored boots, plaid sweater, and polka dot wild rag. And looking good is a lot of what being a Buckaroo is about. Although, if your team can win the Calcutta while you’re at it, so much the better.

Passing the Bota

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Have you ever tried drinking out of a bota bag? The Basques make it look easy, but believe me, it’s harder than it looks. My brother and I had botas when we were kids. They weren’t the “real” ones made of goat skin sealed with pitch but a modern version with a plastic liner. We mostly used them to carry water on hikes but sometimes Mom would let us fill them up with grape juice and practice drinking Basque style. There were rules, though. We had to wear our worn out clothes and take the botas outside — yeah, we got grape juice stains everywhere.

This weathered painting on the side of the famous (or infamous) Winnemucca Hotel shows the basic technique for drinking from a bota. At arm’s length, you squeeze wine from the bag into your mouth without spilling. With wine, there probably comes a point where the longer you practice, the harder it gets!

Once you master drinking from a bota, you can attend any traditional Basque affair with confidence. In case you haven’t experienced one firsthand, Basques really know how to party. There’ll be eating, drinking, and dancing with gusto. And everyone is super friendly. It might be helpful to know a few Basque phrases, like Zer moduz? (How are you?), or Zatoa pasatzen? (Can I have a pull off your bota bag?) With practice and luck, you’ll fit right in. And if someone tells you, Nire amumak zuk baino mila aldiz hobeto dantzatzen du, (My grandma could dance you under the table,) don’t take it as an insult. Considering the Basque grandmas I know, it would just be a statement of fact.

Night Horse

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One of the entertainers we’ve invited to Shooting the West this year is Brenn Hill, a singer/songwriter out of Hooper, Utah. My favorite song he sings is “Night Horse”, written by fellow cowboy Chuck Pyle. The song describes what can happen when cattle stampede in the dark. The cowboys mount up in a hurry and run with the herd until the cattle tire. Then, if they’re lucky, they can turn the herd back toward home.

But finding home can be a tricky proposition when you’re too far away to see the campfire and all around you it’s black as cats. So the chorus of the song tells the cowboys …

Turn it over to your night horse

Let him bring you back on home to the fire.

Now your night horse probably isn’t the flashiest horse in the remuda, but it’s the one with a sixth sense about where he is, and where he’s supposed to be. As Chuck Pyle says about one such horse …

He must use somethin’ other than his eyes

Whatever birds fly south on

I guess that’s what he counts on

Little Joe could carry me through to sunrise.

I once had a horse I could trust like that. He was black, with a white star on his forehead. Every time I hear the Night Horse song, I think of that old gelding. When I imagine riding through a dark night, miles from home, it’s not my horse’s abilities I question. It’s my own. Could I give the horse his head and lean back in the saddle? There’s always the temptation, as soon as I’m not certain of the direction things are heading, to snatch up those reins again. You know what I mean?

I’ve been working on that. It says on the quarter in my pocket, “In God We Trust.” That takes more practice than I care to admit, but I do realize the value in trusting someone other than oneself — beyond oneself. God makes a good night horse. Chuck Pyle’s song reminds me I’m not alone on the journey. When I trust, the reins lay slack.

(The illustration comes from a rubber stamp I picked up a few years ago. Thanks to “MD,” whoever you are.)

Shopping with the Madame

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Brothels are legal in most rural Nevada counties. The bordellos are fairly discrete, often tucked away on a dead end street. Even in a small town you may not notice the red light district. But I’ve run into the madame at the grocery store a few times — even sporting girls have to eat.

You might wonder how to tell an off-duty madame from any other shapely middle-aged woman. The most obvious clue is if she looks vaguely like her picture in the local yellow pages. No kidding. A few years back the full-page ads under “Brothels” were hard to miss in our phonebook. Of course, in real life, a madame’s face might look a decade older than the picture. In fact, even under generous make-up, her face might look a decade older than the rest of her body. No one ever claimed the world’s oldest profession was easy on a gal.

The next clue might be if she’s dressed to show off her well-proportioned figure in ways that seem a bit racy for a rural town. We’re not talking Las Vegas-over-the-top-glamor. Just boots with a heel a little thinner and higher than most women would wear to go grocery shopping. Or jeans a size tighter than a real cowgirl could tolerate astride a horse. And of course there’s the cleavage.

But the indicator I find the most interesting is how the experienced checkers act around the madame. This is a dead giveaway. The checkers treat a madame with an uncharacteristic formal distance. Their interaction is all business. They don’t joke around with the madame, or chit-chat, or ask her how her day’s been going. None of the usual friendly banter. This change in their manner is enough to alert the next person in line that something is up. And there’s a quality about the interaction that seems timeless, as if this is the way that the working women have been treated in small Western towns since the Gold Rush. Or at least it’s one of the ways they’ve been treated — I’m sure there’s been far worse.

The madame pays for her groceries and heads out the door as the sun sets. Almost time to go to work. I watch her walk across the parking lot, curious about what kind of car she drives. Curious about how a life lived so differently can intertwine with mine and it doesn’t seem so strange — and then it does seem very strange.

I’m relieved when the checker turns to me with a smile, starts unloading my shopping cart and asks how my day’s been. I can stop thinking about the madame and her next shift. But later that night, under a sleepless moon, I wonder if I’m cut out to be a Nevadan. My feminine soul has a tough time making peace with this economic need for sacrificial lambs.

Blessing the Peacemakers

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On a sweltering morning in June, I wandered across the withered grass of the historic Riverview Cemetery on the outskirts of Denver. I was looking for the grave of Captain Silas Soule, a remarkable man who refused to order his men to fire on the unarmed Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek on November 29, 1864. This may seem like a small detail in the tragic history of European American and Native American relations, but Captain Soule’s brave deed keeps haunting me.

Once I found his grave, it was clear I wasn’t alone in wanting to honor one of the many people who tried to turn the tide of genocide away from the Indian families camped along Sand Creek. Among the dozens of military grave markers lining the northeast corner of the cemetery, Soule’s was the only one decorated with plastic flags and Memorial Day juju. The sprinkling of stones left along the top intrigued me. I’ve heard that people bring these offerings from Sand Creek, but since I’ve yet to visit the site of the infamous Massacre, I don’t know if that’s true. I hope it is. The talkative magpies that liven up the cemetery left an iridescent black feather on the ground. I tucked it under one of the little stones and said a prayer as a coal train rumbled beyond the chain link fence.

When popular American culture replays the history of the so-called “Indian Wars,” we rarely hear about the peacemakers like Black Kettle, Lean Bear, William Bent, or Silas Soule. Let’s seek them out. I can’t help thinking their efforts still hold a blessing for us.