about the author
As a child, back in the 1930's, my mother used to read cowboy western poetry to me and my siblings the way some mothers today read Dr. Seus. One year for a birthday present, she made me a scrap book with a wooden cover. She had burned on it a picture of a cowboy ....and a stanza of the most widely known and acclaimed cowboy poem of the day...OUT WHERE THE WEST BEGINS. We were small kids at the time, but we knew a stanza or two of that poem. The scrap book was filled by me with my favorite cowboy western poems....and this poem heads the list. (Today, that 68 year old scrap book remains one of my treasured possessions.) There has been a renewed interest in cowboy western poetry in the past two decades or so with the Cowboy Poetry Gatherings...but back in those days, cowboy western poems were a part of everyday life. Arthur Chapman is not widely known today...but in those day he was preeminent. His poem OUT WHERE THE WEST BEGINS was even quoted in Congress. I worked during high school as an usherette in a movie theater. I worked my way through college as a long distance operator; and I graduated from Rocky Mountain College in Billings Montana in 1954. For the next 18 years I worked as a Medical Technologist, chiefly in the field of toxicology. Among other institutions, I worked at Texas Children’s Hospital and Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Los Angeles County Hospital in Los Angeles and Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys, California.
In 1974, I graduated from Drake University Law School. Subsequently, I was employed as a Prosecutor in The Polk County Attorney’s Office, Des Moines, Iowa; and as Director of the Regulatory Division and legal counsel, Iowa Department of Agriculture. For the last eight years, prior to my retirement in 1995, I was an Administrative Law Judge (tax cases). Since retirement, I have been so busy I wonder how in the world I ever managed before retirement. Besides writing poetry and fooling around on the internet, I am finishing a novel, RAPIST. (It sounds pornographic…it’s not. Actually, much of the background for the book is the Farmer’s Holiday Movement during the Depression.) My collection of cowboy western poetry, RUSSELL COUNTRY, was published in 2001 by Hancock House Publishers. RUSSELL COUNTRY GREAT POEMS ABOUT THE OLD WEST!! This collection of poems is an echo of the stories I heard as a granddaughter of early Montana and North Dakota pioneers. These poems contain memories of a time when the great buffalo herds still thundered through the valleys, when Cheyenne and Crow still camped around the Yellowstone River, when mountain men and cowboys, prospectors and miners, rustlers and vigilantes still populated Russell Country. Many of the poems are true accounts of events in the lives of Emma and Caleb Duncan (Grandparents of my late husband, Bill Duncan.)
The poem "Shaney Ridge" tells about how Caleb Duncan and his brother George, through hard work, built up a large ranch in Russell Country; and how George gambled it away. The poem "Empty Cradle Sad" tells about the abduction of Bill's father, when he was an infant, by a Crow Indian.
Bill was raised on the family ranch. As a small boy, he and his brother Pete rode bareback on bucking calves with Bud Linderman, pretending to be rodeo stars. ( Bud Linderman later became a World Champion bareback rider.) Bill was active on the family ranch. In Spring, he helped drive cattle about 50 miles from the home base, to higher leased ranges on the Crow Indian reservation. In fall, he helped drive them back. Many of the poems were based on accounts in Bill's life. The poem "Rustler's Roost" (to be featured on this web site soon) is about a band of rustlers that operated out of the Big Horn Mountains. As a head of a nine-man crew that surveyed the Big Horn Mountains prior to the construction of the Yellowtail Dam, Bill traveled through country that few white people have ever seen. They were there for about 5 months; and lived chiefly off of the abundant game to be found in the Bighorns at that time. In a very remote section of the Big Horns, the crew came across a narrow pass into the canyon. It had a heavy chain attached to a hook in the granite wall. It was stretched across the pass, and across the adjacent river. Past the boulders, there was a pathway to a fertile plateau. It had long been rumored that there was a band of rustlers that operated out of the Big Horn Mountains; and this apparently was the place. The entire area is now under water; and is part of the Yellowtail Dam Reservoir. Bill was fortunate to have seen this bit of Montana history and to have experienced the wild west in a way that few people living today have known. For more information contact: Hancock House Publishers http://www.hancockhouse.com/products/ruscou.htm Your comments are invited: wacobelle@msn.com