For National Poetry Month, I thought I’d tell a little story about a poem. This piece of verse was recited by a man named Fred Soule at the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camp in Visalia, California on September 2, 1941. The camp was one of several such migrant worker camps in California, established by the government to house refugees from the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression who went west looking for farm work. The poem was recorded on an acetate disc by Charles “Lafe” Todd and Robert Sonkin, two fieldworkers collecting folksongs for the Library of Congress. Todd had become fascinated with the migrant camps in the late 1930s after reading John Steinbeck’s pamphlet of essays Their Blood is Strong, and had arranged folksong expeditions for himself and Sonkin in 1940 and 1941. This was their last day of recording, and this poem was the very last of over 400 audio titles they captured for the Library, which are online at this link. The poem’s title, as given by Soule, is “Colorado Morton’s Last Ride.” You can hear the recording at this link.
This engaging poetic yarn is clearly written and delivered in the tradition of cowboy poetry, a strain of American verse that’s undergoing a healthy revival these days, with the help of both cowboys and folklorists. As David Stanley pointed out in his lecture here at the Library and his subsequent article in Folklife Center News, cowboy poetry has existed since the cattle drives of the nineteenth century, when wranglers from diverse backgrounds were thrown together on the trail. The ranks of riders included Spanish-speaking vaqueros, formerly enslaved African Americans, hardy Texas frontiersmen, migrants from Eastern U.S. cities, and people from as far away as Europe. Cowboys traveled together and camped together for months at a time, and saw few others along the way. As a result, anyone with a good store of songs to sing, tunes to play, or poems to recite found it that much easier to get along. As Stanley explained, this resulted in a poetic genre with diverse roots:
Cowboy poetry can thus be described as a hybrid genre, one that borrows widely from traditional roots of folk poetry and song, but also incorporates aspects of popular poetry, music, fiction, historical writing, and, more recently, film and television. It has been influenced by academic poetry, country-western music, the Homeric epics, the plays of Shakespeare, and the Bible.
Our own poem is an excellent example of the genre. In it, Colorado Morton learns that his brother-in-law is slated to be hanged hundreds of miles away for a killing that Morton himself committed. With a local train derailment blocking the rails, he makes a desperate horseback ride to substitute himself for the innocent defendant. The tale has all the hallmarks of a great cowboy poem: its story emphasizes Morton’s loyalty to his friend, his willingness to sacrifice himself for justice, and (of course) his prowess at riding and wrangling, all deeply-held ideals of the cowboy community. It’s also grounded in the details of cowboy language, in which “the best horse-wrangler of the Circle-Bar” is forced to endure “pitch and sidewind, and buck, and rear” on a beast whose daddy was “a stud-horse in the teams of Hell.” After a period of hair-raising suspense, it ends with dry humor, another frequent feature of cowboy verse.
More than all this, the poem directly expresses opinions on cowboy matters with a knowledgeable flair:
His bones stood out all over his nibs That horse wan’t nothing but hocks and ribs But I know horses, and I’ll tell you this: A thin devil’s worse than a fat devil is.
Given this wealth of authentic cowboy detail, it might surprise you that “Colorado Morton’s Ride” (as it is officially known) is the work of Leonard Bacon; Steve Green of the Western Folklife Center tipped me off to its publication in Bacon’s book of original poems, Guinea-Fowl and other Poultry. Bacon is a surprising author for this poem because he is primarily known as an academic poet, and lived most of his life in Rhode Island. He published well-received translations of El Cid and The Song of Roland, and his books of original poetry have such exalted titles as The Legend of Quincibald and PhDs: Male and Female Created He Them. He even published an original epic called Ulug Beg under the pseudonym “Autolycus,” which he dedicated to Rudyard Kipling. In 1941, the same year in which Fred Soule recited his poem for Todd and Sonkin, Bacon won the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection Sunderland Capture. A Yale graduate and Berkeley professor whose roots were in upstate New York and in Rhode Island, he didn’t seem the sort to know much about Western riding and wrangling.
This puzzle got me looking deeper into Bacon’s life, and several clues to the source of his authentic cowboy details turned up right away. In the introduction to Guinea Fowl and other Poultry, Bacon explains:
The two cowboy ballads in this volume are the joint effort of Mr. Rivers Browne and myself. The plots and the local color are his contribution. The working up and the versification are, with the exception of a line or two, my part of the work.
I also learned the poem originally appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature, May 16, 1925, again credited to “Rivers Browne and Leonard Bacon.” A search of census records turned up one person named Rivers Browne in 1920, 1930, and 1940, living in Sweet Grass County, Montana. Moreover, the location of a collaborator in Montana made sense given the text of the poem. Although many of the poem’s geographical details seem fanciful, the basics are: Morton rides from an unspecified town somewhere near a “Circle-Bar” ranch in the United States; he winds up in Medicine Hat, Alberta; and the distance is specified to be a little over 200 miles. These details pointed me to a historical Circle-Bar ranch, which lies near Utica, Montana. The nearby railroad town could have been Great Falls, which is just over 200 trail miles from Medicine Hat, or it could have been Utica, which is about 250.
As unlikely as it seemed, then, at this point in my research it was looking likely that Bacon wrote “Colorado Morton’s Ride” in collaboration with a Montana cowboy who knew real details of the landscape, but was not above making up other details for the sake of a good yarn.
Looking for a connection between Leonard Bacon and Montana turned up another reference, in the biographical paragraph on Bacon contained in the book The Pulitzer Prize Archive Vol. 11:
[Bacon] graduated in 1909 and enrolled at Yale for graduate work in the same year. At that time the poet published his first volume of verses called The Scrannel Pipe. After suffering a nervous breakdown Bacon gave up studies and went to work on a cattle ranch in Montana where he stayed until the spring of 1910.
This sent me to the stacks here in the Jefferson Building, to see if I could turn up anything more about his time in Montana in his volumes of verse. Luckily, I discovered that his volume Semi-Centennial, although classified and shelved with his poetry collections, is in fact an autobiography. There’s no index, but I knew the year, so it was easy to turn up the references: on pages 85-90, he describes his time in Montana with vivid attention to detail:
Harry at the cabin door would squint at the somber clouds and say: “It’s chinooking.” In another hour the thermometer would have risen from below zero to nearly fifty, and the snow by sundown would be whipped off like a table-cloth. Blue pools lay in every depression of the plain. And the white jackrabbits, unaware that they were now the most conspicuous objects in the landscape, crouched quiet till you came within a yard of them–a hateful betrayal on the part of the Ancient Mother.
Bacon even tells us where the nearest train station was (Big Timber), and the names of his employers, Harry and Jack Hart, which identifies the ranch as the Eureka Ranch, later the Dot S Dot. These details should be pleasing to library fans, because the Hart family’s papers, including records of the ranch and photos of the employees, are being preserved by archivists at the Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections of the Montana State University Library; there’s a finding aid online here. They were even kind enough to let me use some of the images in this post!
Most importantly, Bacon describes his coauthor, Rivers S. Browne, in some detail:
A man of high breeding and instinctive delicacy, he had been a cowboy for twenty years, and had carried horsemanship to a point where, not merely an art, it was a philosophy. Every bone in his body had been broken by some sixty kicks and other catastrophes. […] In his youth in the early nineties Browne had been horse-wrangler to many cavallardas coming up from Mexico with the longhorns purchased on the border. The duties of the son of an English general had consisted of breaking wild horses caught on the long march–so that the vaqueros might ride them. With such a job there was no middle way. Either one died or one became an artist.
With such a wrangler on the team, it’s no wonder the details of horsemanship seem so accurate in the poem.
The specifics of the collaboration between Browne and Bacon remain a little fuzzy. In the autobiography, Bacon merely says that “years later” they worked together on “a couple of Western ballads.” Browne was an interesting character, though; the census records say he was born in India, and Bacon remarked offhand that he was the son of an English general. Bacon also mentioned that Browne maintained land in Canada, and border-crossing records confirm that he traveled between Canada and Montana with some frequency. Whether Bacon ever returned to Montana, whether Browne went to visit him in California (where Bacon lived when the poem was published), or whether they managed their collaboration by mail, remains a mystery to me. It’s possible the answer lies among Bacon’s papers, which are preserved at the University of Rhode Island’s library.
There’s one more mystery surrounding our audio version of the poem, “Colorado Morton’s Last Ride”: just who was the reciter, Fred Soule? Although he’s obviously a talented and expressive speaker with a prodigious memory, this is the only recording Todd and Sonkin made of him, and they wrote down nothing about him in their correspondence or notes. Searching the Library of Congress website for the name Soule turned up an interesting document that provided the crucial clue: a 1935 letter sent by Roy Stryker, head of the Farm Security Administration’s Historical Section, arranging for Dorothea Lange’s photographic expedition, on which she shot, among many others, her iconic image popularly known as “Migrant Mother.” The recipient of the letter was a government official on the other end of Lange’s trip, the regional Information officer of the FSA for Northern California, Frederick P. Soule. According to Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott, Soule and his staff had also worked with John Steinbeck, helping him with information about the FSA and affording him access to the camps, where he had written the newspaper essays which had first caught Charles Todd’s imagination, as well as his great novel The Grapes of Wrath.
So that’s my story. It’s about a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet and a Montana cowboy, unlikely buddies who worked a ranch together in 1910 and wrote verse together in the 1920s. But it’s also about some Library of Congress folklorists and an unsung government official, working behind the scenes at the tail end of the Great Depression, striving to preserve and present folk culture and foster great American writing. That’s the kind of story we love at the Library of Congress!
If you want to read the poem, visit this link!
Note: I’d like to acknowledge some help in the research on this poem from Steve Green of the Western Folklife Center, Stephanie Hall and Todd Harvey of AFC, and Kim Allen Scott and Heather Hultman of the Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections of the Montana State University Library. Despite Colorado Morton’s epitaph, sometimes you travel farther with help than you do alone!
Comments (4)
What a terrific research epic — the Library equivalent of Colorado Morton’s ride! And listening to the recording was an awesome way to start my Friday.
Although I have never been an aficionado of cowboy poems or songs, I occasionally indulge, and find that they, and this one in particular, remind me in a pleasant way of the poems of one writer of the American West, if we can extend that term to include the Klondike. I refer to the works of Robert W. Service, whom I have always enjoyed.
His work, like this poem, does not fit the category of “folk” poetry, in that the work represents the published efforts of an educated man, and work for which he received acclaim during his own life. That of course did not save him from literary critique, and his work was largely dismissed by literary critiques of his day however popular it was. It certainly mimicked what we might call folk poetry and that no doubt informed the literary views of his time.
Like this example, I am certain a few people have believed Service’s poems to be from oral tradition. They remained popular and they have been adapted by modern folk revivalists for performance. Perhaps the most famous modern redactions of Service’s writing have been the recitation of The Cremation of Sam McGee by Johnny Cash and the partial performance of the same poem in an episode of the TV series, Northern Exposure.
Thank you for sharing this information which fills a lacuna in my knowledge of the topic.
A wonderful piece of wrting and research. I loved Bacon’s description of Browne’s horsemanship as both an art and a necessity. Great history. Thanks for sharing this.
While researching my great grandfather Rivers Swinton Browne, I was directed to this publication. I am grateful for this article and am puzzled by some of the information.