Cowboy Up:
Dave Edmiston and
the Mississippi Kid
“If you’re looking for sympathy you can find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.” -Dave
The skinny guy on the tight little pinto started talking to us as if he’d known us all his life. We were leaning on the corral fence of the Moose Head Ranch, waiting for the team-roping practice to begin, the sun just beginning to get in our eyes as it sank toward the Tetons across Jackson Hole, the valley of the Snake River. The steer-calves were being slammed into the chute and the ropers were loping around on their stout, quick horses, shaking out their loops and kicking up dust which looked pink against the lowering sunlight. The young man rode right up to us, making his horse dance. Rodeo-rider fore-and-aft-crunched summer straw cowboy hat, breast-band and double girth on his horse, saddle-horn wrapped with old tire rubber, and a new, stiff rope he was shaking out, probably bought mail-order from King’s in Sheridan. “I can’t rope this evening,” he said, in a sweet drawl. “But I’m keeping on it. This is the first time I been on my horse, and it feels OK.”
“The first time?” my wife said. “It looks like you were born on that horse.”
“Oh, no, sorry, ma’am, I mean the first time I been up since my accident. Cracked my pelvis, the doc said.”
“When?” I said.
“Hmm, I guess it’d be about two weeks ago. I’m a farrier, and this one booger kicked me when I was trying to pry a busted shoe off him. I been working at the Teton Village dude outfit down the valley as a wrangler, day rides for tourists, but back in Mississippi I was pretty good at shoeing.” He swayed in his saddle and his horse swiveled sideways to balance him.
“This is the best horse I ever rode,” he said. “They let me on their good stock because they know I had my own horses in Mississippi, though of course I was a kid at the time.” The rider was maybe 21 and looked sixteen. He nudged the pinto with his left knee and the pony curveted in a tight circle and came back to the fence. “I like coming here for the practice,” he said. “Hope Dave will let me rope next week. I’m OK. I’ll be good to go at the Jackson rodeo, in a little while. ‘Course that’s for tourists, and there idn’t no real money in it. But I got a good thing going, you know, on accounta I know horses. On the Internet, you can punch up people with horses for sale, or someone might even come right up to you and make an offer. Mostly it’s folks bought a horse for practically nothing, don’t know nothing about breedlines, so maybe the horse don’t suit them, they offer it cheap, so I do a check and I figure it’s a solid American Quarterhorse with a little draft in him to make him stouter. Pay four, five hundred bucks, sell it for fifteen hundred, even two thousand if he looks more Quarterhorse than draft.
Or you got your mustangs, out here they ain’t nothing but a nuisance but people back East will pay silly money for them. I’m setting up a website.”
The kid is almost falling off his horse. He’s talking out of his head, and I realize that he’s added a lot of the beer which always accompanies roping practice to his pain medication. The chute gate opens with a clang, and the first steer-calf busts loose. The Mississippi Kid pulls his pinto to one side, and the two ropers gallop out thunderously, building their loops. The header manages to hook one horn, but the heeler comes up empty. On this beginning of the Fourth of July Weekend, the sun still hangs up heavily above the notch to the right of Mount Moran. There will be at least a couple of hours more light for the roping practice, and most of the dudes along the fence have their cameras out.
Dave Edmiston, the ranch manager and head wrangler, is up on a big sorrel gelding, one of his two roping horses. He’s a massive man, hands the size and color of smoked hams, a big square face surrounding a perpetual grin revealing tombstone teeth, and a belly which is a tribute to the beer he inhales whenever he’s not working. He’s 58 and he was born and raised in Jackson Hole.
“Well, I’m actually not a cowboy,” he’ll tell the dudes when he’s tending bar at the main lodge during the cocktail hour. “Never ran cattle. I always raised horses, so I guess that makes me a buckaroo.” The grin again, with a gap between his two front teeth which makes him look a little goofy. He isn’t. He’s open and affable with us dudes, because it’s part of his job and he seems to enjoy it. We expect him to use words like “buckaroo,” so he does. He probably knows, also, that “buckaroo,” a corruption of the Spanish vaquero, literally means “cowboy,” not horseman.
When he was a kid he went to a one-room log schoolhouse, riding in on horseback during fall and spring, brought to school in winter with other ranch kids in a big horse-drawn sleigh (we often pass the building, now National Park property and falling apart, on rides along the eastern side of the valley heading toward the Gros Ventre uplands). But he’s a deeply knowledgeable man with a carefully-calibrated bullshit meter. He established the ranch’s policy of hiring college kids, usually from the deep south, as wranglers, even if they’d had little previous riding experience. Local Wyoming cowboys, born in the saddle, would have their own notions about how to run a dude drive, mostly different from Dave’s.
Besides, he knows all the locals from way back, and they aren’t as polite as Southern boys. What’s left of them show up at the ranch for team-roping practice on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and the beer-fueled ranking is continuous and inventive. Dave likes to get a nice well-spoken sophomore from Ole Miss, Florida State or some Christian college in Alabama and train him his way each year before the dudes arrive. From what the wranglers have told me, it’s a little like Marine Boot Camp on horseback. Maybe what a new hand on an 1870s cattle drive had to endure.
The Mississippi Kid leaves the roping corral, dismounting shakily near his horse-trailer, tying off his pinto, and pausing for a moment with his arm around the horse’s neck, more for support than for affection. His face is drawn and blank, and he reminds me of Montgomery Clift in The Misfits, playing the bronc-rider still dazed from getting bucked off on his head and out of the money, leaning against the wall of a phone booth as he tries to tell his mother he’s all right. The distinction between Hollywood cowboys and real ones can get pretty thin nowadays.
Dave’s waiting in the slots next to the chute with one of his old roping buddies, a man his age but thirty pounds lighter, fitting the lean rawhide Marlboro Man cowboy image better than Dave does. Marlboro shot one of its commercials at Moose Head back when cigarette ads were still allowed on tv. The long-time Marlboro Man model died shortly afterward of lung cancer. Apparently he really was a rodeo rider, and he certainly used the product. They put him on one of Dave’s horses, but his hands didn’t look callused enough for closeups of him handling the reins, so they used Dave’s. Truth in advertising, to a point.
When Dave was a champion team-roper, he was usually a heeler, the harder job. While the header throws his loop around the steer’s horns, the heeler has to bounce his loop on the ground under the running animal, catching its rear feet with a jerk as the steer runs into it. Rodeo rules give full points only if horns and heels are cleanly captured, the rope-ends dallied off with two turns around the saddle-horns, and the riders ending with their horses facing one another and the steer briefly stretched out between them.
There’s a portly man wearing a very expensive Stetson standing next to us, a retired rancher from the Ocala-Tallahassee cattle country of north-central Florida, who explains the rules to us as Dave and his buddy banter, waiting for the next steer. On the money circuit, professional team-ropers can stretch a steer in under ten seconds. Here, things are quite a bit looser. The man in the Stetson, who seems to know Dave pretty well, says that it’s just for fun – some of the younger ropers might hope to compete in the weekly Jackson rodeo, more a tourist show than a serious competition, as the Mississippi Kid said, although winners do get points which can advance them toward the finals in places like Madison Square Garden and Las Vegas. And Dave is lesson-teaching this evening, riding as a header.
His Marlboro-Man friend is up on a big rangy gray mare who fusses a bit in the slot, banging her butt against the back rail and tossing her head. Dave’s horse stands still, but cocked like a pistol. As the fuss continues, Dave says, “No wonder she’s upset – you been bumpin’ that mare for five years and you never once told her you loved her!” Marlboro isn’t amused. He finally gathers his horse, and Dave nods almost imperceptively at the man on the chute-lever.
The steer bolts out straight, and the two riders are right on him, loops fully open and thrown even before the steer reaches the end of the corral. Dave catches both horns and dallies, stopping his big sorrel flat-footed, but Marlboro only gets one heel. Still, the horses face each other and the steer is briefly stretched. Best ride of the evening so far, and there’s a smatter of applause. The riders loosen their ropes and let the animal trot down to join the other steer-calves at the catch-gate at the far end of the corral.
They wear rubber wrapping over their horns, protective collars, and plastic armor around their legs, and the roping doesn’t seem to hurt them. But when they are brought back to the chute, they are banged in by men using electric prods until they line up in an orderly way, ready for the next go-round. These are valuable animals: a savvy half-grown steer, veteran of a number of small-scale rodeos and practice events like this one, can command rather large change if he’s selected for the Big Leagues of rodeo. So the steers are competing for the money just like the ropers, except they don’t know it. They roll their eyes and bawl when they are shocked into the cramped chute, and I realize that my delight in the skill of the riders, my excitement when the deep thunder of two superbly-trained horses breaking from the slots simultaneously makes my spine vibrate, my awe at the fact that anyone can actually rope a steer’s hind feet at full gallop, is slightly diminished when I consider that nobody asks the steers if they enjoy the sport.
But the sun has finally made its way down into the notch near big-shouldered Mount Moran. The sky over the Tetons is outrageous, a sunset so gaudy it’s become a cliché, something cheaply reproduced so many times for calendar art, in Western movies and in western-theme motel décor, that it’s become visually worn out. Unless you are looking at the real thing. I don’t bring a camera to my stays at Moose Head. I get up at dawn and sit on the porch of my cabin with a cup of the awful brown hot water the ranch provides in its cabin coffee-makers (Moose Head’s real coffee, in the main lodge, is strong and delicious), watching “young Dawn with her rose-red fingers” paint the Tetons from the top of the Grand down over the lesser peaks, eventually casting pinky-orange light over the flats near the Snake, which always shows an early plume of silvery fog tracing its length through the cottonwoods. Dawn in the Tetons is as astonishing as sunset. It’s one reason why people are loving this country to death.
In and around the town of Jackson, billionaires of all stripes, from Harrison Ford to Dick Cheney, have built large luxurious houses all over the place, and although the zoning statutes are pretty rigorous about the visual impact of the new mansions (if they’re up on buttes, for example, their roofs can’t rise above the natural skyline), they gobble up water and energy like there’s no tomorrow. Water, of course, has always been a fighting subject in the West. This year Jackson Hole has been favored by a snowy winter and a warm spring, resulting in an early, copious runoff. Dave, whose job includes maintaining the irrigation ditches in the horse pastures, trades his roper boots every early morning for Wellingtons, and his horse for a noisy ATV four-wheeler, carrying a shovel for making low mud dams to head the ditchwater evenly through the fields. But in spite of enough this season to get the dudes’ feet wet walking to cabins which abut the pastures, Dave talks water obsessively. There’s been no rain since early June, and the long spell of bright, dry weather, with smoke from forest fires from all the way down in Arizona hazing the Tetons, makes him worry, even though it’s great for the dude business. If the Teton wall keeps blocking the thunderheads developing over in Idaho this early, there will be trouble come August.
And energy – specifically from natural gas – has become another fighting issue. Dick Cheney’s in the valley for the Fourth: we spotted Air Force Two, attended by two Blackhawk helicopters, parked off the runways at the Jackson Airport when we landed; and Cheney’s personal SAM silo, inadequately disguised as a brushy hill just off the road north of Antelope Flats where the buffalo roam but the antelope no longer play, is fully activated: you can tell because its radar dish is turning, scoping the skies for rogue aircraft. Wyoming, thanks to Cheney, gets about three times as much Homeland Security money as New York. By the Jesus, Osama ain’t going to blow up the Tetons! Cheney is fully behind the current effort to extract newly-discovered deposits of natural gas in northwestern Wyoming, and the vast pumping arrays, which have already altered the landscape of the Wind River Range to the east, are marching in on Jackson Hole. Even Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks are in danger, since it turns out the largest deposits sit directly under them. In Jackson, gossip has it that exploitation of these enormous gas deposits, even at the expense of the prettiest country on earth, figured in that energy report Cheney prepared back before 9/11 and refuses to talk about.
Billionaires and gas-wells, vs. conservationists and supporters of alternative energy: not exactly an even match. As Deep Throat never actually said, “Follow the money!” Meanwhile, even the liberal tree-huggers and animal-lovers flocking to Jackson Hole aren’t interested in the cowboy stuff any more. They are hikers and skiers, white-water kayakers, extreme mountain-climbers who try to scale the Grand in winter. They love the landscape, as a grand backdrop for their exploits, and are generally offended if there’s horse-shit on the trails, even though it’s good for the wildflowers. They regard cowboys as quaint anachronisms, and some of them even think horseback riding is cruel to horses. Of course they hate steer-roping, and they never go to the Jackson Rodeo. But when they aren’t engaged in “green” sports, they all drive gas-guzzling SUVs.
The Mississippi Kid is back in the corral, dancing on his pinto and swinging his rope. Maybe he took another pill. He chats up a couple of dude kids and lets them pat his pony’s nose. By now the young women who tend the cabins and work the dining room and kitchen have finished washing the supper dishes, and they are out in full lovely flesh, cut-off tops which show off their navel rings, hip-hugging denim mini-skirts with sassy fringes, a tattoo or three, short cowgirl boots with pastel uppers, and pink and orange cowboy hats, flirting their sweet asses off with the wranglers who are attending Dave’s seminar on team roping. My wife and I know a few of the young men, veterans at Moose Head. I play guitar with one of them when I’m here; and because we ride fairly well, they request us on the dude rides because we can keep up.
They are the boys who fell in love with cowboying when they first got out here from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina. They’ve been through Horse Boot Camp and survived, and they know Dave. Two years ago a wrangler ignored Dave’s advice and tried to mount his jittery horse western-movie style, stepping up before he’d gathered the reins. The horse bolted sideways, the kid fell off with his foot stuck in the stirrup, and he wound up with a compound fracture of his left leg, the bone sticking through the skin. He was lying by the side of the trail trying not to howl with pain when Dave got to him on the four-wheeler to take him to an ambulance. Dave purpled the clean mountain air with curses about his stupidity. And just yesterday a new wrangler, a superb rider, taking out a long string of dudes, three generations of a Tennessee family from grandparents to kiddies, got into a fuss with a rank horse he was riding for the first time. He managed to stick when the horse bucked and stampeded into the woods above the trail, but a low pine limb smacked him right in the forehead and knocked him out of the saddle. It took awhile before other wranglers managed to round up the horse, and meanwhile the rider was walking around cross-eyed, trying to ignore the blood running down from the cut on his head. “Please don’t tell Dave about this,” he said. “I know what he’ll say.”
Dave’s doing the heading, for one of our wrangler friends, and the sun has finally set. Instantly the temperature drops twenty degrees, but the light lingers. The gate clangs open and the steer comes out clean. Dave’s throw is perfect, and this time his partner catches both heels. But the young rider forgets to dally off, so the steer isn’t stretched. “Out of the money,” the guy in the Stetson says.
(I wrote this piece a good while ago, before I had double knee-replacement surgery which ruled out riding, and before arthritis crippled my hands so I could no longer play the guitar.)