Wallace McRae | Stick Horses and Other Stories of Ranch Life

Published: July 15, 2009

Cowboy poet Wallace McRae credits his memoir, Stick Horses and Other Stories of Ranch Life, to pal and poet Paul Zarzyski and a conversation the two men had several years ago while McRae was looking “worse than dead,” following emergency open-heart surgery.

Zarzyski implored his friend to recover and write down his stories, not as poems, but as prose. “Write them just like you tell them.”

Despite McRae’s protest (“I just can’t get them to fit in meter and rhyme”), the cadence of poetry seeps into these tales about his life on the Rocker Six Ranch along Rosebud Creek in southeastern Montana. The collection reveals the qualities that make McRae one of the luminaries at the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV: vivid recollection of detail, an ear for the music of language and wry humor.

McRae – author of The Cowboy Curmudgeon and a recipient of a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts – delves into family history and affectionately describes the tough, sturdy neighbors and rough-edged ranch hands that inhabit the far-flung reaches of Rosebud Country. He deftly sketches a cowhand: “stirrups let out to the last hole, boot heels down, toes up, Chihuahua spurs chinging, erect as the Eiffel Tower …”

The author was clearly paying attention to the storytellers that he grew up listening to, before television or radio co-opted our long history of tale-swapping as entertainment.

I grew up amid old-timers, brimming with stories. McRae captures the voices of those generations, mostly gone now, who lived close to the land. When I read his stories, I hear my parents, grandparents and great-grandmother, and am thankful that he got it right.

Better yet: My son, 25, who caught just the tail-end of the storytellers in our family, picked up Stick Horses the other day and read a few chapters. “Great book,” he said. "I'd like to read it when you're finished."

Stick Horses was published 2009 by Gibbs Smith, Layton, Utah, and sells for $19.99 hardcover.

– Kristi Niemeyer