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Show J'Wayne "Mac" McArthur Logan, Utah born: 31 October, 1935 Born on a ranch in Shelley, Idaho, riding his own horse by the age of four, Mac McArthur explains that "the whole western idea of the cowboy, has just always been a part of me and that's all I wanted in my life." At eleven he left home to pursue his dream of independence and working on the range. He buckarooed and cowboyed in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming for the U.P. (Union Pacific) Ranch as well as for the 73,000 acre Green River Cattle Association in Pinedale, Wyoming. He learned, and used on a daily basis, many of the traditional, 19th century ways of handling cattle. After military service, he left ranch life to earn university degrees at Utah's agricultural school (Utah State University) in Logan. From there he worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, later returning to USU to take his present job as head of the Horse Program. As a small child, Mac remembers that he loved western stories and that his mother often read them to him. As he got older, he enjoyed collecting the old, western postcards that had poems on the back. But it was not until 1973, while researching and writing a report on the economic impact of horses on Utah's economy, that he began writing poems about his own experiences with horses. Since then, he's not only co-authored a book with Scott McKendrick entitled The Cowboy in Verse and Photograph, but has also written two books on horses, one historical novel, and a number of short stories about western life. Additionally, he has written numerous articles for both national horse maga- 98 Cowboy Poetry From Utah |