OCR Text |
Show 44 The Grouse Creek Cultural Survey Wallace Betteridge finishes a braided rawhide reata by attaching a "hondoo" (sometimes "hondo"), the ring through which the rope passes to form a loop, Montello, Nevada. (Hal Cannon; GCCS HCB-25637/3) inroads in Grouse Creek; the community's conservative ranchers continue to dress in the manner of Great Basin and other Western cowboys of the post-war era. Their outfit is characterized by a cowboy hat without the wide, flat buckaroo brim, jeans, a work shirt, and boots. In some cases, especially in winter, the costume partakes of a more universal agricultural model with tractor hats, insulated overalls, and rubber overshoes on cowboy boots. The outfit remains important, however, and there are Grouse Creekers who stubbornly refuse to deviate from the Western way. Doug Tanner remarked that the "more the person prides himself as a cowboy, the less he likes to put on a pair of overalls, cap with earpads, and mittens. In fact, there's a lot of oldtimers that would go out and their ears get frostbit, or put their scarf around their ears, rather than put on a cap and pull down the pads. Just to kinda keep the image up a little bit." The image of the cowboy is manifest in a kind of cowboy code. The image and the code are evident in the clothes, but in Grouse Creek, as in Nevada, it is the skills that are most valued. Doug Tanner takes pride, for instance, in continuing to rope and throw calves during spring branding rather than using a table-chute, a mechanized device that holds calves as they are branded. On a less specific level, there is something in being, as Max Tanner says, "a good neighbor," helping adjoining ranches collect strays, mending fences, and treating folks honestly. "You gotta have good neighbors, you know," Tanner said. "They know you'll take care of theirs, and they're gonna take care of yours, that's kinda the way its been for years and years." In the larger buckaroo community, Grouse Creek cowboys are judged not as Mormons, but as cowboys, by whether or not they were "good hands." "I wanted to be a cowboy I guess from the time I got big enough to go out and watch the rest of them," Max Tanner recalls. His son Doug explains how he learned to be a cowboy: Basically I learned a lot from my father. He was a good cowboy. He had a lot of pride in his work, not just in the work he did, but his horses, and his gear, he always kept it in good shape, and a lot of people said he rode good horses, and that's a pretty good compliment. I know it would be to him. And I learned a lot from him and as kids do, kids always have a tendency to pick out somebody that they kinda emulate a little bit, and pick up traits from them, and I've done that too, in riding with different people I saw people do things that I said, "Well, I wish I could do that," or, "I'm goin' to try and learn to do that." Max is a good cowboy, he knew cattle, I picked up a lot of the habits he had. Earlier, what one could learn about cowboying in Grouse Creek was supplemented by repping for one of the bigger Nevada ranches. Most Grouse Creek cowboys have worked away from home sometime during their lives, partly from necessity and partly from the need to experience buckaroo culture first hand. Doug Tanner, for example, mentioned that he did not consider himself a real cowboy until he worked on the Simplot buckaroo crew. |