Back Home in the Nicola Valley

We came over the Okanagan Connector yesterday from Peachland to Merritt.  I lived in Peachland in 1970 and 1971 where I worked at Brenda Mines – coming up the highway we passed the snow-covered wall of the old Brenda tailings dam.  Then we drove along the western slope of Pennask Mountain above Hatheume Lake, where our summer cow camp was, and where I met my first wife Marion – she had come from England to experience life in the wilderness, leaving her executive secretary job to do laundry at Hatheume Lake Lodge.  Then farther along past Elkhart Lake, which was a 14-mile pack horse trip from the old camp at Mud Lake, itself 35 miles on a track through the bush from the Home Ranch at Douglas Lake.

We lived then in old mountain homesteads, cooked on wood fires and drank water from the creeks, and a trip to town was a full day’s effort.  And now we whistle past at 110 kilometres an hour, from point to point with barely a nod to the country around us.  Scotty Holmes, past Chief at Spahomin (or “Upper Nicola Band Indian Reserve #3”, as it’s called by various paternalizing government bodies) said to me the other day that when were riding in that country we never knew that we were in paradise, and now it’s gone.

Then down into Merritt for an all-candidates forum at the remarkable Nicola Valley Institute of Technology – more about NVIT later.  Lots of excellent discussion with good people, and there will be more about that later too.

I walked out this morning through the bunchgrass slopes above the beautiful home John and Barbara Yellowlees have built high on the hillside above the Nicola River.  It’s good to remind oneself every now and then that the grasses have been around, unchanged, for twenty million years or so.   Human beings are astonishingly arrogant as we imagine ourselves to be the bosses of the planet.  The grasses and the birds and the insects were here long before we arrived, and they’ll be here long after we’re gone.

Last night I pulled on my boots to go out and get something from the Kidder Camper, and John said something about me looking like a real cowboy now, with my boots outside my pants.  I laughed and remembered this great poem by Gale Gardner.  I had enormous fun reciting this once to my friend Tim Williams, who was wrangling dudes at the old Bar Q guest ranch in Ashcroft, while I was chasing cows for Bjorn Nielsen at the Mesa Vista.  Tim wrote and sang great cowboy tunes, but never got to be a working cowboy – he laughed and laughed when I gave him this:




The Dude Wrangler
by Gale Gardner

I’ll tell you a sad, sad story
Of how a cowboy fell from grace.
Now this really is something awful,
There never was so sad a case.

One time I had myself a pardner,
I never knowed one quite so good;
We throwed our outfits in together,
And lived the way that cowboys should.

He savvied about wild cattle
Ad he was handy with a rope.
For a gentle well-reined pony,
Just give me one that he had broke.

He never owned no clothes but Levis,
He wore them until they was slick,
And he never wore no great big Stetson,
Cause where we rode the brush was thick.

He never had no time for women,
So bashful and shy was he,
Besides he knowed that they was poison
And so he always let them be.

Well he went to work on distant ranges;
I did not see him for a year.
But then I had no cause to worry,
For I knowed that one day he’d appear.

One day I rode in from the mountains,
A-feeling good and steppin’ light,
For I had just sold all my yearlin’s
And the price was out of sight.

But soon I seen a sight so awful
It caused my joy to fade away.
It filled my very soul with sorrow.
I will never forgit that day.

For down the street there come a-walkin’
My oldtime pardner of yore,
And although I know you will not believe me,
Let me tell you what he wore.


He had his boots outside his britches;
They was made of leather, green and red.
His shirt was of a dozen colours,
Loud enough to wake the dead.

Around his neck he had a ‘kerchief,
Knotted through a silver ring;
And I swear to Gawd he had a wrist-watch,
Who ever heard of such a thing!

Sez I, “Old scout now what’s the trouble?
You must have et some loco weed.
If you will tell me how to help you
I’ll get you anything you need.”

Well he looked at me for half a minute,
And then he begin to bawl;
He sez, “Bear with while I tell you
What made me take this awful fall.

“It was a woman from Chicago
Who put the Injun sign on me;
She told me that I was romantic,
And just as handsome as could be.”

Sez he, “I’m afraid there ain’t nothin’
That you can do to save my hide
I’m wrangling dudes instead of cattle,
I’m what they call a first-class guide.

“Oh I saddles up their pump-tailed ponies,
I fix their stirrups for them, too.
I boost them up on their saddles, and
They give me tips when I am through.

“It’s just like horses gone loco,
You cannot quit it if you try.
I’ll go on wranglin’ dudes forever,
Until the day that I shall die.”

So I drawed my gun and throwed it on him,
I had to turn my face away.
I shot him squarely through the middle,
And where he fell I left him lay.

I shorely hated for to do it,
For things that’s done you can’t recall,
But when a cowboy turns dude wrangler,
He ain’t no good no more at all.