Cowboy pickers and poets take over Chinook

Western guitar pickers and poets took over Chinook for three days to pick cowboy tunes, recite cowboy poems and tell cowboy jokes. They laughed, they sang, they felt and some yodeled.

Montana's Country Poets and Pickers 22nd Western Heritage Roundup brought together about 20, mostly silver-haired, musicians, poets and storytellers from Canada and Montana.

B.J. Smith, a crowd favorite storyteller from Alberta, Canada, with thick, upturned whiskers, explained that cowboy poetry grew out of the need to keep cattle calm.

Cattle need just the right amount of background noise. If it's too quiet, the slightest thing will "spook" the cattle, he said. Too much noise is no good either. So cowboys started making up stories to recite to the cows, B.J. said.

One of the stories B.J. told was about a solitary man named Casey with a glass eye.

Casey went into town to tell the doctor he was seeing a brown spot everywhere he looked. After inspecting Casey's glass eye, the doctor found a piece of manure on it. After thinking a bit, Casey figured out how the manure got on his eye.

He'd been up in the mountains with his pack horse when a grizzly bear popped out and scared them, causing the horse to trot backward. Casey told the horse to stop going backward, lest they fall off the mountain. The grizzly popped out a few more times. In an effort to convince the horse that the greatest danger was behind them, Casey pulled out his glass eye and shoved it in the horse's behind to see, is how the story went.

Bless Paquette and Arnold Hokanson were two of four Havreites who took part in the singing and reciting. The difference between them is 57 years.

Bless is blonde, sings, plays the ukulele and is 27. She said she was a little intimidated when she showed up Friday. Aside from the age difference, she acknowledged how talented everyone was. But, she said, everyone was very warm and welcoming, and it didn't take long for her to feel comfortable.

Arnold is a retired rancher from Warrick who sings, picks, recites and writes books. He lives a few miles outside Havre.

Like B.J., Arnold has memorized all the stories he tells. Arnold said he realized he had knack for wordplay at Christmas of '88. He and his wife made a Christmas card and he came up with a little poem to put on it. He has been writing ever since.

At 72, Montana native and Laurel resident Norm says he thinks like a 25-year-old, but feels like a 90-year-old. He rapped a list of things wrong with his body before going to his car and coming back - out of breath - with a copy of each of the five books he's written under his arm.

Norm said "most everything" inspires him. He had a large, black binder filled with his poems.

Age is a recurring theme in Norm's poems.

"Change is the only constant I can find. I am older than I've ever been ... I am younger than I'll ever be again," he recited during one of his many poems.

He said his influences are the British-Canadian poet Robert W. Service and radio broadcaster Paul Harvey. Norm also made sure to point out there are only two kinds of music - hymns and country western. He mentioned the recently deceased Merle Haggard, along with songwriters Whispering Bill Anderson and Bob Wills.

Before leaving the platform, Norm told a story titled "Cowboy Chili."

"In a seedy little café, in a Colorado town, an old cowboy sat at the counter, feeling sickly," the poem begins.

A young cowboy in the café saw the old cowboy not eating his chili and said he'd eat it himself since the old man wasn't going to. The old cowboy allowed the young one to slide the bowl over and the young man "started eating hungrily."

As he got to the bottom of the bowl, the young cowboy saw a dead mouse at the bottom of the bowl.

The story says at this point, the young cowboy's stomach "changed directions" and soon "the bowl was full again."

The old cowboy leaned over and said to the young cowboy, "Yup, partner, that's as far as I got, too."