It's tradition: A folklorist's life

He finally collected so much that, according to local legend, his wife gave him an ultimatum — that or her. So he took a lot of it and fashioned an outdoor museum/playground/park that includes everything from horse-drawn wagons to a display of barbed wire to swings, a teeter-totter and a viewing station made from tractor seats and old milk cans. "He got no financial reward for all this work," said Colen Sweeten, a resident cowboy poet who accompanied the tour. "He was a different kind of man."

Throughout the tour, Sweeten entertained with stories, experiences and poems. He explained how the phrase "arriving with bells on" had to do with old freight wagons and talked about how the "pioneers came West willingly because they had to."

He memorialized growing up on a farm in poems that deal with everything from chasing pigs to listening for "Daddy's Bells," to doing the "Barnyard Ballet" and enjoying the new experience of "rubber robe" (now better known as bungee cord). Poignant moments, too, such as saying goodbye to a well-loved horse are the stuff of cowboy poetry.

"Cowboy poetry's now popular entertainment," he said. "But only the people who lived it really understand the feelings." Still, Sweeten said, he tries to convey some of those feelings. "Painting a word picture is not enough, you have to convey the feelings. I tell people that if they give me 30 minutes I'll make them laugh and I'll make them cry."

And maybe, too, they'll come closer to "understanding agriculture. The problems, the developments, the life."

But, said folklorist Bert Wilson, who recently retired from Brigham Young University, you have to be careful not to over-romanticize the people and places of this Western agriculture tradition.

In a keynote address at the AFS meetings, Wilson shared stories and experiences of his mother, who grew up in the little town of Riddyville in southern Idaho in "grinding poverty" that haunted her throughout her life.

We have to remember, he said, we are hearing individual voices. "My mother was not just a representative of Western homestead women, but a person in her own right."

But that's what has intrigued him in the study of folklore over the years, and what the farming and ranching tour was all about: "Human beings coming to terms with human problems in human ways. Ultimately it leads to a greater understanding of what it means to be human."

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