Main Street, Wyoming; 210; Tex Garry, Western Storyteller

This program made possible by a grant from U.S. Energy and Crested Butte Corporation, part of a family of companies in the mining and minerals business. This program made possible by a grant from U.S. Energy and Crested Butte Corporation, part of a family of companies in the mining and minerals business, providing jobs for Wyoming people since 1966. This program made possible by a grant from U.S. Energy and Crested Butte, part of a family of companies in the mining and minerals business, allowing jobs for environmental, water, and resources. The program made possible by a grant from U.S. Energy and Crested Butte, part of a family of companies in the mining and minerals business, providing employment for the development of the mining and minerals business. Welcome to Main Street Wyoming. I'm Jeff O'Gara. Tonight I'm talking to Jim

Gary, a storyteller, and I used to be fond of saying he was a storyteller from story Wyoming, but really in all the years that I've known Tex as he's called, it really hasn't been possible to say just where he's from. He had to know which friend to call or look outside your window at the right time to see his truck driving up. He does tell me that right now he's holding up in Echita, Wyoming. Guess where that is. Working at putting down on paper, some of the stories that he's collected over the years. So first we need to pin him down a little bit about just what he is. Jim, tell me whether you're a storyteller, a writer, a folklorist, an anthropologist, a historian. I know you've been a cowpoke, a lumberjack, and what are you? Well, I guess you'd probably easiest to refer to me as somebody who figured out how to make a living telling lies without having been elected to office. Pretty good. I guess storyteller comes as close as anything, although I do try to collect materials for archival purposes as well as

for performance. What kind of stories are we talking about? A little bit of everything. History, folklore, just amusing anecdotes, some of everything. Any kind of geographic concentration, I think of you as collecting stories out here in the west. Well, primarily, that's where I work. Most of my work is west of the dry line, west of the hundred meridian, but I've collected on the Georgia Sea islands and in Northern Great Lakes region and a little bit on the main coast and in Argentina, England and Scotland. I think of storytelling as being a kind of roundabout arc that you kind of circle it for a while and then you hone in and then all of a sudden you're telling a story. So it seems a little bit abrupt, but I feel like we ought to give the audience immediately a taste of storytelling. Could you just pop off a story for us? Sure. One of the things that you found when you start collecting there's certain themes that run through areas and through

life and one of the stories of the generation I work with the most right now are primarily old people. I like to say that I go around digging up old timers before they need to be dug up literally. And one of the things that comes out very often are stories about the changes in their lives. These are people who were born into the horse age and now are living with computers. But for most of them the biggest change they encountered was the automobile. An old gentleman named Bob Springfield who used to work for French's down outside of Riverton. And when old man French got his first car he liked most of the old timers. There was something I don't know if it had to do with the price of gasoline or the scarcity of it in this part of the world or what. But all the old timers

coasted going downhill. They had shut their engines off and and let the car coast going downhill. And that work found with Model T's and things like that. But Mr. French had gotten a pretty good-sized truck to help with Holland his wool to town. He had pretty good-sized sheep operation and and Holland wool in with wagons was a pretty time-consuming operation. But he had gotten this truck and he was going into town with several tons of wool on it. And now if you come into Riverton nowadays coming from up by the airport it's still a pretty good hill coming down into town. But back then it was a show enough gray dropping off those hills down into town. And when he got to the top of the hill he killed the engine and put it in neutral and started to coast. Well

needless to say that truck coasted a good bit faster than a car dead. And Bob said he was just a little bit nervous as they started down and said after they got up to about 50 miles an hour he mentioned to Mr. French that he might are to put the brakes on. And French replied well hell I burned them out 200 yards back. Bob said at that point he started duck down and got wrapped as tight as he could around the transmission case waiting for the impact. But he said French wrote her down and said he hit the first bench and started slowing and said that slowed up pretty good and we're like they were going to coast to stop and Bob thought they were all right and he raised his head up above the dashboard just as they got to the drop off there by the school in Riverton. And he said they knows down that and all he could see were box cars in front

of him where the railroad crosses the street there and said he'd duck back down again. He said he guessed they must have been switching because he said they they didn't hit any of them said they they were tracks were clear when they got there but he said when they finally got stopped again where the park is now down at the end of Main Street that is just sagebrush out there then he said they were about two three hundred yards out into the sagebrush when truck finally stopped. He said he looked up again said French looked at him and said Bob can you drive? Bob said yes sir I can. He said well said you drive this on back over to the to the Will Barnes said I'm gonna walk on up to the house he had a house there in town as well as one out in the country and Bob said he got it up there and then he got it into the shop so they could fix the brakes on it said he is there in town two days getting a truck fixed for he could go

back to the ranch said when he got back out the ranch said Mr. French should come out there on his own but said he'd come in a buggy it pretty well done but but those sort of stories are everywhere they're all over Wyoming I've run in I don't know how many accounts the first cars in the town yeah trouble people had I think and I think people identify I know I've heard you tell a lot of stories that are out of Wyoming but it's always intrigued me that you're telling these Wyoming stories but you go by the name Tex that tells me maybe your origin is not Wyoming. No something about my accent it seems to have tipped people off that I wasn't native barn. So are you from Texas or? Yeah grew up in Texas and came out here on a research trip in 1969 I supposed to be here for six weeks. Research what kind of research? I was doing research on Eagle and Osprey pesticide levels in their eggs. I never have

been real good with time. I'm still here. Stretched out a little bit. Did you grow up then in Texas? grew up in Texas. What part of Texas? Right in the middle about 35 miles from Austin. Little town of Taylor's where I went to school. Any hint in your early life that this storytelling was going to become an obsession? Yeah I think probably so. The only way you could get a word in edgewise and my family was to be a good enough storyteller that some of the others had shut up and listen. Big family, small family. A immediate family, not very big. I had a brother and a sister but where I grew up was old family holding so everybody all around was Ken and I had 40 or 50 cousins that lived within 30 miles. I mean you know was all pretty close and great aunts and uncles as well as aunts and uncles.

Grandparents, great grandparents, and they were all storytellers. I imagine in that context storytelling wasn't viewed as a profession or an avocation even. It was just something people did. Just everybody did. When did you identify or how did you identify it as being a pursuit? I don't want to call it professional because you're like a lot of writers sometimes you can't tell whether you're making money out of it or not. Well it beats working no matter. I actually I was here at Sheridan College for two years as artists and residents set up their film and video program for them and in the process of doing it I was spending a lot of time traveling around Wyoming. This was in the height of the energy being back in the seventies and I was going around collecting folk materials on video tape because so many things looked like at that point they were just going to be completely buried. They were talking about the population of

Wyoming being a million million and a half. Things were going to be lost and so I was trying to record that material and at the end of that by a weird set of circumstances. Lynn Simpson tricked me into agreeing to do a performance telling some of the stories I'd heard in the process of the collecting and Peter Hazrich over at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center was in the audience and they were starting to do live programming in the summers there at the museum and he invited me to come over and tell stories there and I supposed to be there for a week and I was stayed six weeks and there you go again. At the end of that time I really was unfit for any serious work ever again after that so I just had to keep doing it. But it sounds like they're really too thrust to what you do you collect and preserve I guess you tape the stories of older people that are still around and then you do storytelling yourself. Do you find your

your treading in the footsteps of anthropologists or is the the business of telling stories about the old stories? When I'm around historians I make sure that they think I'm a folklorist and when I'm around folklorist I make sure they think I'm a historian but get both of them together then I point out that I'm really a wildlife biologist. There we go. In the storytelling area of your life did you have any mentors any people that gave you an example of how this art might be pursued? Quite a few I mean my father probably the best storyteller I've ever met but within the family there were a number of great ones but I also when I came to Wyoming and countered quite a few good storytellers where I first worked over in Jackson Hole or several old timers on the ranch who were pretty masterful and in Jackson in the winter time once you get the feeding done there's time to sit and visit a little bit. There

was also I was fortunate enough to meet an old menstrual man named singing Sam Agons and I spent one summer traveling with him and we we did shows all over where from Arizona to the Canadian line that summer and he really encouraged me professionally was probably the first person to really push me in the direction of is there actually a circuit out there that you would travel doing storytelling? Well he was he was a musician he was also a custom jeweler he made gold and silver jewelry and he worked the way menstrual worked in the middle ages he he performed as an entree to sell his jewelry and so we would go to dude ranches and county fairs and and he would use his his menstrual talents to

draw a crowd and then sell his jewelry as how he made the money and so not being able to make beautiful gold and silver jewelry it didn't immediately dawn on me that I could do anything financially with with my talent yeah I know just from we're in Sheridan now and talking to people around town I mentioned occasionally I'm going to be talking to Tex Gary and they they express a particular pleasure at your storytelling I think because a lot of it is pulled from ranches around here that you can ranch in other places how about a Sheridan story just for the folks around around town well generally in Sheridan if you want to if you want a story that everybody can identify with probably the first name that comes to mind is Curly Wetzel Curly cowboyed around this country from all the 20s on he he retired when he is about 80 and at that

point he is working for the burns and but he had worked for Eaton he had worked for the padlock he had been a wagon boss for the padlock and the only reason he retired was because John his son was ready to start junior high and the school out where they lived on the ranch only went through the sixth grade so they had to move into town so John could go to school and and that gives you some idea if you'll do the math involved and John being ready to go to junior high and Curly being 80 you'll believe anything about Curly and around Sheridan you don't have to everybody knew Curly and and Curly had led his life knowing it was a story and and the the result was that that there's some pretty good stories that that he told and probably the the best of the of the

Curly Wetzel stories that I've actually been able to to verify and Curly's a lot of Curly stories like a lot of stories that people tell you don't want to check too closely the thing to remember is that stories can be true without being factual truth only has to work here facts have to work up here but 1936 Curly and a guy named Bob Crosby were both rodeoing a lot back then and decided they had go to what was in the biggest purse rodeo in the country it was at Madison Square Garden and normally cowboys back then if they had to carry their horses with them which they did they both bulldog and they'd load them on the train and what we're called immigrant cars which were a modified

box car they had stalls and majors and feedbunks and one end of them and bunk's in a cook's dove and table and the other end of them and you and the horse is traveled together and that way you could feed and water them and take care of them but they didn't have the the price of an immigrant car so but Crosby had a Model T and Curly borrowed a trailer from somebody and so they jury rigged a trailer hitch on the back of the Model T and hooked the trailer on and put their saddles up on the front fenders and try horses in the trailer and a couple of bales of hand a couple of sacks of grain tied on the back bumper and see their bed rolls and war bags in the backseat and headed east and Curly said didn't have a lick of trouble till they got to Chicago but he said they hit Chicago perfect timing of course now back in those days for the interstates the main

highway going to Chicago was the main street in Chicago and they wound up in downtown Chicago at five o'clock in the afternoon well Curly said you know said the problem those old Model T's was said two things said one they weren't designed for pulling trailers and that is a pretty small four-cell in their engine and secondly they were not designed for stop and go driving they needed to be running they needed a lot of wind going through the radiator to keep the engine cool and when the engines overheated on Model T's that the car stalled and once it stalled you could crank all you wanted to but it wasn't going to start till the engine cooled which was forty-five minutes or so generally and so Curly said they were caught in this heavy traffic and said getting stopped at every corner by stoplight and he said Crosby was driving but he said I knew was in trouble because I could see a little steam ease out from

around the edge of the radiator cap he said finally Crosby turned him and he said Curly said it sees dank stoplights said if we don't run this car well it's going to stall on us and Curly said I just looked at him said Bob we can't forward get stuck in downtown Chicago with these two horses said you better just run this thing away isn't cool at all he said by George he did it said he just took off driving like we was out in the country said we didn't get but six or eight blocks in a cop pulled us over said we pulled over to the side of the street and said he pulled his motorcycle up in front of us and God off of it put it up on the kickstand walk real slow back to us put his foot up on the running board and then for he could say anything said Crosby lit in to him he said officer said these are the route it's nasty it's most reckless drivers I have ever seen anywhere in my life when I said a half a dozen of almost run

into us and said they're yelling things at me I wouldn't yell at an egg sucking dog and said that cop looked at us for a minute finally said well didn't you see all the stoplights Curly said for that Crosby could say anything said I kind of duck so I could make eye contact with him and the cop at the same time said say Bob I told you them red lights must have meant something he said that cop looked at us and said he really looked at us for the first time took in our steps and hats and our boots look back at the two horses in the trailer and the saddle's on the front and said he took his foot off the running board and walked real slow around to the front of the car and looked down and sure enough there it was 1936 was the first year they put the cab on Buckinghorse on Wyoming license plate and there that wasn't he looked at that and Curly said he studied that license plate for a little while and he walked real slow back around to us and he said I could tell he was pretty upset with us but

he said for he said anything said I saw him cut his eyes back around at those two horses and I knew his alright said he wanted to arrest us but he knew there wasn't a jail selling Chicago big enough to hold him to horses so instead he just said you boys follow me and said got back on his motorcycle he turned on the flashing lights and the sirens and he escorted us right through town he said he got us to the far side of town pulled us back over to the side of the road got off his motorcycle put it up on the kicks down walk real slow back to the car put his foot up on the running board said then he just stared at us no longer he stared the lower we sank down in our seats kind of trying to get hidden under our hats and finally said boys said where y'all headed and we told him was on our way to the big rodeo at Madison Square Garden and he said well boys said I got a piece of advice for you we said yes sir and he said no

matter how you do it the big rodeo why don't you go home through Indianapolis okay let's do let's let's take a little look I hate to hope this doesn't hurt a story but I want to look a little behind the curtain and the storytelling business I know that when old-timers tell stories they tell them over and over and they add a little bit here and there and get them to work a little better on the audience and you've taken the stories that they've told you and you're retelling them do you add I mean do you work a little bit to make the stories well you you know William Stafford told me one time the thing you have to remember about history is it hadn't all had a chance to happen yet and sometimes stories work that way they just naturally grow a little bit if you take them out and feed them well and exercise or something okay you and you do a fair amount I mean you find a good story like that really close to home but you also get out and about and go fairly far afield looking for stories I'm kind of

curious about that urge instead of just working on a little garden right here you're traveling fairly far afield looking for material what's the urge there why do you go out and head up I don't know where you've gone tell me how far off you've gone well I don't guess I've gone any further than Argentina looking for stories but where's those cowboys down there yeah you bet there's some big time series cowboys down there I guess I've never found a place that didn't fascinate me and studied ecology and school and that's the study of the household the whole place not just one room so I'm always interested to know what's going on someplace else do you find though you must be able to kind of compare how different cultures tell stories and I imagine it is quite different very different and the the histories and the tradition that goes into the story and into the listening to stories and how long can you make a story

I tend not to think of Americans as being terribly high in the rankings of storytelling cultures do you have any feeling I think the rural people are very much attuned to rural people it's still part of their tradition and it's not fair just to lay it on rural people I mean you can you go to any big city in in a country and and find people who sit and tell stories to one another in cafes on park benches wherever it's still very much a part of the culture to do it professionally we don't have the tradition that some places have like salaries for storytellers yeah it pays better in Ireland it does here yeah but we're also living in in the TV age I mean we're doing a television show right now and television is about MTV and sound bites and cutting together a lot of things and I guess I wonder whether you might be working in someone

outmoded for that's fine do you think that's true when I started doing it I thought it would prove to be but it really hadn't what I found is that is it people really are fascinated with with the process of storytelling as well as with the stories and the people do enjoy listening when you give them the chance and it's not just because it's an anachronism they're actually listening to the stories right so does that answer the question of you know why do you bother well I mean the reason I bother is because it beats working but but not I think really it does is that that there still is a place for it and it's not I mean I happen to be interested in history and so I'm interested in the stories that are historic in the stories that are that are from the folk tradition yeah but and I have a have a cousin who was a career Air Force officer fighter pilot for his whole life you know high-tech you know 21st

century and those guys get together and don't do anything but tell stories you know it's it's not just the old ways you know we all tell stories what about what about the people who who listen to you tell a story and think about it a little bit and and and feel that hunger they want to start hearing stories told what what do they do a Wyoming's the easiest place in world to find the types of stories I look for any town in Wyoming you drive down Main Street at six o'clock in the morning past the cafes you look for the cafe that's got local license plate half a dozen low numbers two three digit number is that the silver spur in Sheridan Spurs pretty good the Ritz is probably the best place in Sheridan for it the busy bee in Buffalo Lula Bells in July ever towns got one or two or three places like that and but you don't have to know

in advance you can drive along to you see and you see those those two and three digit numbers on the license plate well as people have been living here since dirt was new in the country and you can go in there on any morning and you can hear the history of the county told and stories through it we'll do it thanks for joining us text good to see you and thanks for joining us on Main Street Wyoming This program made possible by a grant from U.S. energy and crested-beaut corporation, part of a family of companies in the mining and

minerals business, providing jobs for Wyoming people since 1966.