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John Ray Shreve, Cowboy Poet - Writer - Humorist - Singer - Musician
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I was born and raised in the old cowboy fold, with some of the
old cowboys took me under their wing and made a top hand out me.
I started riding when I couldn't reach the stirrups. If Dad wasn't
there, or some other old cowboy to help me mount, I would have to
lead my horse up beside the pole corral, a stump, a rock, or anything
that would give me that two foot advantage. By the time I was 12
years of age I could measure up to the older hands and was an accepted
member of the fold.
I was born and raised on the Crow Indian reservation in southern
Montana in the heart of cattle country in both northern Wyoming
and southern Montana. I cowboyed for some of the big outfits that
lived out of the chuck wagon, and where the bed tent was your bunkhouse
for six months of the year. I also rode for some little outfits
that had no grub to put in a chuck wagon even if they'd had one.
I helped handle many Longhorns and Mexican Billies that were shipped
up here from Mexico and Texas, as well as New Mexico. I will guarantee
that you would play the dickens driving these cattle down any main
street for people to look at. I had a sizeable outfit on the Crow
reservation, but lost everything I had in 1985. I started writing
poems in 1949, out of boredom, when the Bottle Neck D outfit put
me in camp by myself on top of the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming.
My job was to look after six hundred head of yearlings. I was only
eighteen, and it could get pretty lonesome out there, forty miles
from no place.
I wrote my first-book "Cowboys and Spirits" in 1998,
not out of boredom, but out of love and longing for a way of life
that had vanished forever. My second book, "Ride the Divide"
delves deeper into the life of my father, John B. Shreve, whom I
idolized. One real, real bad winter, and with other bad luck, he
lost it all. Later, he died in a cow camp, at the age of 78, from
a bad fall while running his horse all out turning some cattle.
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