Horse Bell Recollections
It's mind-boggling how a sight or smell brings back memories. My Aunt Margie posted a photo on Facebook of two horse bells used with my family’s roundup wagon when I was a child. The bells, buckled on the necks of “bell horses,” helped wranglers locate the cavvy in the hills on dark mornings. Seeing them fills me with memories.
I was privileged to spend summers of my youth living nearly out of a CM Russell painting, with a rope corral, tents, teepees, bed rolls, and a mess wagon (ours was pulled by a pickup and not horses, though we fed with a team when I was little). The back of a mess wagon drops to create a kitchen workspace with a bank of drawers. Besides storing provisions for life on the range, the mess wagon held the rope corral with its wooden crotches and iron stakes, the big mess tent and the canvas fly that stretched over the bows on the wagon. Rather than the open fire of CM Russell’s times, Grandma cooked beef, potatoes, biscuits or calf fries to perfection on a heavy little cast iron stove.
Seeing those bells, I hear their low din punctuating the horses’ grazing and the coyotes’ howling as I’d fall asleep in my bedroll. One memory prompts another; I can smell the canvas of the Sheridan Tent and Awning bed tarp, tents, teepees.
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| [I don't have photos of me w/ the wagon as a kid, but here's one of my dad and his brothers and sister, and another of a poker game; my grandpa is in the white shirt on the right. Photos from Aunt Margie & Uncle Aubry Smith's collection.] |
Long before daylight, Grandma would holler a long-winded, “Rooooooooooll Out, Whooooooo!” signaling breakfast. We’d step through the dewy sage in the dark to the light of the warm mess tent for pancakes, eggs and bacon as the wrangler drove the cavvy into the rope corral. I can still hear the hiss of the lantern and remember the mingled smells of coffee, breakfast and lantern fuel. After breakfast, horses were caught with houlihan loops, led from the rope corral, and we’d saddle up. The sun was usually rising as we’d ride out, leaving grandma -who, I’m sure would rather have been “cowboying” -cleaning up breakfast and preparing the noon meal.
Some of the people I share these memories with are gone now, but seeing relics of that time illustrates that the past is stored safely in my mind. As a kid, I thought I’d one-day paint my memories of those days, but today I paint mostly livestock. I fear my inability to paint people or portray my memories in an artistic way.
Many artists paint cowboys today. Most do it from an informed, ranching background (if you missed the recent Carrie Ballantyne retrospective at The Brinton Museum, you missed a real treasure); a few, having never even been on a horse do it remarkably well, especially if what inspired their work was genuine and they’re recreating it in their own informed, artistic style.
Where do those artists get their ideas? Some spend time on working ranches. Others pay to attend photo sessions where people dressed as 1800’s Native Americans, trappers or cowboys recreate scenes. Some artists paint these “historical” figures astride modern-day Quarter Horses; someone lacking a background with horses might not see the disparity. My experience alerts me when an artist’s rendition of an old-time cowboy in woolies is riding a double-rigged saddle from a more recent era. Once I saw a big painting of a saddle with its latigo and hanger on the wrong side; the artist didn’t know that it mattered when she flipped the reference photo in Photoshop. Only one who’s never saddled a horse could appreciate uninformed art like that.
I guess what I’m saying is that if art doesn’t come from the artist’s own experience, it should at least create an authentic experience for viewers or help them reconnect with their own stories, like the photo of those horse bells did for me. If a western artist hasn’t “lived it,” he should study it enough so that aspects of his work are accurate to the era or lifestyle he’s aiming to portray.
I didn’t know how to paint cows before I started doing it in 2009, I just knew cows- their musculature, expressions and attitudes. Maybe I should start painting more of the ranch life I recall. Learning to paint people living the life I remember would stretch me as an artist, and the resulting work might eventually affect someone in the way the photo of the horse bells affected me.