Fw: [Redbadbear] WESTERN AMERICAN CULTURE AND RODEO AND BIG BILL HAYWOOD -- AND MORE

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Hunter Gray 
To: [email protected] 
Sent: Saturday, March 23, 2013 3:56 PM
Subject: [Redbadbear] WESTERN AMERICAN CULTURE AND RODEO AND BIG BILL HAYWOOD -- AND MORE


  

WESTERN AMERICAN CULTURE AND RODEO AND BIG BILL HAYWOOD -- AND MORE 

The American West is always changing these days -- for sure:   new people
and sprawling cities, paved highways and Interstates, television and
computers -- all that and more.  And more.

But much of the West doesn't change -- ever:  The Big Sky; the  Land -- the
Earth and Plains and Mountains and Deserts; and a great many of the
people -- the native homegrown Westerners and the people who come into the
West and who [naturally] convert to Our Way of Life.

Rodeo doesn't change.  It's like it always was -- brave men [and now a few
brave women]  and wild beasts:  mutually adversarial right down to the dirt
and the bloody bone [sometimes literally.]

I don't claim to be a rodeo man in the participant sense.  One of my younger
brothers was a very good calf-roper for years.  But, although our family had
horses -- on very good lower Oak Creek land south/southwest of Flagstaff in
the Verde Valley, not far from the old copper camp of Jerome -- I've never
really been a horse person.  I am, however, a very good mule man:  a mule is
always smart; always very stable -- doesn't shy in a skittery way, say, from
a rattler as will a horse; and a mule is extremely surefooted.  I like mules
and know them well.  [The best one with which I was closely associated, and
which I rode much indeed for work  and other purposes, always tried,
cunningly, to carry me under low hanging pine limbs -- but, once you knew
that little idiosyncrasy, no sweat and no fall from the saddle.]

Most radicals these days don't know much about William D. "Big Bill"
Haywood, who started out in Mormon Utah in 1869 [hatched Episcopalian] and
died lonely at Moscow [the other one, not Idaho] in 1928: half his ashes in
the Kremlin wall and the other half at the consecrated-for-radicals Waldheim
Cemetery at Chicago.  In between, of course, Bill Haywood was the cutting
edge of the legendary Western Federation of Miners and a key founder of the
Industrial Workers of the World.  He was the major defendant in the infamous
Steunenberg  murder frameup trial at Boise in 1907 -- where, defended ably
by Clarence Darrow and others against the forces of the Mine Owners'
Association and the Pinkertons, he and his WFM colleagues -- Charles Moyer
and George Pettibone -- were freed. In Darrow's eleven hour address to the
jury, the great Artist of the Defense roundly attacked "The Spiders of Wall
Street" while much of the courtroom wept.  On that, see my rather extensive
1997 review/essay on the background and development of the Boise Trials and
related matters -- published in the Butte regional newspaper:
http://www.hunterbear.org/jhg_review_of__big_trouble.htm

Bill Haywood was many good things: great courage and great commitment, great organizer, creative strike activist and tactician and leader, top speaker,
Red Socialist -- much more.  And, for all of this, he was  seized and
imprisoned  by the Feds in 1917 with 150 other prominent IWW leaders.  They
were eventually tried at Chicago and Wichita and Sacramento under the
hastily concocted and Wilsonian "Espionage Act" which, ostensibly targeting
anti-War activities [it reached out and grabbed Gene Debs and others as
well], was really of course aimed against social justice -- and especially
militant labor -- radicalism.  In the end, an ailing Haywood and a few
others, out on bail pending appeal,  understandably enough under the
horrific circumstances fled to Russia.

Most radicals of today couldn't tell you much at all about Bill Haywood and
that very fine crew of trail blazers who "saw the elephant and heard the
owl" in some very, very tough crucibles. They might know that the copper
bosses got the great Wobbly martyr, Joe Hill, but they probably couldn't
tell you when; and they've heard some about the gentle Debs -- but probably
not the fact that  Debs several times publicly threatened that legions of
armed Westerners  would converge on Boise and free Haywood et al. if the WFM leaders were convicted.

But even the more informed radicals of today probably don't know that, in
addition to being a highly skilled hard-rock metal miner, Big Bill had also
been a prospector -- and an extremely successful Nevada cowboy.

And hardly anyone now would know that his brother-in-law, Tom Minor of
Nevada, was one of the very top United States rodeo champs for a good and super long
spell.

In fact, both Haywood and Minor structured a dimension of the IWW especially
for cowpunchers, "bronc riders" and rodeo men -- and some did indeed sign up
in the  fighting Wobblies.

Rodeo is like the rugged Real West In The Flesh, so to speak:  it's
equalizing and egalitarian.  You're face to face in the Real West with raw
nature:  big sharp mountains, furnace deserts, the wild and roily rivers of
no return, wild critters and wild people.

With rodeo, it's wild bulls and wild horses and wild men [and now a few wild
women.]

And it's a setting where, as in the mountains and deserts and on the wild
rivers, you're taken for what the Real You is and can do and does.  Long,
long before the Movements great and good, and all of the important Civil
Rights Acts and such, and reflecting the ethnic demography of the West,
Native Americans and Chicanos who rodeoed won not only  their spurs as
men -- but were fully accepted by their rodeo colleagues and many others as
the humans they indeed were. And there've always been some Blacks and some
Orientals  who rodeoed, risked much -- and who forced recognition of
themselves as  people.

[Kind of like the military for ethnic minorities -- especially after Harry
Truman's sweeping military integration order. "If you could shoot good . . ."]

Anyway, I like rodeo.  Sometimes a guy gets killed and I have good buddies
who were crippled for life by the time they were 21.  But most people get
through it OK and almost all of the animals always do.

This  coming-up newspaper article talks about one of the  bigger ones -- but
the little rodeos in the backwoods settings of the West, the little towns
and the great rural sweeps, can be really first-rate.

And then there are the Great All-Indian  Rodeos:  Flagstaff with its annual
three-day Indian Pow-Wow over the Fourth -- and then the Gallup Indian
Ceremonial early in August.  In each of those and others like them -- full
of top-flight Native dancers from a myriad of tribal nations in the 'States,
Canada, and Mexico and hundreds of first-rate Native artisans and
craft-people -- rodeo is a great big piece of the Experience for everyone.

Anyway, I [a faithful mule man] always like good Real Western Rodeo -- and I
always will.

So find one -- a good one, big or little -- and try it, folks.  If you don't
think it's becoming a socialist, then always remember Big Bill and tip your
Stetson or  your little Eastern-type cap to a guy who, among everything else
he did, was a renowned Nevada cowboy.

Hunter Gray [Hunter Bear]


HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

See the new and expanded/updated edition of my "Organizer's 
Book." It's the inside story of the massive Jackson Movement,
bloody repression and murder, and more -- including a myriad
of organizing "lessons."  And with my new and 10,000 word
Introduction. http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm (". .a local activist's
 important account of the deleterious effects the involvement of 
national organizations can have on indigenous protest movements."
David Garrow in "The Age of the Unheralded", Progressive Magazine,
April 1990.

See my piece ON BEING A MILITANT AND RADICAL
ORGANIZER -- AND AN EFFECTIVE ONE:
http://crmvet.org/comm/hunter1.htm

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded in 2012. Photos. Material on our Native
background.)