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Authors: Dayton O. Hyde
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to every one I could. Beyond the rodeo events, there were parades and dances. The towns filled up with local ranchers and cowboys, and for many of them it was their one trip to town for the year, the source of many a tale to be told again and again around the bunkhouse stoves.
One Sunday, I rode over to the Beatty Rodeo with Rose and her family. On the way, we passed Bart Shelley, driving a bunch of his horses across the vast sagebrush flats toward town. I was thrilled to see the big horse Blackhawk in the lead. I had brought a camera with me and couldnât wait to photograph Blackhawk coming out of the chute. He was ridden by a cowboy named Ed Donovan, who managed a tensecond ride. I took the film to a Klamath Falls drugstore for development and sweated out the results for nearly a week. With most of the bunkhouse cowboys gathered around me, I opened the envelope from the photo shop and found I had captured Blackhawk sunfishing high in the air. It was to be the first of thousands of rodeo photographs I would take through the years, and that gave me a niche in rodeo beyond being a mere spectator.
I had no formal training as a photographer but learned by doing. Most of my early attempts ranged from bad to awful, and it took several rodeos before I shot anything as good as the photograph of Ed Donovan on Blackhawk.
Soon I was sending off a flood of rodeo shots to Ma Hopkins, the editor of Hoofs and Horns, and it wasnât too hard to persuade her to give me a job as official photographer. She neglected to ask me my age and would have been aghast had she known I was only sixteen.
Without rodeos, Saturday nights at the ranch were lonely, and often I rode into town with some of the Yamsi Ranch crew and sat in the darkness outside houses known as Ireneâs or the Iron Door, as the cowboys sought out what they had come to town for. I would listen and wonder as music and laughter came from within. Sometimes a woman would come out to bring me a bottle of pop and sit in the cab of the truck, visiting me. I would marvel that these women seemed like any other women I ran into in town. They talked of families in towns Iâd never heard of, and what they dreamed of doing with their lives once they got money. They called me âhoneyâ and âsweetheart,â and their perfume lingered on long after they had gone back to the house.
On the ranch, on long days a-horseback, I did lots of listening, for I felt at my age I had few stories worth telling. What I was learning, in those days, was to be a good audience. I honored the storytellers by being attentive, by riding carefully abreast of them so as not to miss a single word.
Life on the ranch, of course, was not all stories of the past. Drama was a part of everyday life. One summer day Ern Morgan sent me off to help on the Marsh with an old cowboy named Roy. We shunned the roads and cut across country, both of us tired of the usual well-worn trails.
Roy was up in his seventies but fighting old age as though life had gone too fast and there were still places to go and things to do. I remember listening to the creak of him as we trotted along through towering virgin ponderosa pines, leaving a faint trail of pumice dust as we rode. I wasnât sure whether the creak came from his old bones or from his ancient Hamley saddle, which showed a lifetime of hard use. We were conscious, both of us, that one day these giant trees would be cut and hauled away, and we had best drink in the scenery before it was gone.
I had the usual pity of youth for the old, after seeing that Roy needed a pine stump to mount and having heard him groan as he settled into the saddle. But before the day was out I learned that the old man had plenty of life left in him.
That afternoon we were dropping down off the ridges to the edge of Klamath Marsh, along Big Wocus Bay, when the old manâs horse stepped on a stick and began to limp. We still had miles to go, and there seemed to be little
One Sunday, I rode over to the Beatty Rodeo with Rose and her family. On the way, we passed Bart Shelley, driving a bunch of his horses across the vast sagebrush flats toward town. I was thrilled to see the big horse Blackhawk in the lead. I had brought a camera with me and couldnât wait to photograph Blackhawk coming out of the chute. He was ridden by a cowboy named Ed Donovan, who managed a tensecond ride. I took the film to a Klamath Falls drugstore for development and sweated out the results for nearly a week. With most of the bunkhouse cowboys gathered around me, I opened the envelope from the photo shop and found I had captured Blackhawk sunfishing high in the air. It was to be the first of thousands of rodeo photographs I would take through the years, and that gave me a niche in rodeo beyond being a mere spectator.
I had no formal training as a photographer but learned by doing. Most of my early attempts ranged from bad to awful, and it took several rodeos before I shot anything as good as the photograph of Ed Donovan on Blackhawk.
Soon I was sending off a flood of rodeo shots to Ma Hopkins, the editor of Hoofs and Horns, and it wasnât too hard to persuade her to give me a job as official photographer. She neglected to ask me my age and would have been aghast had she known I was only sixteen.
Without rodeos, Saturday nights at the ranch were lonely, and often I rode into town with some of the Yamsi Ranch crew and sat in the darkness outside houses known as Ireneâs or the Iron Door, as the cowboys sought out what they had come to town for. I would listen and wonder as music and laughter came from within. Sometimes a woman would come out to bring me a bottle of pop and sit in the cab of the truck, visiting me. I would marvel that these women seemed like any other women I ran into in town. They talked of families in towns Iâd never heard of, and what they dreamed of doing with their lives once they got money. They called me âhoneyâ and âsweetheart,â and their perfume lingered on long after they had gone back to the house.
On the ranch, on long days a-horseback, I did lots of listening, for I felt at my age I had few stories worth telling. What I was learning, in those days, was to be a good audience. I honored the storytellers by being attentive, by riding carefully abreast of them so as not to miss a single word.
Life on the ranch, of course, was not all stories of the past. Drama was a part of everyday life. One summer day Ern Morgan sent me off to help on the Marsh with an old cowboy named Roy. We shunned the roads and cut across country, both of us tired of the usual well-worn trails.
Roy was up in his seventies but fighting old age as though life had gone too fast and there were still places to go and things to do. I remember listening to the creak of him as we trotted along through towering virgin ponderosa pines, leaving a faint trail of pumice dust as we rode. I wasnât sure whether the creak came from his old bones or from his ancient Hamley saddle, which showed a lifetime of hard use. We were conscious, both of us, that one day these giant trees would be cut and hauled away, and we had best drink in the scenery before it was gone.
I had the usual pity of youth for the old, after seeing that Roy needed a pine stump to mount and having heard him groan as he settled into the saddle. But before the day was out I learned that the old man had plenty of life left in him.
That afternoon we were dropping down off the ridges to the edge of Klamath Marsh, along Big Wocus Bay, when the old manâs horse stepped on a stick and began to limp. We still had miles to go, and there seemed to be little
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