>>FEATURE
TO BE A COWBOY
Oliver Christensen, as told to Barbara Holliday
University of Calgary Press, 148 pp.
Singing cowboys like Roy Rogers, paintings of wranglers riding an open range, a day’s work with only the weather as your boss – these were the images and notions that made up the dream of being a cowboy during Alberta’s ranching era.
And these were the attractions for Oliver Christensen, the son of a Denmark farmer who came to Western Canada in search of hope and abundance.
By the time Christensen turned 16, he was doing a man’s work on his father’s grain farm, eager for adventure away from home. At that time, there seemed no better life than that of a cowboy, he says. He could ride a real saddle horse, not the heavy farm horses he rode bareback, and he’d make a fair dollar, earning as much as $90 a month during haying season.
Christensen’s dream, which began with the drawing of a horse on a school scribbler his father used as a journal, came true when he was hired on at the Bar U Ranch in 1945. The ranch, south of Longview, was Western Canada’s most famous outfit, world-renowned for its cattle herds and Percheron horses.
Christensen’s time at the Bar U is told in the book To Be a Cowboy, written in Christensen’s words as told to author Barbara Holliday, a former historian at the Bar U Ranch National Historic Site. Christensen, now 81, only worked two years at the Bar U, but the experience remains one of the highlights of his life.
"Who wouldn’t want to ride all day with that view, up against the mountains, under a blue sky and in clean air?" Christensen asks during an interview at the Bar U, his large hands sweeping along the foothills he came to know so well.
So why did he abandon his dream and a ranch known for hearty food and fair treatment? It turned out that the romance of the cowboy life didn’t square with the real thing.
"The attraction was stardom. You were going to be like Roy Rogers," says Christensen. But hearing lyrics about cow camps beneath a starry sky is a lot different from living the reality of Mother Nature’s wrath. Whether it was raining, hailing or snowing, Christensen and the other Bar U riders were expected to put in a full day’s work without complaint.
"It really was a dead-end job. You either ended up crippled, or working the grub line, going from camp to camp to make a living. The time of big ranches was just about over. I was there in the twilight of the era," says Christensen.
So he left, eventually returning to run his father’s grain farm until 1979, when he was electrocuted while lifting an irrigation pipe that hit a power line. But Christensen never gave up his love of the cowboy culture.
"When I quit, I took my angora chaps and my hard-twist rope to Bradley’s (tack store) in High River. I knew if I didn’t sell them, I’d be tempted to go back," he says.
If riding horses for a living began as a dream, then the naming of the Bar U Ranch as a national historic site was Christensen’s second dream come true. Now, as a volunteer, he can share with visitors his Bar U experiences, without having to endure hammerhead horses and bedroll bedbugs.
His stories are colourful, but none are tall tales, he insists. "A cowboy never lies. Like this one time I spurred my horse and he went right up so high, I was picking leaves from the tops of the trees. When I landed, I left a three-foot crater, but it was covered over in the floods, so the hole is no longer there for me to show anyone. It’s now just a story," he says. "But it’s a true one."
Christensen is proud of Holliday’s book, noting it was released on his 80th birthday. But readers may feel somewhat misled by the title, since less than half the book details Christensen’s two years on the Bar U. Much of it consists of a portrait of his late father Otto, detailing his life from the time he purchased land from the CP Rail in 1914 to his success as a grain farmer with 800 acres, a house with a coal furnace and his own threshing outfit.
In this respect, To Be a Cowboy is an honest sample of the Prairie experience, reflective of all those who immigrated to this country in hopes of forging a better life in the Canadian West. It captures the day-to-day toil involved with putting a meal on the table, from stooking hay by hand to driving a team of horses spooked by an eclipse. Just as Otto began to find success in owning his own threshing outfit, the Depression struck, and his crop earnings for 1930 were $201, less than a tenth of wheat sales in 1929. There was nothing romantic about his life, and it’s little wonder his son was seduced by the romance of the cowboy life.
And that same romance keeps Christensen going back to the Bar U as a volunteer. Visiting the barns keeps him young, he says. "I’m 21 years old when I come back here." In many ways, he’s still riding the dream. |
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