Western Wanderings - Will James Society's 1999 Annual Roundup in Colorado Springs, CO - Brief Article

Sunset, Oct, 1999 by Peter Fish

OUR MAN IN COLORADO SPRINGS

Heart of the West

* "We're actually a cult," Jack Wong confides. "Quite subversive."

I scan the convention center's ballroom. The singing cowboy has lit into an up-tempo number, and dancers skitter across the parquet: women in sequined dresses, men in bolo ties. At the Will James Society's Annual Roundup, subversion is hard to uncover unless you count devotion to the Texas two-step and a beloved Western author as suspect.

"It seemed like Mother Nature was sure agreeable that day when the little black colt ... tried to get a footing with his long wobblety legs on the brown prairie sod." Those are the opening words of Will James's Smoky the Cowhorse, and they may well be entwined in your memory like strands of DNA. Good children's books have that effect, and Smoky is among the very best.

The man who told Smoky's story was born Joseph Earnest Dufault in 1892, and he was raised, poor, in Montreal. The West was his grail. At age 15 he hit the road, ending up in Montana. He gave himself a new name, made himself a cowboy. But he had other talents, too. He was a naturally gifted storyteller - able to capture, in words, in drawings, the sweat and joy of life on the Western range. In 1920 he married a Reno girl, Mice Conradt, who encouraged his artistic career. That same year Sunset published some of the first Will James illustrations presented anywhere.

From then on, James lassoed popular success as effortlessly as he had any calf. Legendary Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins issued James's Cowboys North and South in 1924. Two years later came the best-seller Smoky, which the New York Times dubbed the Black Beauty of the cow country.

Attend a James Society Roundup and you can peruse new, used, and rare editions of the author's 24 books, buy reproduced illustrations, and watch one of three Hollywood versions of Smoky.

You can talk to his fans and discover that his work still serves as a touchstone for what Western life should be. "I grew up in Nogales, Arizona," Jack Wong tells me. "Cattle country. As soon as I hit the public library, I went for the horse books. And when I met Will James, I doted on him."

"Oh, people used to turn around and look as Will and Alice walked down the street, they were so handsome," Anne Hamilton tells me. Mice Conradt's niece, she grew up with tales of the couple's glamorous life in the '20s. At the height of Will's success, he and Alice would enter New York nightclubs and bands would strike up "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," in honor of Smoky. Back home, James's royalties bought him the Rocking R ranch, near Billings, Montana.

It all came crashing down. James's trajectory recalls that of another Jazz Age icon, E Scott Fitzgerald: the same abundant gifts, the same harrowing fall. To keep the ranch, James had to maintain a killing pace of selling drawings and magazine stories. He began to drink. In 1930 he published Lone Cowboy, his autobiography. It told of his life as an orphan raised by a Montana fur trapper. A lovely tale, none of it true. Says Jack Wong, "He knew that once that story unraveled, he'd be in trouble."

"In 1941 I went with Alice to Hollywood," says Anne Hamilton. By then, the Rocking R had been sold, Will and Alice had separated. "We cried our eyes out. He was so dissipated. We knew we were never going to see him again."

But you can read his books. The Will James Society publishes a newsletter and plans to fill the nation's libraries with James's works. For Wong, Hamilton, and other fans, it's the books, not James's life, that tell the true story - of a West of adventure and gallantry, where a cowhorse like Smoky can endure hardship but find peace back on his home range. The story's final lines still warm me like a campfire: "The heart of Smoky had come to life again, and full size."

Another two-step begins, and I join Anne Hamilton on the dance floor.

The Will James Society's Seventh Annual Roundup runs September 30 through October 3 at the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs; call (406) 656-7727, evenings, or Steve Zimmer at (505) 376-2281, days. Prints and drawings: Will James Art Company; (406) 656-2851. Books: Mountain Press Publishing Company; (800) 234-5308.