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well, or she is extravagant; she must dress well enough, or she is slovenly; she must conciliate every woman, or she is proud; she must not attract the eye of any one else, or she is a cad; she must attract the eyes of some, or she cannot properly help her husband. She must not comment upon members of the congregation, or she is a gossip; she must comment upon them, or she is negligent in her moral stewardship. But the minister's wife suffers only half of what the minister has to undergo. He deals mainly with women. The women are the mainstay of his church activities. He must be popular with them, of course, but not too popular. He must protect himself against the appeals some of the women make upon his nature; a church is a very little town indeed, and gossip is always tasteful to the virtuous. He must also protect himself from the ever-present soul or two who is ready to gush over the minister. He needs a steel armor to hide his feelings in, and the only thing available is his skin. He hardens and toughens that by use. He hides a little more deeply than usual inside of it and becomes what he pretends to be. He becomes an impersonal agent, a passionless, smooth, much pretending, much talking being. There is little room for strength of character, for virile leadership, for genuine spiritual stimulus. The minister becomes a rather drab symbol that concentrates what the community says it wants to be, but what it really escapes from being by making of what it calls its moral leader its moral scapegoat. This is the price a man must pay for the profession of

ministering to the sins of the community.

No such estimate as is contained in this essay can possibly be suggested as a description of all members of the ministry. To do that would be both unfair and untrue. There are many men who have escaped submersion, and they are the great spiritual leaders of our time. But even they have rarely escaped in full. One finds among them a hankering after the dogmatic, the simple formula, the ready generalization, the simple credence in the efficacy of words, the readiness to pass judgment upon weighty matters, the curious selfcentered existence, and the feeling of a calling to save one's fellows rather than the sense of readiness to share with one's fellows, upon which real ministry depends.

The ministers who have escaped most fully from the particular pressures I have been discussing are those who have lent themselves to the newer movements in the church for positive social service: clinics, kindergartens, clubs, gymnasiums, various social activities, from help to the unemployed to that of organizing dances and picnics for the young folks. In so far as the minister has lent himself to the doing of real things, he has become a real person. But here it must be remarked that where he is becoming a social worker, one who works in the field of social problems, and actually does real things, he ceases to minister to the sins of the community and becomes a servant of its needs. Here a man finds a different field and becomes a different person.

I

The Birth of a Ballad

A Note on a Cow-Boy Minstrel

BY FREDA KIRCHWEY

T is still possible to go beyond the range of the radio and its tidings of stock quotations and the latest dance tunes. And yet as we traveled on foot and on horseback up the slow trail toward the ragged peaks at the head of the Green River Valley, as we left the easy ranges covered with cattle for a perpendicular desert inhabited by elk and mountain sheep, I carried with me a fear that we might yet come upon some outfit encamped in a narrow pass with a radio set beside the fire raising impudent arms to the genii of the air and demanding in that wide solitude the production of "It ain't gonna rain no more." It did not happen, but I have no doubt that many such blasphemies have been committed in remote corners of the mountains; and when they become common, then will be the long-heralded end of the real West. The sound of its own songs will die out with the men who now sing them; they will be copied into anthologies, their sources disputed, their texts compared, and the portable culture of New York will take over the West.

Of course we too carried with us the products of the radio, if not the instrument itself. New York's gayest jazz orchestra had tickled the ears of our guides, Bert and Charlie and Will;

they knew the words and tune of every song that Broadway dances to, and they knew the dances. But they still sang the old tunes, as they still danced the old dances-tunes that slip pleasantly from the edge of an ancient harmonica. Around our camp-fire, in our own bleak pass, we distilled strange mixtures. Late jazz and early ballad mingled and faded out on the thin air; the dying old and the strident new came from the same throats and announced to the mountains our age of change. And quite incidentally we stumbled upon the birth of a Westerm song as authentic as "The Cow-boy's Lament," and as breezy and effective as many that have already been collected and sold in books.

It was Charlie's song, and his own cheerful career makes it easy to account for. Charlie ran away into the mountains when he was a small child, beating his way from Seattle on freights and wagons, and he headed as straight as his fortunes would allow into the wildest country left in the United States. He read Daniel Boone and Kit Carson, and with vast tenacity and singular success he has made himself into the likeness of his heroes. From the day he left home he has earned his living herding sheep on lonely ranges, rounding up cattle,

"Yes, we buried him there on the lone prairie,

Where the owls all night hoot mournfully,

cooking, horse-wrangling, guiding, trapping, hunting. And now he is a substantial citizen with a homestead, which he leases to another man, six or eight horses, and an ability to live by the pursuit of adventure. Strangely enough, the joy of adventure has not We buried him there on the lone

Where the buzzards beat, and the wind sports free

prairie."

Such a song in all its local variations sounds well against a back-drop of dark emptiness and broken peaks. Charlie would sing it with mournful conviction, and then would swing from the contemplation of death to the equally melancholy theme of blighted love.

deserted him even though he hunts bears as a business; and after he has spent a winter alone in the mountains, with the snow piling forty feet deep in the cañons around his hut, and nothing to break into his awful intimacy with himself-after four months of that he "comes out" to a town of two hundred souls, sends his furs East, rounds up his horses, grub-stakes himself, and starts out again to spend his earnings in a summer of lonely freedom, riding and hunting and fishing through the mountains of Wyoming and Utah and And all pretty girls that don't prove Idaho. Sometimes he breaks his hu

"Oh, a curse on your gold, your silver, too,

true.

fly;

I'll stay on trail till the day I die.'

man fast by guiding a party of "dudes" I'll go back West, where the bullets or he gets a job during the fall roundup or works at a tie-camp. But nothing holds him for long-nothing but the mountains. And he is looking for a girl who will trap and skee all winter and take the trail all summer; but she must know how to cook and wash, too.

"O Billy, Billy, stay at home,
Don't be forever upon the roam.
There's more pretty girls, more truer
than I;

Don't go back West, where the bullets
fly.'

""The girl is married I adore;
I'll stay at home no more, no more.
I'll go back West to the sage-brush
land,

Charlie was younger than the other two guides, but he seemed older. His independence of human companionship, his conscious feeling for the hard romance of the mountains, his steady belief in the glamour of a life of freedom, made him a mature and complete person. All three of our guides made I'll go back West, join a cow-boy the same jokes and told the same stories, and in the same rumbling minor sang songs of loneliness and death.

66

band.""

There were many songs, all of many verses, sent up into the darkness that

In a narrow grave just six by pressed in against our fire, and the three liveliest, sung loud and often, turned We buried him there on the lone out to be the song of Charlie's own making. The chance is small that it

prairie.

has been printed or even written down before, though it has doubtless spread, as such songs do, out through the circles of Charlie's friends and their friends; therefore it is worth giving here, with all its spirited imperfections and with the story of its painful and comic birth.

Imagine Charlie hunched lean, redbrown, dressed in jeans and flannel shirt, his eyes fixed on distances beyond the darkness and the black cliffs that faced us across the river. Bert and Will were smoking; the rest of us crouched close to the fire, smitten by the cold behind us. Charlie wiped off his harmonica and put it carefully away in the rear pocket of his trousers. He ignored the rest of us and raised his voice, making the steep walls of the cañon humbly repeat the stanzas of his saga:

"I was just bummin' round the town, Spendin' my time; Out of a job,

I did n't have a dime.

"When up steps a man.
He said, 'I suppose
You 're a bronco-fighter;
I can tell by your clo'es.'

"I thought he was right,
And told him the same,
And I asked if he had
Any bad ones to tame.

"He said he had one
That was quite bad to buck,
And for pilin' the cow-boys
He'd had lots of luck.

"I got all excited

And asked what he 'd pay If I'd ride that old pony A couple of days.

"He offered me ten dollars.
Said I, 'I 'm your man,
For the horse never lived
That I could not fan.""

"You know," said Charlie, conscientiously explaining, "fan with yer hat, like you seen Bert do breakin' that pinto pony back to the ranch."

"I don't like to brag,
But I 've got this to say
That I have not been thrown
For many a day.'

"He says, "Get your saddle;
I'll give you a chance.'
So we got in his buckboard
And drifted for the ranch.

"Early next morning, Right after chuck,

I stepped out to see

If that old pony could buck.

"He was down in the horse corral Standing alone,

A snaky-eyed outlaw,
A strawberry roan.

"Little pin ears

That touched at the tip, And an XYZ iron Stamped on the hip.

"Little hog-eyes
And a long under jaw-
All of the things you see
On a snaky old outlaw.

"I put on my spurs,
I was sure feeling fine,
I pushed back my hat,
I picked up my twine.

"Twine," explained Charlie, "means rope, lasso, lariat." He made a sug

gestive, loose-wristed gesture of his arm to complete the description.

"I dabbed that loop on him,

And I knew then

That before he was rode
I'd well earn my ten.

"I got the blind on him;
It sure was a fight.
Next came my saddle;
I screwed her down tight.

"I stepped up into his middle
And pulled up the blind.
'Git out of the road, boys;
Let's see him unwind.'

"I guess that old pony
Sure come unwound,
For he did n't spend much
Of his good time on the ground.

"He went straight up,
With his belly to the sun.
He sure was a sun-fishin'
Son of a gun.

"He lit on his feet
And turned up on his side;
I don't see how he kept
From shedding his hide.

"He was the worst bucker
I've seen on the range;
He could turn on a quarter
And give you back change.

"I tell you, no fooling,
That old pony could step.
I was still in my saddle
A-building some rep,

"And when I descended
Back down to the earth,
I lit into cussin'
The day of his birth.

"I know now

There's horses I can't ride;
Some of them is still livin';
They have n't all died.

"And I'll bet all my money
There's no man alive
That can ride that old pony

When he makes that high dive."

There were faults one could find with that song, but one does n't snatch up ill considered trifles of grammar and rhyme and meter and tune on a cold August night beside a hot fire. It was a good song. Surely pride was never followed more swiftly by the inevitable fall; and never, I feel sure, has the picture of an "ornery" horse been more neatly drawn.

"How about that 'slipped-it-in-high' line?" I inquired of Charlie.

"The Eastern fellers put that one in," said Charlie. "You see, how that song came to be written was this way. I was on a round-up job down toward the Red Desert." He pointed his thumb over his shoulder into the darkness.

"We was all pretty busy and short of men, and one day a couple a young fellers drifted in. They had some outfit. Yeller an' pink han'kerchiefs, ol' wore-out chaps, second-hand Montgomery - Ward saddles, saddles, hats about a foot high. Of course anybody 'd know they was dudes, but it never struck them how they looked. They thought they was fixed up all

"When with one of his big jumps O.K. They said they could ride

He slipped it in high,

And left me sittin' on nothin' 'Way up in the sky.

seemed to kind o' take pride in their ridin'-so the ol' man took 'em on;

said he 'd give 'em a try-out, anyhow.

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