ABSTRACT
Wally McRae could have been in his mid-fifties, or he might have been nearer seventy: he had that sort of a face. He had a bushy, sickle-shaped mustache and a complexion the color of an eggplant, and he was elegantly attired in a fancy embroidered waistcoat, cowboy boots, and a bowler hat. Of the 100 or so poets at the 14th Montana Cowboy Poetry Gathering, held in the decorous setting of Lewistown, he was probably the best known. He was certainly the most charismatic, and he treated us to a memorable cameo of cowboy poetry. One of his poems was a send-up of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ode to a Skylark; another hinted, more seriously, at the problems that threaten the rural way of life in the American West.
