America’s first cowboy poet

The idea of cowboy poetry, as opposed to other poetry, is that cowboys write cowboy poetry, not that they can’t write any kind of poetry they want.  A Texan named Lysius Gough published a book titled Western Trails and Other Rhymes in 1886, which is generally considered the first book of cowboy poetry. 

Gough, born in Lamar County in 1862, qualified as a cowboy by the time he was a teenager but he was barely literate when he ran away from home at age 14 due to what he described as “a minor family incident.” He found work herding cattle from northwest Texas to New Mexico, Reno and Kansas for B.L. Murphy in Hopkins and Hunt counties and he stayed with it for five years. His experiences on the trail provided him with the raw material for much of his poetry, which he began to scribble down as he was able. 

When he was 20 some men in a buggy approached him in Montague County and asked if he wanted to take one of their horses to Red River Station. Gough obliged the men, one of whom, Jules Gunter, asked if he wanted to accompany a whole herd of horses to the T-Anchor Ranch in the Texas Panhandle. Gunter’s family owned the T-Anchor, which had holdings in Grayson County as well as the Panhandle. Gough stayed at the T-Anchor for two years until a chuckwagon cook named Gus Lee gave him some good advice. 

“Parson,” Lee said to Gough. The other cowboys called Gough “Parson” because he never swore. “Do you know you are a damn fool? You have no school education and if you go back to the ranch you never will have. My advice to you is to go home and go to school.”

Gough heeded the advice and enrolled at Pilot Point Institute in Denton County.  His 10- and 12-year-old classmates marveled that any grown man would quit a perfectly wonderful job as a cowboy to sit with them all day in a classroom. Gough graduated and took over as the school’s principal.. By then he was already a published poet, having published Western Travels and Other Rhymes while he was still in grade school. Ever restless, he also studied law and moved his growing family to the Panhandle during the early days of that region’s settlement.

Gough was the first school teacher and the first county judge in Castro County and the first mayor of Dimmit. He performed some of the first experiments in the Panhandle with various strains of crops and seeds and later operated a sprawling wheat farm in Deaf Smith County.  He served as the first president of the Panhandle Wheat Growers Association. 

In that role, he studied how the grain exchange operated in relation to how much he and other wheat farmers got paid and he didn’t like what he found. He published a book called Crime which denounced in no uncertain terms the speculators he charged with manipulating the grain market to the benefit of the speculators and at the expense of the farmer.

“When strawberries grow on poison ivy and cows sit erect on cacti and sing ‘Home Sweet Home’ the farmer will come into his own by borrowing more money,” Gough wrote. 

Gough helped organize a reunion of T-Anchor cowboys at a park near Hereford in 1922. Gus Lee, the cook who had advised Gough to go back to grade school as a 22-year-old, was on hand to make sourdough biscuits for the boys, who reminisced and listened as Gough recited his poetry.  

Gough published a second volume of poetry, Spurs, Jingles and Saddle Songs in 1935, which contained several poems from the first book along with some new material. He kept writing until the day he died, Nov. 4, 1940, in Amarillo. A poem found in its typewriter was titled, appropriately, “Gone.”