about the author

         I was born during the depression, on my grandfather’s ranch in Stillwater County, Montana. Later my folks moved to Billings, where I went to grade and high school.  This is rodeo country; and a good portion of summer entertainment involved rodeo attendance.  It is also cattle country; and it was difficult not to grow up a  cowpoke of sorts by osmosis.

      As a child, back in the 1930's, my mother used to read cowboy western poetry to me and my siblings the way some mothers today read Dr. Seus.  One year for a birthday present, she  made me a scrap book with a wooden cover. She had burned on it a picture of a cowboy  ....and a stanza of the most widely known and acclaimed cowboy poem of the day...OUT WHERE THE WEST BEGINS. We  were small kids at the time, but we knew a  stanza or two of that poem. The scrap book was filled by me with my favorite cowboy western poems....and this poem heads the list. (Today, that 68 year old scrap book remains one of my treasured possessions.) 
                               
      There has been a renewed interest in cowboy western poetry in the past two decades or so with the Cowboy Poetry Gatherings...but back in those days, cowboy western poems were a part of everyday life.   Arthur Chapman is not widely known today...but in those day he was preeminent.   His poem OUT WHERE THE WEST BEGINS was even quoted in Congress.       

      I worked during high school as an usherette in a movie theater.   I worked my way through college as a long distance operator; and  I graduated from Rocky Mountain College in Billings Montana in 1954. For the next 18 years I worked as a Medical Technologist, chiefly in the field of toxicology.  Among other institutions, I worked at Texas Children’s Hospital and Southwestern Medical School in Dallas,  Los Angeles County Hospital in Los Angeles and Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys, California. 

         In 1974, I graduated from Drake University Law School.  Subsequently, I was employed as a Prosecutor in The Polk County Attorney’s Office, Des Moines, Iowa; and as Director of the Regulatory Division and legal counsel, Iowa Department of Agriculture.  For the last eight years, prior to my retirement in 1995, I was an Administrative Law Judge (tax cases).  Since retirement, I have been so busy I wonder how in the world I ever managed before retirement.  Besides writing poetry and fooling around on the internet, I am finishing a novel, RAPIST.  (It sounds pornographic…it’s not.  Actually, much of the background for the book is the Farmer’s Holiday Movement during the Depression.)

         I have just completed a volume of poetry, RUSSELL COUNTRY  

RUSSELL COUNTRY by Bette Wolf Duncan 



GREAT POEMS ABOUT THE OLD WEST!!

Hancock House Publishers
1431 Harrison Avenue
Blaine, Washington 98230-5005

                         Synopsis:
      This collection of poems is an echo of the stories Bette Wolf Duncan heard as a granddaughter of early Montana and North Dakota pioneers. These poems contain memories of a time when the great buffalo herds still thundered through the valleys, when Cheyenne and Crow still camped around the Yellowstone River, when mountain men and cowboys, prospectors and miners, rustlers and vigilantes still populated Russell Country.

                                                    order here:
                                                                      RUSSELL COUNTRY
                                                                      1755 S.E. 108th
                                                                      Runnells, Iowa 50237
                                                                      wacobelle@msn.com