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About "Doc" Dale Hayes:
"Doc" Hayes is a professor at
a public university in Manitoba, Canada. He runs a small
grazing operation for cattle of relatives and neighbors back
in the bush near Nesbitt, Manitoba and, each year travels to
different gatherings and poetry festivals around North
America. Way back when, he tried rodeoing for a while
but a blindbucker convinced him he was a school teacher and so
since those many years ago his non-job focus has been on
studying and recording tales of the cowboy way. He came by his
love of western storytelling and cowboy poetry as a result of
sitting in on bunk house bull sessions in Northern Arizona
back in the late '40s. For over forty years he has
collected cowboy stories and remembrances of Canadian and
American cowboys that often serve as a basis for his
poetry. He has had several books of poetry, academic and
western, published and his recent cd-rom Conversations With
an Old Horse is made up of his own original poetry and
several selected stories of the "Old West," backed up by
several good traditional western musicians. He can be
reached at http://cowboypoetry.hypermart.net/
or at dochayes@prairie.ca
A new video,
Cowboy Poets-Minstrels of the West features our our old
pard "Doc"
Dale Hayes and our Honored Guest Mike Puhallo
along with other talented folks. Read all about it here.
Doc Hayes says that the story of the family that settled near the
Lesser slave Lake in the poem, and who were overwhelmed by the
challenges of the far North, shows how much sacrifice it took to
open Northern Canada asit has been opened today.
Doc
Hayes has spoen to over 400 eduational and organizational training
and motivational meetings since the mid '70s. Doc has been featured
at many of the major gatherin;gs in both canada and the United
States. He is the producer and host of the Brandon Cowboy Poetry
Gathering and the Canadian Cowboy Chirstmas. He has been featured in
both regional and national television shows on Cowboy Poetry. He is
a member of the Academy of Academy of American Poets and the
Academy of Western Artists.
W. H. D. Koerner’s painting Hard Winter, originally
appeared as a black and white reproduction illustrating the novella
entitled Short Grass, by Hal G. Evarts. The text and
its images were serialized in The Saturday Evening Post from the
third week of May 1932 through July of that same year. Taking
cues from the story, Koerner may have encoded messages that
transcended the original heroic conceptions of cowboy mythology,
revealing a tragic figure on the brink of demise.
Self-congratulatory images and novels of the American West were
touchstones for many Depression Era audiences through magazines that
fortified American ideals of exceptionalism. Despite the fact
that audiences had not experienced the life-threatening hardships of
the western frontier, these images--especially cowboy
iconography--served as a comfort in that they were an insignia of
security and prosperity. Not only did Hard Winter have
uplifting resonance with many readers during this period of
distress, it began to dispel and deconstruct a one-sided mythical
heroism to disclose the underlying reality of the icon as a tragic
figure. This moment of despair in the national psyche
reiterated a sense of American adaptability to the Depression Era
audiences and reaffirmed their power to overcome periods of
turbulence. With Koerner’s image, new and seemingly unusual
bonds between the “lost” of cultures associated with cowboys and
Indians that fueled and reconfigured new mythical constructions and
perceptions of these western icons. Through an examination of
Short Grass, historical intersections, and the work of James
Earl Fraser and Frederic Remington, Hard Winter bound the fate of
two cultures, that of cowboy and Indian. Although a
comprehensive biography of Koerner is not the purpose of this paper,
I have included an exploration of personal circumstances and earlier
works that helped shape the artist’s vision as contextual sources of
artistic inspiration.
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