Fathers, Sons, and North Dakota: Cultivating the Ties That Bind on the Agrarian Landscape

Cover Photo: Marshall “Bud” Taylor on a quarter horse stud named Squab at the Taylor Ranch, Towner, N.D., 1958

By Ryan M. Taylor

One reality I’ve resigned myself to is that I’ll never get every book read that ought to be read. That’s one reason I appreciate book recommendations to help me sift through all that might interest me.

Several years ago, a friend recommended Iron John by poet Robert Bly to me. It’s subtitled “A book about men,” and even though I wasn’t a father at the time I read it, I was a devoted son. Now that I am a father of two sons and a daughter, but have lost my own father to age and Parkinson’s, I find myself thinking often of the themes I discovered in Iron John.

I read a little of everything, and although poetry and mythology aren’t regular residents of my literary nightstand, I’m not afraid of them either. I hadn’t had a lot of exposure to Robert Bly, and, if you Google him, you’ll find a range of opinions on him and his work, but I thank this poet laureate of Minnesota for getting me to think about my father, fatherhood, and male mentoring in a new light.

Left: Bud and Ryan Taylor, 1977 (photo by Corinne Dokken Frey) Middle: Bud and Ryan Taylor with a tough little ranch pony named Geronimo, 1974 (photo by Elizabeth Taylor) Right: Bud Taylor on his John Deere 60 and Ryan Taylor on the ground on the Taylor Ranch hay meadow, 1992 (photo by Elizabeth Taylor)

It’s an interesting world we live in where a Harvard-educated poet can speak so directly to a North Dakota cattle rancher. We are all connected, though, no matter how we try to divide ourselves, so it shouldn’t surprise me. “Mitakuye Oyasin,” or “All my relations,” as my Lakota friends would say.

Bly uses the story of Iron John, a Grimm fairy tale, to voice some opinions on the way male relationships have changed as we’ve moved from an agrarian- and craft-based culture to an industrial age.

It’s rare now for fathers and sons to work alongside each other. More often, a father is someone who leaves early in the morning to go and ply his trade and comes home at night for a few hours, or less, of family time.

Although North Dakota, by definition, is considered an urban state because the majority of our people live in incorporated cities and towns, most of us still consider it rural and agrarian. As a rancher’s boy, I’m a bit of an anomaly to the typical industrial age son, and for that I am grateful.

Some of my earliest memories are being outside on the ranch with Dad— feeding cattle, making hay, riding horse, doing chores of one kind or another. Now that Dad is gone, I feel like the luckiest son in the world to have had that “quantity time” with him.

Bly says the father as a living force in the home disappeared when the demands of industry sent him away to work in the factories. The living father force, however, was always present on our ranch.

Bly would probably say our ranching relationship was a little like tribal culture. “Fathers and sons in tribal cultures live in an amused tolerance of each other. The son has a lot to learn, and so the father and son spend hours trying and failing together to make arrowheads or to repair a spear or track a clever animal. When a father and son do spend long hours together, which some fathers and sons still do, we could say that a substance almost like food passes from the older body to the younger.”

I certainly received that food, and the teaching, as Dad and I tried and failed in amused tolerance of each other while working cattle and completing all the regular, seasonal tasks on a ranch. Conversely, Bly says, “When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, and not his teaching.” The act of teaching, he says, sweetens our sometimes harsh and human temperaments.

I’ve lost track of all the things my father taught me. Some of the lessons are pretty common—how to shut a gate with a double half hitch or tie a horse to the hitching rail with a bowline knot, how to prime the leathers of a well cylinder beneath a windmill, how to judge when the hay is ready to be stacked or baled. I continue to do these common things so often; they are constant reminders of him that have helped me handle the grief of his loss.

I always knew that my relationship with Dad was special, and different, from many of my friends whose fathers had to leave for work every morning. But Dad was different, too, because he was 48 years old when I was born so it was a little like being raised by a grandfather.

While my friends’ fathers were baby boomers, my father was a World War II veteran of the South Pacific. He was a boy who grew up taking on odd jobs to help his family through the Great Depression. Those circumstances shaped him, and, in turn, helped to shape me.

One circumstance that shaped Dad was that he was raised without a father. When Dad was just a year and a half old, his father died from smallpox—he was unvaccinated. What’s more, in the short span of time between 1921 and 1923, his grandfather also died suddenly from a rupture and his young uncle was killed when he was rammed by a grown steer.

That meant every man on the ranch had been tragically taken within 16 months time, leaving two widows to care for two small boys and a soon-to-be-born baby girl. So my father never knew a father, or had the male presence of his uncle or grandfather in the immediate vicinity.

But he did have his father’s cousin from Montana named Gordon and he would become the father figure in Dad’s life. I don’t want to overstate the whole male mentoring influence on rearing boys because Dad, one of the truly wonderful people in this world, was first and foremost a product of his mother and grandmother’s care and nurturing.

I always described him as a gentleman who was a gentle man, who was caring and thoughtful, who put stock in relationships and knew the importance of helping a neighbor. Those traits were surely influenced by the strong, independent women who raised him and brought the young family through the 1930s.

But, there was a need for a man in the young boy’s life, and that’s where his elder cousin came in. Gordon was a cowboy’s cowboy who ranched in the rugged breaks of the Missouri River near Culbertson, Montana. He grazed several hundred horses in the area and made his living trading horses at a time when horses were still a valuable tool on the northern plains.

When Dad was a young boy he would get on the train and spend entire summers on Gordon’s horse ranch, and I think that was his “Iron John” time when he left his mother and discovered the metaphorical wild man in the forest.

Gordon was plenty wild when it came to riding bucking horses and living in rough country, but pretty tame in social ways as Dad said he never saw his male mentor drink, smoke, or gamble.

Bly speaks often of the importance of initiation in a boy’s development when he leaves his mother and his father to be with the wild man. For Dad, I believe he accomplished that when he was 14 years old and he helped Gordon chase 40 horses from Towner to Jamestown, North Dakota.

It was 1935 and the overland horse chase took several days of camping and herding as one of the two rode horse and the other drove the 1927 Buick coupe with the camping gear. The food was pretty ordinary and Dad always remembered Gordon buying a pail of eggs at a farm along the way. When Dad asked how he was going to keep the eggs from rotting, Gordon built a fire and boiled the whole pail. Dad claimed he ate enough hard-boiled eggs for a lifetime on that trip!

Dad spoke often of this grand boyhood adventure so I know it had a big impact on his development. He was just 14 but he was given a grown man’s responsibilities to help chase and sell those horses. Gordon bought him his first hat, boots, and saddle. He made him a cowboy, and a man.

My male mentoring and initiation with Dad was more of a long and continual process. It was the hundreds of summer sausage sandwiches shared in the hayfield at lunch time. It was the conversations that I took part in, or just listened to, as Dad visited and shared stories with hired help and family friends who helped us put up the hay on our meadow.

It was the visits and the silent time together while we dug postholes and built fence, or tamped in a railroad tie for a corner post. He’d be teaching while we were working. This is how you run the fence stretcher, this is how you measure the distance between the top wire and the ground (it’s hip height on a tall Taylor), this is how you practice your stoicism when you rip your hand open on the barbed wire and watch the blood trickle onto the ground.

We harnessed teams, saddled horses, and broke colts. We branded calves, doctored cattle, chased cows, and learned the temperament of animals and the proper temperament for people who work with them.

This all took time, and Robert Bly validated that time for me. There was no shortage of stories for me to share in the eulogy I delivered at Dad’s funeral because our time together allowed for the creation of so many. He had given me his time in abundance, and with that “substance almost like food passing from the older body to the younger,” I knew that I had been well fed.

But ranches and farms are fewer on our landscape and there are fewer families with careers that allow them to work side by side.

Yet, I believe fathers and sons, male mentors and boys, can make the most of the time we are given. Society will reap the benefit of young men with a sense of direction and the grounding of their fathers and close male role models, rather than the skewed male icons of popular culture.

I take a couple of clear messages from Iron John as I ponder good fatherhood, and it matters not if you work from a ranch, an office or a factory. First, it’s about time and lots of it. If time is limited, don’t shortchange the little there is.

I think the time ought to be invested in three areas—the outdoors, working together, and teaching. In the fairy tale, I believe Iron John is found in the forest, in the outdoors, for a reason. As we continue to move ourselves indoors, it’s more and more important for all of us, but especially fathers and sons and male mentors, to get outdoors. The forest, the prairie, the green and living spaces are fertile ground for relationship building and initiation.

North Dakota has a lot to offer for outdoor experiences. Take advantage of it—camp, hunt, fish, hike, bike, learn our history, feel the sun, wind, rain or snow together.

Working together is easier for me as a rancher, but we can find chores and tasks in other settings as well. It could be in the garage or the backyard, or at the workbench.

We should be on the lookout for tasks and jobs where we can have long hours of “amused tolerance of each other.” I think it’s nice to have something to point to at the end of the effort. Stand back and admire the yard fence, listen to the rebuilt motor, appreciate the woodcraft you completed together.

Finally, teaching. It’s easy to be harsh or impatient after a long and stressful day. The act of teaching makes us think about the words we say, and reminds us that there is something to learn, that skills are not automatic but take some coaching from adults who are forced to keep their tempers in check.

We’re not teaching calculus here. We’re showing how to tie a knot, build a campfire, or explain some of the tasks we do when we are away at work.

Take the time to be a dad today, take the time to mentor a boy you know. Bly made me think and gave me some of the key ingredients in his book. It made me appreciate all that I have been given, and inspires me to be more giving. All from a poet writing about a fairy tale.

Ryan Taylor is a fourth-generation cattle rancher, author of the syndicated column, Cowboy Logic, and a North Dakota state senator representing District 7. He ranches with his wife Nikki and three young children near Towner, North Dakota.