My name is Nancy Dawn Wadsworth. As many of you know, I am Bill’s daughter. Another piece of my identity is that for the last twenty-five years I have been a student and professor of American politics and culture, mostly at the University of Denver.
I’ve studied my dad’s biography pretty closely, especially recently, so I’ve stacked up lots of notes, stories, interviews, and other archives—including stories you all have told me. In part, this helps me make sense of my own life, but I’ve also been working on a project about how our very different identities and experiences illuminate the paradoxes, possibilities, and difficulties of our country’s trajectory over the past five decades. For today, though, I want to share some personal reflections that might be comforting to those of you who knew and cared about Cowboy Bill.
I’ve heard many of you talk about Bill as a kind of legend. It seems like every person I’ve spoken to since he passed has commented that you never met anyone quite like him, that he seemed to have lived an epic life filled with so many unusual experiences that it’s hard to believe some of his stories could be real! But you’ve also shared that he was someone
who really mattered to you—a good neighbor, a charming coworker; the kind of uncle or father or grandfather you always wanted; maybe a spiritual mentor, who shared something that has influenced you ever since. For so many of you, he was a dear friend, and even someone you aspire to be more like.
In this moment of making sense of life without his familiar presence around here, three things have landed with me as especially valuable gifts—not from any particular wisdom he tried to dispense, but from the way he lived. They are: the importance of doing useful labor, faith as a discipline, and the value of being active in community. They sound simple, but
each in their way is remarkable when sustained over a long lifetime.
In terms of useful labor, it says something about Cowboy that he was working full time through the last week of his life. In fact, four days before he died, I had been with him, hanging out on his shift at the Visitor Center, watching him welcome folks in, as I have many times over the years. How many people can you think of who are even capable of working full time at ninety-six years old? And, really, it was more than that when you count helping out at The Divide, or picking up spare shifts giving tours at the museum on his “days off.” I think our dad was able to work because being of use fed his life force, and that, in turn, influenced the people he crossed paths with.
Several years ago, I got a call from an Encampment friend who was worried about why in his late-eighties Cowboy was commuting to Rawlins a few days a week in the winter to stock shelves at Wal-Mart. I basically had to say, “Sir, are you going to try to make that man stop working? Good luck!” The reason he never retired wasn’t because he couldn’t have, but because he was happy being of use. (And if we’re honest, he also never met a side-gig he could turn down). He loved meeting people, learning, and sharing knowledge—and this took him to some far-flung quarters for work. Places like the big island of Hawaii for varied construction projects, North Dakota for the sugar beet harvests, and Talladega Super Speedway to help out at the races.
As his children, my brother and I learned the value of useful labor as little kids, helping Daddy clean up and restock our bar in the High Sierra on mornings after busy nights. I learned how to count out a cash register before I was 7, and my brother Bill saw the value of cleaning under bar tables when rewarded with lost change and an occasional bill! There is no doubt that our father’s work ethic, across all the differntt jobs he held, influenced us to be hard workers in our own fields. His willingness to work, and work hard, also kept Daddy connected to all kinds of people, walks of life, and community.
As with the value of honest work, Daddy’s life demonstrated, to me at least, how faith in something much larger can be a discipline that fortifies the spirit and provides comfort in the darkest hours. To my knowledge, he didn’t become seriously religious until we were going through a hard separation and divorce, but it was clear that his deep study of the Bible and the intimate relationship he developed with his Lord helped him through the hardest parts of his life, as the song goes, “one day at a time, Sweet Jesus.” There is no way to truly know what someone else’s faith is like from inside, and many of you knew that part of him better than I did, but I have always admired his dedication to his core spiritual beliefs, and his willingness to live into his faith until the final seconds. It delights me to imagine him reunited with a Creator of unfathomable magnificence, mercy, and grace.
Whether it was the hundreds, maybe thousands, of sermons and Bible studies Cowboy attended over the years, or his sewing circle here in Encampment, or at the Senior Center, the Ranchers Family Camp Weekend, and across many other arenas of his life, Bill enjoyed being part of the community. I’d like to share a quotation from a speech I heard recently from a wise man named Guy Burgs, which I think captures something Cowboy did naturally. He said:
The chance to be part of [a fortunate human life] happens briefly.
The invitation is not to show how inventive and imaginative you are
But how much you can notice what you’re already part of
And appreciate it and share it
And care about those that are around you, and look out for their welfare
While you are looking out for your own. That’s it.
And then you’ll get to the end of it, having had an awesome time
Knowing that that is something you’d recommend to others.
It was this noticing, this appreciating, this looking out for others, that led to Cowboy Bill having friends across all ages, and people everywhere he went being happy to see him. This kind of life is truly exceptional, and right now we live in an era marked by unprecedented levels of loneliness and, for many, a sense of isolation. If all of us were as willing to be part of our communities, even with folks who live or believe differently from us, like some of the folks who swing through the Encampment/Riverside Visitor Center from all over the world, we would no doubt have a more interesting, richer, and much less volatile world.
I am grateful for and proud of the example Daddy set for us and others in his work ethic, his disciplined faith, and his active membership in community. Before closing, I want to offer one last note, and it is about the difference between the polished personas we cultivate and our more complicated real selves.
Cowboy crafted his own image carefully, and that image changed over time. Across 96 and a half years, he was all of the following: a farmer’s son in Depression days, a Navy man, a ranch hand working cattle in his twenties, a ballroom dancer, a keen student who eventually earned a Master’s degree in psychology, a schoolteacher, a carpenter, an outstanding skier, a business owner, and a traveler.
Eventually, and I don’t think it happened until late into his sixties, he became this colorful, well-dressed, silver-haired character who answered to the nickname Cowboy. By that point in his life, the name made perfect sense: he had been refining his Western dandy look from his ranch hand days to his avid attention to the rodeo circuit where he attended Cheyenne Frontier Days and the Pro Rodeo Finals for decades. In many ways, he lived into that image authentically. But as with any image so steeped in history, legend, and myth, like the American cowboy, more complex stories breathe beneath the surface.
In his nearly 100 years on the planet, Bill lived some lives none of us knew much about. He had a marriage before the one with our mother, and an adopted daughter he lost to choices made by someone else, whom he never forgot. For many years he was a respected teacher in the Los Angeles County School system, teaching English and history to hundreds of young people. I know that after we were off to college, he had some years of loneliness and a fair bit of wandering without a clear purpose. He could be gruff, impatient, Puritanical, a bit vain. He didn’t always know how to connect with his children and grandchildren, though he loved us all dearly.
I share these things not to take anything away from the vision I have tried to offer here of a long life well-lived, but to remind us that any legend worth his salt is multidimensional.
Perhaps living an epic life is always a dynamic dance between the personas we live into and the true selves we are. While Cowboy Bill was as complicated and imperfect as the rest of us, I am also so proud to be the daughter of this extraordinary man.
Thank you all again, and now we will lay his ashes to rest.