Jeanne Miller
Images of the American West
Santa Barbara, CA and Singapore

Why I Love the West

The western U.S. is a very important place to me, my spirit and my art. I have so many great memories of being there!  I remember one pack trip in particular, back in the early 1980s.  I left the Johnston Ranch in New Cuyama, California with my friend, rawhide braider, buckaroo, cowboy poet and general smooth talker, Dick Gibford.  On that wild ride up to the cow camp (I was on his broke horse -- he was on the 2-year old being ridden for the first time that morning…) he pointed out more native plants than a botanist would have, picking bay leaves for cooking and showing me the plants that the Chumash Indians of the area had used to make arrows.

Dick talked of his teenage years spent there on the Montgomery Portrero, riding with his pal Emery, whose folks had grazing rights on this huge and ridiculously beautiful piece of land-grant history.  He told me of riding his horse one day when a California condor passed overhead, with a shadow so large that at first he thought it was an airplane! He took me up to a Chumash Indian cave and showed me cave paintings, and we sat in that cave and watched the sun go down, drinking wine from a bottle that we had hauled all the way up those miles of switchback trails.  We couldn't swear to it, but we both thought we heard a low growl from above us as we sat so quietly in that cave. He speculated that it might have been one of the mountain lions that frequent the area.

We left Black Willow Spring after just a few days because a big front came through, and I was already wearing all the clothes I had brought, supplemented by about half of his, and besides, the wine was gone. He told me later, teasingly, I think, that it was my fault that the bear broke into the little cabin after we left. Said I made him leave in such a hurry that he forgot the cowhide that he was soaking in a bucket in the kitchen.  As a rawhide braider, that hide represented several weeks' worth of very raw material to Dickie.  The bear must have decided he liked the smell of that old rotting hide and went in after it, taking the hide and trashing the place…do I love the west? Do I go back every chance I get? You bet.