Cowboy culture to be told through stories
Staff writer
Barbecue and storytelling will share the stage at 7 p.m. April 18 in Peabody when Ron Wilson brings cowboy poetry and rural storytelling to the community.
Porcupine Tea Company and Mercantile will serve barbecue cowboy dinners across the street from Peabody Township Library beginning at 6 p.m., setting the tone for an evening rooted in Kansas history and culture.
For Wilson, the setting matters.
“When you walk or drive into a community, you get a sense of are the buildings maintained? Are businesses active? Are there boarded-up stores?” Wilson said. “Those are all indicators. And then the important thing is to interact with the people and really get a sense of how they feel about their town.”
Wilson has spent decades doing just that.
Since the 1990s, he has traveled Kansas as both a rural development specialist and a cowboy poet, sharing stories of people and places that define small-town life. His work centers on keeping stories alive not as nostalgia but as something still present.
“This is the place where the cattle drives had as their destination,” Wilson said. “Their whole goal was to get to Kansas.”
Through cowboy poetry, those histories are experienced rather than simply recalled.
“Cowboy poetry celebrates the American West, and sometimes in a way that pure prose does not,” Wilson said. “It paints an image in the mind of the listener.”
Wilson’s focus is on authenticity over myth.
“We have the authentic history in Kansas,” he said. “It’s not Hollywood. “It’s the working cowboy and the modern-day farmer and rancher. But it’s also the cowboy values, to hang tough, to work hard, to try to do the right thing.”
While rural communities face change, Wilson said their identity remains intact.
“Headlines of the demise of rural Kansas — I just don’t buy it,” he said. “Rural Kansas people are very resilient.”
That resilience shows in people whose stories he continues to find.
“There are real Kansas people doing really innovative things and making a positive impact on their communities,” Wilson said.
Preserving those stories takes effort.
“We have to be aware and value our neighbors, our communities, our history, our heritage,” Wilson said. “Because if we don’t, it’ll slip away from us.”
In Peabody, his goal is simple.
“We want to appreciate Western history, but we want to have some fun and celebrate cowboy life and rural life,” Wilson said.