A drifting cowboy

Thursday, October 29, 2026

Memories of Rancho Deluxe -- Jerry England's Cowboy Folk Art

Jerry and Joyce England's cowboy home in the mid 1990s

Between 1989 and 2002, Jerry England designed and crafted Molesworth inspired cowboy folk art furniture. He decorated his home in California which became his showroom...

Rivet of the Rivers: The Extraordinary Life of François Rivet, Voyageur, Mountain Man, and Patriarch of the Pacific Northwest

Overview

This is the true story of François Rivet (1754–1852), a second cousin seven times removed to the author, whose life traced the great river systems of North America from the St. Lawrence to the Missouri, the Columbia, and the Willamette. Born into a multi-generational family of Quebec voyageurs, Rivet crossed into the Mississippi drainage as a young man, survived near-death encounters on the Upper Missouri, paddled for Lewis and Clark as far as the Mandan villages, wintered beside Fort Mandan, and then plunged into the free trapper’s life in the Bitterroot and Flathead country.

He survived the deadly 1807–08 clash that killed John McClellan and most of their party, traded with David Thompson, formed a lasting country marriage with the Salish widow Therese Tête Platte, raised a mixed-blood family (including the stepdaughter Julia who became the wife of Peter Skene Ogden), served as interpreter and freeman for the North West Company and later the Hudson’s Bay Company, rode the Snake Country brigades under Alexander Ross and Ogden, and at age seventy-five was placed in charge of Fort Colvile. In 1838 he retired to French Prairie, formalized his marriage before the newly arrived Catholic priests, became a respected elder and community figure, and died at nearly one hundred—the last living link between the Corps of Discovery and the Oregon settlements.

Written as a historically rigorous yet novelistic saga in ten chapters, the book aims for the vividness and narrative drive that could attract a screenwriter seeking a sweeping frontier epic grounded in real events, real characters, and the complex meeting of French-Canadian, Métis, Salish, and American worlds.

Chapter One: Blood of the Voyageurs, (1754–1790s)

The bells of Saint-Sulpice rang across the flat river parish on the morning of 7 June 1754. Their sound carried over the long narrow fields that ran back from the Saint Lawrence like the keys of a great green piano, over the rail fences and the low stone houses with their steep cedar-shingled roofs, over the wooden wayside crosses that marked every concession road. Inside the little church the air was cool and smelled of beeswax, damp wool, and the faint sweetness of last year’s apples still stored in the sacristy. Father whatever-his-name-was that year poured the baptismal water three times over the red, squalling infant and named him François, son of Nicolas-Pierre Rivet and Marie-Madeleine Gauthier dit Landreville.

The godparents held him firmly while the Latin words washed over the stone walls. Outside, the great river kept moving the way it always had—brown and powerful in the June flood, carrying the melt of a thousand northern streams toward the sea. New France still flew the white flag with the golden lilies that summer. No one standing in the churchyard that morning could know how few years remained to it.

François Rivet was born into a family that measured time by the height of the water and the length of a man’s contract. His great-grandfather Maurice had stepped ashore from La Rochelle in 1664, a young man with a strong back and the hope of land. He had married Marie Cusson, whose own people were already putting down roots in the colony, and together they raised children in the shadow of Cap-de-la-Madeleine. Their son Pierre—François’s grandfather—had signed his first voyageur engagement for Detroit in 1703. Thirty-three years later he was still paddling, hired once more for the Poste de la Rivière Saint-Joseph. The notarial records still carry the careful script of Claude-Cyprien-Jacques Porlier: Gatineau et Hamelin embauché Pierre Rivet aller à Poste de la Riviere St-Joseph.

Nicolas-Pierre, François’s father, had followed the same current. In 1738 he signed with Marin Hurtebize for the Illinois country. The men of the Rivet line did not speak of these journeys as adventures. They spoke of them the way farmers speak of harvests—necessary, exhausting, sometimes fatal, always measured in livres and in the hope of returning before the ice closed the rivers.

The boy grew up inside that inheritance. Before he was tall enough to see over the gunwale of a canoe he knew the smell of spruce gum and bear grease, the weight of a paddle blade cutting water, the particular silence that falls when a brigade is working hard against the current. In the long winter evenings the old men gathered around the stove in the Rivet house or in the taverns of L’Assomption and sang the old songs. They sang of the rose that blooms in the springtime, of the girl left behind at Lachine, of the devil who waits at the worst portages to claim the souls of men who curse too freely. Between the verses they told stories of the pays d’en haut as if it were a second parish: the soft light on the prairies beyond the Mississippi, the way the stars looked bigger at Michilimackinac, the taste of buffalo hump roasted over a fire of dry willow.

François listened. He watched his father’s hands—scarred across the knuckles from poling, the nails permanently rimmed with black from gum and grease—and understood that those hands had held the same paddle his grandfather had held, and that one day they would place it in his own.

The Conquest came when he was six. In September 1760 the white flag came down over Montreal and the Union Jack rose in its place. For most of the habitants the change meant new officials, the same tithes, and the slow realization that the world had shifted under their feet. For the voyageur families the rivers remained open. The British merchants needed experienced paddlers as badly as the French bourgeois had. The contracts continued, written now in a mixture of French and the new language of power, but the work was the same: leave in the spring with a sash around the waist and a pipe in the teeth, return in the autumn (if the rivers and the tribes and the fevers allowed) with wages or with stories or with both.

By the time François was old enough to sign his own name—or more often simply to make his mark—the old French world had already become memory. Yet the blood remembered. In the 1780s and into the 1790s the notarial archives of Montreal and the surrounding parishes recorded the engagements of a young man from L’Assomption named François Rivet. The clearest that survives is dated 8 November 1791. Jacques Giasson hired him for three years to go “chaque fois que nécessaire”—wherever required—the Far North excluded. Three years of hard paddling, of portages where a man carried two pièces of ninety pounds each plus his own gear, of winters spent in country where the only law was the law a man carried in his own two hands.

He was already in his late thirties by then. No longer a boy chasing the romance of the trade, but a seasoned engagé who knew the difference between a good bourgeois and a skinflint, between a brigade that sang to keep the rhythm and a brigade that worked in surly silence. The records call him voyageur de L’Assomption. The older men still sometimes used the older, more dangerous phrase: coureur de bois. The distinction mattered less on the water than in the offices of the merchants who preferred their labor regulated and their accounts tidy.

What the contracts do not record is the look of the river at first light when the mist still lay on the water like a second skin and the only sound was the soft dip of paddles and the occasional grunt of a man settling into the day’s work. They do not record the taste of sagamité cooked with a little grease and a great deal of hunger, or the way a man’s shoulders and lower back felt after eighteen hours of upstream labor against the spring flood. They do not mention the nights when the northern lights moved like silent green and violet curtains above the black spruce, and a man lying on the cold ground wondered whether he would ever again hear the bells of Saint-Sulpice or taste his mother’s tourtière.

François Rivet carried all of that with him. He carried the blood of Maurice Rivet, the man from La Rochelle who had gambled everything on a colony at the edge of the world, and of Marie Cusson, whose people had already begun to turn the forest into farms. He carried the memory of his grandfather’s thirty-year career on the western lakes and his father’s journeys to the Illinois. And he carried something harder to name—a restlessness that the settled, fertile farms of L’Assomption could not quiet.

By the final decade of the century the great canoes were still leaving the warehouses at Lachine every spring, bright with new paint and heavy with trade goods. But the richest returns now lay farther west, beyond the old French posts, up the broad dangerous Missouri and into country that no Canadian brigade had yet fully mapped or claimed. Men who had grown up on the Saint Lawrence began to drift south and west, following credit, rumor, and the promise of better packs.

François Rivet was one of them.

When he finally turned his face toward the Mississippi drainage he did not go as a green hand seeking adventure. He went as a man already formed by three generations of river work—a man who knew how to thread a canoe through white water, how to read a sky for weather that could kill, how to bargain with strangers who might become either trading partners or enemies before the day was out, and how to keep moving when every muscle in his body begged him to stop and lie down.

The parish registers of Saint-Sulpice would continue without him. Children would still be baptized, couples married, the dead buried in the sandy soil near the church. The great river that had received the baptismal water from his forehead would keep flowing past the long lots and the steeple. But the deeper story that began with a splash of water on a June morning in 1754 was about to leave the Saint Lawrence behind. It would find its true current in rivers that still carried no French names on any map the merchants of Montreal possessed—rivers that ran through country where a man could still invent his own life, or lose it, according to the strength of his arms and the sharpness of his judgment.

François Rivet shouldered his pack, checked the set of his sash one last time, and stepped into the current that would carry him west.

NEXT

Chapter Two: The Missouri Beckons, (Late 1790s–1803)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-two-missouri-beckons-late.html

Rivet of the Rivers: The Extraordinary Life of François Rivet, Voyageur, Mountain Man, and Patriarch of the Pacific Northwest

Chapter One: Blood of the Voyageurs, (1754–1790s)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/rivet-of-rivers-extraordinary-life-of.html

Chapter Two: The Missouri Beckons, (Late 1790s–1803)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-two-missouri-beckons-late.html

Chapter Three: Engagé of the Corps, (1804–Spring 1805)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-three-engage-of-corps.html

Chapter Four: Free Trapper on the Missouri, (1805–1808)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-four-free-trapper-on-missouri.html

Chapter Five: Salish Country and a New Family, (1808–1813)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-five-salish-country-and-new.html

Chapter Six: Freeman Between Empires, (1813–1821)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-six-freeman-between-empires.html

Chapter Seven: Snake Country and “Old Rivet”, (1822–1829)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-seven-snake-country-and-old.html

Chapter Eight: Master of Fort Colvile, (1829–1837)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-eight-master-of-fort-colvile.html

Chapter Nine: French Prairie and the Big Wedding, (1838–1845)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-nine-french-prairie-and-big.html

Chapter Ten: The Long Portage Ends, (1846–1852)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-ten-long-portage-ends-18461852.html

Wednesday, October 28, 2026

Backroads Iconic sandstone formations helped shape more than 2,000 Hollywood films | Bartell's Backroads

Iverson Movie Ranch, was one of Hollywood’s busiest outdoor filming locations during the 20th century.

Check it out on John Bartell's Backroads from ABC10...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEC3_TXUmbM

Thanks for looking, Happy Trails

Friday, October 16, 2026

EMPIRES OF THE WILDERNESS: THE VOYAGEUR BLOODLINE OF LA PRAIRIE (1585–1917)

A Multi-Generational Saga of French-Canadian Voyageurs,

Carignan Soldiers, Pacific Pathfinders, and Montana Homesteaders

CHAPTER 1: THE VIKING TRAIL, CHAMPLAIN’S TRUCHEMENTS, & THE NORMANDY LINE (890–1678)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/empires-of-wilderness-voyageur.html

CHAPTER 2: THE STAGING GROUND AT LA PRAIRIE & THE LACHINE MONOPOLY (1626–1723)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-2-staging-ground-at-la-prairie.html

CHAPTER 3: THE FATHERS OF THE FUR TRADE & THE BOURASSA DYNASTY (1659–1756)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-3-fathers-of-fur-trade-bourassa.html

CHAPTER 4: OUTLAWS, OUTPOSTS, & WILDERNESS SURVIVAL- RENÉ BOURASSA DIT LARONDE (1722–1778)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-4-outlaws-outposts-wilderness.html

CHAPTER 5: UNITING THE LINES- THE CARIGNAN SOLDIER & THE BOOSHWAY (1682–1773)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-5-uniting-lines-carignan.html

CHAPTER 6: SHIPWRIGHTS OF THE ST. LAWRENCE- THE DUQUET CANOE MASTERS (1695–1799)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-6-shipwrights-of-st-lawrence.html

CHAPTER 7: REDCOATS, PONTIAC’S REBELLION, & THE DETROIT RUN (1770–1813)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-7-redcoats-pontiacs-rebellion.html

CHAPTER 8: THE BORDER CROSSING & THE NEW YORK MIGRATION (1803–1877)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-8-border-crossing-new-york.html

CHAPTER 8.5: THE PACIFIC PATHFINDER — FRANÇOIS RIVET & THERESA TÊTE PLATTE (1754–1852)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-85-pacific-pathfinder-francois.html

CHAPTER 9: THE TRAILS OF BIG SKY & THE CRESTON HOMESTEAD (1880s–1948)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-9-trails-of-big-sky-creston.html

EPILOGUE: THE UNBROKEN RIVER

• MASTER INDEX OF ANCESTORS, DATES, & LOCATIONS

• BIBLIOGRAPHY & HISTORICAL SOURCES

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/epilogue-unbroken-river.html

Sunday, October 11, 2026

FROM THE SADDLE TO THE SOD: THE BAILEY SAGA (1882–1903), ACT I: THE CITY BOY AND THE SHADOW COWBOY (1882), Chapter 1: The Weight of the Reins

The massive leather reins felt completely natural in Jackson Bailey’s hands, but the silence of the trail did not.

Back in Elkhorn, the world was a cacophony of iron wagon tires striking cobblestone, the sharp, rhythmic snaps of teamster whips, and the deep, low nickers of the massive Belgian draft horses his father bred. Jackson had grown up in the heavy shadow of his father, David Solomon Bailey.

He knew the precise geometry of a four-horse hitch before he knew his fractions. He knew how to read the flick of a colt’s ear to anticipate a sudden bolt, and he knew the hollow, distinct thud of his father's wooden leg stepping onto the floorboards of a freight wagon—a permanent reminder of a Mississippi battlefield called Brice's Cross Roads.

But at seventeen, the heavy freight lines of Elkhorn felt less like a trade and more like an anchor. Tucked into the pocket of his canvas coat was a crumpled Beadle & Adams dime novel, its cheap pages promising a life where a man didn't just haul another merchant’s dry goods; he rode the open range, free and answerable to no one.

When Jackson slipped away from the homestead heading toward Ord, he didn't leave empty-handed. He brought no guns, no grand cowboy gear, and no illusions about the elements. He brought something far more dangerous to the wild frontier: an edge. He possessed the quiet, unshakeable confidence of a boy who had spent his childhood staring at the broad, muscular backs of two-thousand pound draft horses, learning exactly how to command a beast with nothing but a shift in weight and a low hum in his throat.

As the northern trail turned to rolling seas of buffalo grass, the sky opened up into a bruising, infinite blue. Other drifters on the road looked at Jackson’s town-made clothes and assumed he was another daydreaming city boy destined to freeze or get thrown by the first wild mustang he tried to saddle. They didn't see the calluses on his palms from years of holding back runaway teams. They didn't know the stubborn, iron-willed grit he had inherited from an amputee cavalryman who had rebuilt a life from nothing.

Jackson looked back over his shoulder one last time toward the east, where the distant steam of the locomotives faded into the prairie haze. He didn't know that his secret cousin, the great showman Buffalo Bill Cody, was busy turning the rugged reality of the plains into a traveling circus. He didn't know that miles ahead, across the winding Loup River, a New York Infantry veteran named Marcus Pierce was coughing his life away inside a freshly cut sod house, leaving a daughter named Lillian to face the wilderness alone.

Jackson simply adjusted his hat, checked the stride of his horse with an expert's eye, and urged the animal forward. He was a teamster's son, and he knew exactly how to steer a destiny straight and true.

Chapter 2: The Greenhorn with Old Hands

https://a-drifting-cowboy.blogspot.com/2026/10/saddle-to-sod-saga-chapter-2-greenhorn.html

FROM THE SADDLE TO THE SOD:

THE BAILEY SAGA (1882–1903)

ACT I: THE CITY BOY AND THE SHADOW COWBOY (1882)

Chapter 1: The Weight of the Reins

https://a-drifting-cowboy.blogspot.com/2026/10/from-saddle-to-sod-bailey-saga-18821903.html

Chapter 2: The Greenhorn with Old Handshttps://a-drifting-cowboy.blogspot.com/2026/10/saddle-to-sod-saga-chapter-2-greenhorn.html

Chapter 3: The Earth and the Sky

https://a-drifting-cowboy.blogspot.com/2026/10/saddle-to-sod-saga-chapter-3-earth-and.html

ACT II: THE FADING FRONTIER (1883)

Chapter 4: The River Cut