Mickey McKnight by Judi Myers, published in the Sublette County Artists’ Guild book, SeedsKeDee Reflections, 1985, under the title “Rustler of Many Brands”.

“When I was born they had to tie my mother down so I could nurse, but when someone cut her loose, she took off and never came back.  My dad found a glove and cut a hole in one of the fingers & put it over the only bottle he had – a whiskey bottle – and that’s how I was raised.  I’ve had an attachment for bottles ever since.”

Three-fourths of a century later, Mickey McKnight still has an attachment to bottles.  For many years he could be found near the warm fireplace in the Corral Bar in Pinedale, Wyoming, sketching on a napkin in trade for beer or whiskey.  It only takes a few moments for the wild horse with flowing mane to materialize on the thin paper.  Mickey’s frayed overalls cover a heavy body and his plaid shirt is torn & dirty.  His ruddy face is partly hidden by a fuzzy beard stained with tobacco juice while his squinting eyes twinkle with merriment.  He is perpetually happy.

Poet, artist & alcoholic; Bible recite, liar & thief; creator of tall tales & teller of true stories – Mickey has a many-faceted personality.  It’s impossible to know where fact leaves off & fiction begins.  Even Mickey admits, “I’m the most truthful liar you ever seen.”

Before Mickey was five, his dad was caught for horse thieving and when they had him on the scaffold, a preacher came to give him the last rites.  Mickey’s dad, attempting to shove the preacher away, kicked the stool out from under his own feet & hung himself.

Mickey was left to be raised by his Indian grandmother & other people.  “My grandmother knew some religion and she taught me to read & write from the Bible.  I never went to school.  Everyone took a shot at trying to raise me.  One of them was a Scotsman and when I was a kid I’d get mad & that Scotsman would make me recite poetry and think about what it meant.”

Since then Mickey has been creating & reciting poetry as a means of expressing an experience he has had or of telling a story.  Mickey describes his verses as strictly barroom poetry:

            He rode into town with a dry, rusty throat

            He reached in his pocket for some money in his coat

            Then his handsome young face, it turned to a sneer

            As the bartender sadly told him the bar didn’t have any beer.

            His shouts & curses could be heard for a mile or more

            Right out through the big, swinging door

            Outside the little yellow dog, he cringed with fear

            As the bartender sadly told him the bar didn’t have any beer.

            So all through the battle of longing & strife

            He had to go home to his dear, loving wife

            “What’s the matter, Honey?  You’re home early, my dear.”

            And he sadly had to tell her the bar didn’t have any beer.

Mickey learned more than just poetry from the people who raised him & by the time he was in his early teens, he was following in his father’s footsteps.  He said, “When I was fourteen, I was wanted in ten different counties and had five sheriffs hunting me.   I was accused of horse thieving but nobody ever did prove it.  I took my lessons from the guys who stayed OUT of jail.  The gang stole some horses and paid me a hundred dollars to lead the sheriff off their trail.  It was a wet time of year, so I took those horses and put them where it was dry – in the sheriff’s barn.  The sheriff ran up & down the countryside like a mad man hunting where I had my cache.  I had to lay low a day or two, but there was grain & hay.  I didn’t mind if I got caught & hung ‘cause possessions is always nine points of the law & that sheriff would go with me.”

Another of Mickey’s abilities was his expertise with the running iron.  He sketched out a brand on a scrap of paper & demonstrated the ease with which it could be changed.  “With my branding we shipped seven carloads of beef every fall,” he laughed.

Mickey lived in Virginia City, Montana, during some of his cattle rustling days.  He said, “I had the house next to the graveyard.  I’d wait ‘til they dug a grave & then I’d take the hides from the stolen cows I had butchered and throw them in the fresh hole.  They got a lot of good men buried with stolen cow hides.”

This lifestyle made it hard to become a family man.  “I never did get married, but I had a lot of wives & the kids – well, I just claim ‘em all,” Mickey said.  “My first wife was a Blackfoot Indian named Seedka.  I traded six head of horses for her & I took her up the mountain, but coming down she got to fighting & I could see she wasn’t worth no six horses.  So, I slipped out and stole four of my horses back.  My kids’ll never know their roots.  Mickey McKnight isn’t my real name.  I took it off a dead man.  I was out with my Indian relatives when I was about ten years old and heard shooting so I hid in the wood pile.  When my dog ran towards me, the white men shot him.  The dog was the only one that knowed where I was.  The white men killed all the Indians but me.  I had to gather all the bodies up in a blanket, pull ‘em in the house and burn ‘em up.  One of the dead ones was Mickey McKnight so I took it.  Nobody knows my real name.  It’s the only thing that was given to me that I ain’t gived away in my lifetime.”

All of his life, Mickey has held belief in the lessons his Indian relatives taught him.  “Everything belongs to the Spirit.  The land belongs to the Spirit – you can’t buy and sell it.  You can use it, but you don’t own it.  It’s like the wind – you can’t hold on to it.  The great Spirit – that’s the Lord, same guy.  The Spirit doesn’t want you to abuse the land.  You don’t pick flowers just to look at ‘em ‘til they wither & kick over.  You only pick things, like the berries, to use ‘em and you never taken ‘em all.  It’s the same way with animals – you never take ‘em all.  These great white hunters don’t understand that.  They kill something & get greedy & want to shoot up everything.  But the Indian sheds sorrow for the animal because it might hold the spirit of one of his ancestors.  I trapped and caught some, but I never took ‘em all.  You always leave some for seed.  White people don’t understand that the land takes care of ‘em.  I was with an Indian friend one time when we met some of them forest rangers.  My friend asked me what a ranger did & I said, ‘He takes care of the forest.’  My dark-skinned friend replied, ‘Don’t he know that it’s the forest that takes care of the man?’”

Whether Mickey is philosophizing or spinning tales, the listener has no choice but to accept him with all the contrary aspects of his personality.  He accepts life as it comes & claims, “It’s been a good life, an interesting life.”  That life has included jobs as a blacksmith, medicine man, circus worker, foundry worker, headstone carver & miner.  As a miner he worked mostly hardrock digging for gold, silver, copper & coal.  The continual dust brought on frequent spasms of coughing which have persisted for the past 47 years.  Mickey has become philosophical about his cough, “It’s a good partner, stay with ya til ya die.  It don’t quit ya no matter that it’ll choke ya down.”

Mickey’s varied occupations were sometimes a bit less than honest.  During the depression, Mickey & his partner tried fur trapping.  “We just slipped into the park up there (Yellowstone) with our snowshoes & we’d catch mink or marten,” he said.  “We made $4800.00 & split it.  Never had so much money.  When the lawmen got to crowdin’ me too fast, I’d take off for the sea & go sailing for a couple of years so the law would have a chance to forget all the bad things I’d done.  When I was sailing I’d jump ship so many times that I’d have to use several aliases.  I lost my identity after sailing under seven different flags & when I got home I had to stand in front of a mirror and introduce myself.”

In the port city of Seattle, a Salvation Army woman came into the bar & asked Mickey for a donation.  Mick said, “What are you gonna do with the money?”

“Give it to the Lord,” was the woman’s reply.

Mickey said, “Why, how old are you?”

She replied, “I’m thirty.”

“Well, I’m forty,” said Mickey, “and I’ll be seein’ the good man before you do. I’ll just give it to him myself.”  But finally he did give her the money after she promised him a date.  As she headed out the door Mickey said, “Where will I meet you?”  She scurried out the door and yelled over her shoulder, “Brother, I’ll meet you up in heaven.”  Mickey’s bar friends enjoyed the scene & then went out & bought Mickey a Bible so he’d know which way to go.

Mickey says he never minded the kidding or the rough life.  “We all get took in this life,” he said, “and someone is always seeing the wrong side.  But I always see the humorous side.”

Another side to that lifetime has been forty years of wrangling, cowpoking & bronc busting.  Mickey spent many years in a cabin in the Red Desert Sand Dunes near Farson, Wyoming, where he could escape with stolen horses because the shifting sands covered his tracks.  In winter he’d catch & break the wild horses that roamed the ‘Walking Sands’.  The snow made a cushion for any falls he’d take & by spring he usually had fifteen head of horses to sell.  Other times he’d break horses for a rancher.  He was hired to break ten broncs once & on the seventh animal he fell & broke his arm.  The rancher wanted to take him to the doctor, but Mickey insisted on finishing the last three horses before he would leave.

Bronc busting has given Mickey the ideas and themes for his artwork:  “I used to travel around & I’d be breaking horses & see something amusing or comical & I’d draw it.  I guess my pictures used to be in every bunkhouse around.”  Two of Mickey’s recent paintings hang in the World Famous Corral Bar in Pinedale, while some of his fifty year old paintings are in Jackson Hole. (Some are also in the Stockman’s Restaurant in Pinedale).  Mickey landed a big commission back in the 1930s & painted the mural in the back room of the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar in Jackson, Wy.  A wealthy rancher there saw Mickey’s work & hired him to paint a room in his house.  Mickey didn’t like this rancher because of his penny-pinching ways & painted the first wall white.  “What’s this?” exclaimed the startled rancher.

“Well, I’m into pop art,” Mickey replied, “and this here is a flock of white ducks eating marshmallows in a snowstorm.”  The rancher gave Mickey another wall & it turned out white also.  Mick explained that it was a field of grass with cows.  The rancher wanted to know where the grass was.  “The cows ate it,” answered Mickey.

And where are the cows?” asked the rancher.

“Well,” said Mickey, “you wouldn’t expect them to hang around when the grass was gone!”

It’s impossible to tell where Mickey departs from the truth & begins spinning yarns.  Some of his least likely stories such as living under the bridge in Pinedale for two winters, turn out to be substantiated by many witnesses.  “The only trouble I had living under the bridge,” Mick said, “was that my boots froze to the ground.  I had to go to the bar just to get warm.  It was as good an excuse as any.”  Later he found an abandoned six by eight foot tool shed & threw a mattress on the floor.  There was no source of heat and some of the siding was missing, but it was better than being under the bridge.  Each winter morning the bar owners would find Mickey waiting at the door, jumping up & down & flailing his arms to keep warm until the tavern was open.  Mickey doesn’t complain about the times.  “I always had good times,” he said.  “People sit and moan & groan, but life is what you make it, I think.  You go through life hating everything or you go through with a song & dance.”

Recently Mickey has found a home at the retirement center in Pinedale.  He is able to write some poems, but his eyes have cataracts that prevent him from pursuing his artwork.  His aversion to doctors & medicine prevents him from getting an eye operation.  He talks in a low voice, often mumbling indecipherably and frequently stopping to spit his Copenhagen chew into a plastic cup.  Some of the chew juice ended up on his salt & pepper beard & some on his overalls.  Leaning back in his chair, he twiddled his thumbs & gave a monologue:  “Where did your little boy get that red hair?  You let him stand out in the rain too long & get rusted?  And those freckles.  He must’ve been standing behind a cow.  Did you know they had a ballet recital here?  They’re trying to change the culture of Wyoming!  You should go down the hall & mingle with the other people here.  They’re the upper crust.  You know what that is, don’t you?  That’s a bunch of crumbs stuck together with dough.”    He started to laugh in his easy way, but the laughter led to choking, coughing spasms.  He regained his breath and talked about life in the retirement center.  “Oh, I’ve got another home.  Everybody tells me to go there – to go to hell – but I ain’t homesick & I ain’t gonna make that rip ‘til I get around to it.  The lady down the hall is squirrelier than a pet coon and she thinks she’s got a dog.  So I got an imaginary dog, Old Fang, and I sicced him on hers.  If they wanna go bugs, you gotta go bugs with ‘em.  That’s the only way you can keep from buggin’ out yourself.   Oh, I’ve done some weird things in my life, but my mind’s still okay.  There’s old Joe, he was a cowboy.  It takes him thirty minutes to unfold his napkin!  What kinda cow camp I ever seen they unfold a napkin?  Why, we’d be seventy, eighty miles away from camp by the time he got ready to even move!  Those other people here feel sorry for themselves.  They think the television is their mother & father.  They won’t do nothing – they just holler for somebody to wait on ‘em.  They won’t turn a hand to help anybody else, but if they need help they squall like a cat with his tail in the screen door.  I get so I don’t have nothing to do with them cats.  I got this room to myself ‘cause nobody else can stand to be in here with me, but I won’t be here long.  I’ll escape, come spring.  Every spring a man’s gotta get out & wander around.”  The white walls of Mickey’s bedroom are bare except for two of his cartoons and a ranch hat with a worked-over brand on it.  The room is sparsely furnished with a bed, nightstand, chair & small table where Mickey works on some verses.  Behind his ever-present humor & fierce independence, he has a realistic philosophy reflected in his poem fragment:

Now I know someday we’ve got to go/ In dead of every hope/

So the cattle life is empty/And I’m lettin’ go the rope…

Postscript: Mickey felt penned in by the retirement center’s walls & left to live with relative & then a friend.  An illness forced him to use a walker, greatly limiting his mobility.  In the end Mickey sought a greater freedom of spirit than he was finding on this earth & ended his life on June 8, 1985.