Montana Cowboy Poet Wally McRae Dead at 89
Songwriter Stephanie Davis says McRae was “just the best of us: the best of Montana, the best poet”
By Amanda Eggert, Montana Free Press
Cowboy poet Wallace “Wally” McRae of Colstrip died June 22 at the age of 89. McRae gained notoriety in Montana — and across the country — for the resonance of his voice and the causes he furthered with it.
The youngest of three children, McRae grew up steeped in cowboy culture and was drawn to entertaining from a young age. He found success in both arenas. In 2020, he was inducted into the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame. A long list of statewide and national organizations recognized McRae’s creative contributions, including the National Endowment for the Arts.
In a 2018 interview with Andy Hedges, McRae recounted how at 4 years old, he recited a little poem at a local Christmas program that was so warmly received it left a lasting impression. “I mean — it was showtime,” he said. “I was a hero. The lights came up. The microphone got live and I was addicted to poetry from that time on.”
After graduating from Colstrip High School, he enrolled in Montana State University, where he was president of his class and earned a degree in zoology. Shortly thereafter, McRae joined the Navy, which took him to the Mediterranean and his future wife. McRae married Ruth Hayes, a nurse from Pennsylvania, in 1960. They raised one son, Clint, and two daughters, Allison and Natalie, on a cattle ranch near the one McRae’s grandfather owned.
McRae used his affinity for speaking and writing in a variety of venues. He worked as a rodeo announcer, penned four books of poetry and one of prose, and acted, directed and wrote plays for the Coal and Cattle Country Players theater group in Colstrip. For decades, he used his voice, both literally and figuratively, to advocate for family ranches and the land and water critical to them. He engaged in a protracted battle with the energy developers who sought to transform Colstrip into a sprawling industrial zone to power the country, using his poetry to describe the companies’ tactics to garner access to the coal beneath ranchers’ land and the landscapes and community ties at stake.
In 1984, McRae helped launch the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. He became a fixture at the event, attending it every year for 35 years. In 1990, he became the first cowboy poet — and the first Montanan — to become a National Heritage Fellow, an honor presented by the Washington, D.C.,-based National Endowment for the Arts.
“People didn’t realize it, but cowboys were one of the few surviving occupational groups that still dealt in poetry,” he said in an interview his alma mater published in 2009. “Sailors and loggers and farmers and military personnel all have left a history of writing poetry, but for some reason they quit. We didn’t.”
Stephanie Davis, a songwriter who first met McRae at one of the early National Cowboy Poetry Gatherings, said he may have cultivated a “cowboy curmudgeon” image, “but underneath that, he was a giant marshmallow.”
Davis said McRae donated the National Endowment for the Arts prize money — $10,000 — to support the Montana Cowboy Poet Gathering. McRae’s generosity helped Davis, who was living in Nashville at the time, return to her beloved home state of Montana to perform.
“I thought that was extraordinary: you win something and donate it right away to somebody else,” she said, going on to describe him as a man who “contained multitudes.”
“I don’t think he had a TV. I think he had shelves of books. He and his wife, Ruth, just read,” Davis said. “He was just the best of us: the best of Montana, the best poet. It’s a huge loss.”
Teresa Erickson, a Billings resident who led the Northern Plains Resource Council from 1985 to 2019, described McRae as one of the organization’s earliest and strongest advocates for family agricultural operations.
Erickson said the willingness of McRae and others to push back on mining companies’ hunger for southeastern Montana coal moved the needle on several issues. Northern Plains prevailed in their nearly four-decades-long fight to stop a railroad from being built to transport Powder River Basin coal through southeastern Montana. In a similar vein, Erickson said coalbed methane production, which she described as a “disastrous” prospect for southeastern Montana landowners, “never really took off in Montana” due in part to the efforts of McRae and others.
“He loved Colstrip and loved eastern Montana,” Erickson said. “He loved the prairie very, very much and saw the beauty of it. Not everybody’s like that.”
Erickson attributes some of McRae’s charisma to his voice. She said he had
“the quintessential Marlboro man” voice, which may have been related, she said, to McRae’s fondness for cigarettes. Erickson said McRae’s integrity also made a lasting impression on her and others.
Erickson recalled McRae’s confrontation with a coal company employee who’d surreptitiously squirreled away some Northern Plains-produced fact sheets ahead of a meeting with the Northern Cheyenne tribe, the Bureau of Land Management and residents impacted by nearby coal-mining operations.
“Wally just marched right up to [the coal company representative] and said, ‘Give me back those fact sheets right now.’ The guy denied it, and he said, ‘We saw you take them.’ The guy very sheepishly handed them over to him,” Erickson recalled. “There was just something about that act. He wasn’t afraid, and he had a moral code, which was: You don’t lie to people. You’re honest.”
Jim Jensen, former Montana Environmental Information Center executive director, first met McRae in the late 1970s while learning about coal development in Colstrip as a graduate student at the University of Montana. Jensen said McRae offered an eloquent “perspective about what was before, what was coming, and what was worth saving.”
“I loved Wally McRae,” Jensen said. “He stood for truly conservative principles in the purest form of what that means — and not the political sense.”
In “My Requiem,” a poem McRae recited in his 2018 conversation with Hedges, he offered this aspiration:
“Some would build an edifice
An architectural gem
To serve throughout the ages
As a lasting requiem
But grant to me this final wish
When I say that last amen
May my mark be carried lightly
In the hearts and minds of men.”