Sixth Grade
Worksheets
Cowboy Poetry
National Cowboy Poetry Gathering Week
Reading Comprehension for January 28
Cowboys of the Old West couldn't prop up their feet and watch a movie or play video games. To entertain themselves after a hard day's work, they gathered around a campfire at night. If you had joined them, you would have heard poetry about life on the range as well as tall tales and other stories. The poetry was often in ballad form. Cowboys loved and still love a good story that sounds like it could be a song.
Cowboy poetry is its own category. Hal Cannon, the founding director of the Western Folklife Center, defined the cowboy poet in 1990 as follows:
"All cowboy poets live in the rural West. Cowboys spend the majority of their time on horseback, keeping track of grazing cattle and moving them to market. Many of today's poets are ranch housewives, ranch owners, auctioneers, rodeo cowboys, dude wranglers, and people who hold down eight hour workaday jobs but raise cattle on the side."
