Jack Van Ryder Son of the West

"THE SMELL OF MAN" "JACK VAN RYDER" Jack VAN RYDER Son of the West

IF YOU MET Jack Van Ryder in Sidney or Singapore, in Bagdad or Bombay, in Moscow or Manila, you would recognize him at once as a typical westerner. His actions and talk carry the unmistakable trademark of places like Arizona, Montana, Nevada and Wyoming. Wherever you bump into his paintings and water-colors, and you'll find them in many places, you'll know they were done by a western artist, and a very good artist to boot.

Jack Van Ryder was born in Continental, Arizona, where the road from Tucson to Nogales turns sharply and swings wide to avoid a couple of cotton patches. Today he lives on the desert not far from Tucson. Between his first address and his present address he has punched cows, driven freight wagons, chased wild horses and rode bucking broncs all the way from the Powder River to the Gila, from Cheyenne to Carson City, from Butte to Bisbee. Somewhere along the line he learned to draw and to paint and some of his things are as fine as anything ever turned out of the West. He has illustrated books, done covers for magazines, and he has produced paintings, water-colors and etchings of the West as it is and as he remembered it and as the old timers would tell of it around the campfires. All this he has done with honesty, dignity and with a great reverence for his subject. You can't fool Jack Van Ryder about his country. His whole life has been tied up with the cow country and the people of the West.

He left his home in Arizona at the age of eleven, shipping to Montana with a trainload of Mexican steers which were unloaded at Little Horn. He unloaded with them, almost dead from hunger. He didn't get a job right away, because in those days so Jack says. "You wrangled horses about five years, and night-hawked a couple more, before they'd cut you a string of horses and put you to punching cows." A Crow Indian, John Pretty On Top, saw the boy in Lodge Grass and gave him the first square meal he had had in many a day. Jack worked for John Pretty On Top for several months, until one day an old-timer who came over the trail from Texas, offered him a job on the Rotten Grass ranch of the Antlers outfit, owned by Frank, Bill and Charlie Henry. At the end of two years he had a good horse, a lead horse and a bed-roll plus a few hundred dollars of cash in his pocket, and like all people who inhabited the West at that time, he became anxious to know what went on on the other side of the mountains. He quit. One morning, he saddled up and started out to see what was going on elsewhere.

"CALL OF THE WILD" "MISHONGNOVI"

In 1913 the West was still a big frontier, and no fences barred your way. From that day until March the 6th, 1917, Jack Van Ryder worked for many big outfits. His reputation was that of a hard worker, who was well worth having as long as you could get him to stay. He worked for the old RL on the Musselshell, the Spear and Zimmermans, the ID on both the Crow and Cheyenne Reservations. He covered the Little Big Horn River from its origin to where it empties into the Big Horn near Hardin, Montana. He rode all over Montana, never staying long anywhere. During the winter months, when the thermometer registered 40 below zero, he would stay on Corral Creek near the place where General Custer and Reno divided commands the day before the Little Big Horn Massacre. He broke horses for Ike Chambers and through all the years old Ike still is one of his idols. At Corral Creek Jack learned to read and write. Up until that time he was absolutely illiterate, and perhaps that is the reason why he portrays the old West as he does. “The oldtimers who came up the trail through Dodge City,” he says, “all changed their names for reasons which were their own business and nobody asked anybody why they left Texas or where they left it. These old-timers told me stories of the early Indian wars and happenings on the drive through the Indian Nations. Instead of writing them down, I drew them to the best of my ability.” He says that they were authentic, because some of the oldtimers commented on the authenticity of them even to the dress of the Indian.

The year 1916 found him around Gillette, Wyoming, working for the Keline Bros. Then he drifted up Powder River around Arvada, where he worked for the OW, Senator Kendrick's outfit.

He enlisted in the U. S. Cavalry in March, 1917, serving first in the 4th Cavalry and at the end of his enlistment in the 17th Cavalry, returning to the United States from Hawaii in the spring of 1920.

The next seven years, he was more a soldier of fortune than anything else. Always going-ing somewhere . . . never satisfied . . . throwing away opportunities for the sake of travel. During this time, he worked on nearly every big outfit in the West, except Colorado, New Mex-ico and Texas.

In 1924 after quitting Coburn's at Mayer, Arizona, he went to Hollywood to work as extra in a Hoot Gibson horse-opera, but he didn't find the end of the rainbow in Holly-wood. When money became scarce, he would go up in the San Joaquin Valley and work for either the Chow Chili outfit or Miller and Lux, and some times he would go to Nevada and freight. This kept up for several years. One day he was walking near the Mack Sen-net Studios in Hollywood, when he heard a lot of hammering going on in an old studio across the way. Upon inquiry he got a job tearing down an old set. He wondered why they were dismantling the studio, and Mr. Ed-wards, a Colonial Britisher, who was in charge, told him that he was going to build a huge relief map of the state of California, and as soon as the studio was cleaned up, there were two artists coming to work for him, and if