About Myself, by Jack Van Ryder

Jack was handy with tools he could continue as a helper. This is really the start of Jack Van Ryder's career as an artist. He finished the modeling of the relief map of California which today is on the second floor of the Ferry Building in San Francisco. This was the first time he had a chance to work with colors, and the experience proved a valuable one to him. He decided definitely upon art as a career, but the call of the road became strong in him again. This time, it was rodeos. Around Los Angeles, he competed in Sunday shows and won quite a bit of extra money. Continuing this, he was in good shape to go to tougher competition. First he contested at the Seattle Stampede and won the bareback riding contest. From there he went to Calgary, where he again came out winner, and so on to Miles City, Montana; Cheyenne, Wyoming.; Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland, and New York. He rode in nearly every big show in the country and most of the small ones. Wherever he went on the rodeo trail, Jack carried his paint box and painted while waiting for a rodeo to come up, or painted in his spare time between seasons. It wasn't long before his fame as a painter exceeded his renown as a bronc rider. In October, 1928, he gave his first one-man exhibition at the Montross Galleries in New York, and since that time he has exhibited in almost every big city in the United States. But more than an artist, Jack Van Ryder is a real, likable person. He detests the fictitious and the false. He grew up the old way when your word, once given, was a bond of honor. Knocking about the world as he has he's seen a lot and learned a lot and he has old-fashioned ideas about friendship and loyalty. Jack is the kind of person who can say that friends he made while breaking horses in Montana or driving a freight wagon in Nevada are still his friends. The world has slapped him around a bit and hurt him at times, but it hasn't changed him very much. He wants to go on painting the best he can. There is only one person he wants to please and that's Jack Van Ryder. And he finds Jack Van Ryder a hard task-master. R.C.

About Myself

THE EDITOR OF this paper asked me to write a few things about myself, and never having done anything that was worth while, I think "The fewer, the better." I began my career at making a living in the cow country and I still believe in all the principles that this life has taught me. My friends are of all classes They are rich and poor and some are in the so-called middle-class. Some are in the penitentiary, and some ought to be there, but aren't, but I am not saying whether I should be there or not. They are also of all creeds, nationalities and religions such as Protestants, Catholics, Hindus, Moslems, Jews and Atheists. They are all the same to me as long as they don't try to make me over. I have never yet found a man or woman who wasn't right sometimes, and it has always been my policy to listen to anything. There were times when I gathered wisdom out of people who were never suspected of having anything but talk. I also have friends in the Insane Asylum, and often wonder how they passed me by.

"FIRST WAGON TRAIN" "JULY NOON"

There are many things that I have done, but there are also a few things that I wouldn't do. For one thing, to me the lowest sort of a human being is a stool-pigeon. I always thought that they are people who get others in trouble to stay out of it themselves. They eventually get into something that they can't talk themselves out of and they wind up in the place they should have been in all along and the only difference is that they find themselves alone and gladly forgotten.

As I said before, my friends consist of out-laws, bankers, financiers, beggars, hoboes, ditch-diggers, cess-pool cleaners, railroad magnates, lawyers, both honest and crooked, doctors, panhandlers, chorus girls, bunko men, gamblers, muleskinners, packers, cow-punchers, soldiers, sailors, loggers, sheriffs, judges, plumbers, prima-donnas, second-hand store owners, loan sharks, newspaper men and one could almost say I know people of all walks of life . . . I have even been known to say a kind word about a Governor and have said "Hello" to a couple of Senators.

The country I was raised in made good story tellers. Reading was scarce and gossip scarcer so we had to make up tales of our own. But you can't blame us for that, because the country out here lies some herself. So I took up writing, and instead of telling a windy only to one person, I immediately increased my audience. What I mean by the country lying some herself is . . . you can almost reach out and feel a range of mountains, because they look that close, yet you have to be horseback in order to get to the foothills of this range in a day. . . They say that we oldtimers are the biggest liars on earth. As long as we are not mediocre, I think that this is all right, but I have known a few liars that come from the other side of the Continental Divide also. They, too, were my friends.

I have never done anything halfway and this includes my acquaintance with John Barley-corn. The days when the drys had it, I still had it from the spout of a moonshine still, and now that the wets have it, I can't see any fun in drinking it. I drank hard, and I never blamed whiskey for what it did. But I did blame it for what it did to me, because it gave me an imagination about being someone that I wasn't. I have heard it said that I have claimed to be a man of the gospel, and preached an excellent sermon, almost ruining a night's trade in a saloon.

I have been a wild young man, but the years sort of simmered me down. I also have had some fights and lost a few. My share of mule skinner's talk has been fully distributed amongst all classes of people, but I have yet to laugh at other people's tears or misfortunes, even though they didn't talk my language.

To sum it all up, I haven't led a secure life and my faults are many; however, when I go to bed at night, with all these things on my conscience, I am able to sleep, because I have never yet tried to harm my fellow man, no matter what I thought of him.

THE NORTH RIM Another View of the Grand Canyon

Such is the size of the Grand Canyon that from the south or the east or the north or the west you see a different canyon, each with attractions and a charm of its own.

The North Rim is the highest of all the rims, so high that snows of winter close the road leading into the rim stopping traffic from November to May. The North Rim is part of a mountain that looks like a mountain lying down. It's called the Kaibab Plateau and that's what Kaibab means: "Mountain Lying Down."

The road to the North Rim leaves U. S. 89 at Jacob Lake, Arizona, and cuts through the heart of the great Kaibab Forest, a garden in the spring or summer. Here is perfect traveling country, especially if you travel slowly. It would be a sacrilege to speed on the road to the North Rim. It would be like a whistling in a cathedral.

PICTORIALS OF THE NORTH RIM BY HUBERT A. LOWMAN

Generally the snow plows have to fight to get through to the North Rim in May, but in July, winter has gone and summer comes to the North Rim and the expansive plateau called the Kaibab. The aspens sway in the sunlight to the music of the soft wind. The taller pines and firs hum their summer tune, content with their world, and well might they be.

The summer rains with sorceress touch bring flowers from the rich soil of the plateau, and in the meadows the grass is rich and thick and green and deer come to the meadows in the evening from their forest fastness.

The forest remains heavy and strong to the very North Rim and when you come to the rim the canyon seems to leap at you with the warmest welcome imaginable. You may have seen the canyon elsewhere but it is altogether new and surprising when you come upon it from the north.

The canyon doesn't plunge from the rim as abruptly from the north as from the south, and on the North Rim the forest flows over the rim and into the canyon as if the forest and the canyon, like old friends, were reluctant to leave each other. And yet looking out into the canyon you sense the massiveness and the color and depth that is the canyon itself, and looking over and beyond the canyon you see the white bonnets of San Francisco Peaks, those good sentinels watching protectingly over all of Northern Arizona. Inviting sideroads take you to different points on the North Rim and there you can best see the canyon-in company with a venerable old pine which has been looking into the canyon for many years and is satisfied to continue the happy watch... R. C.