Ross Knox 

Sasabe, AZ

Poet

Ross grew up on a small cow/calf operation in Prineville, OR and always knew he wanted to be a cowboy.  At the age of 16 he quit school and headed for Elko, NV since that’s where all the big outfits were. He cowboy’d down in Wyoming and Arizona before working his way back to Nevada and Oregon. Ross rode for the TS Ranch three different times under Darrell Munson and at the age of 23 was the youngest jigger the MC Ranch had ever had. Since leaving home, he’s drawn wages cowboying or packing.

At the age of 20, Ross began to write. This was probably ten years or so before the cowboy poetry gathering was ever started. Originally he wrote stores of his time in a MC cow camp and out on the Owyhee Desert. These pieces were never meant to be shared just something to drive away the evening boredom. Occasionally he would recite his pieces to fellow crew members but this was just a source of entertainment. The first time he ever preformed was at a storytelling festival in Reno, NV with Larry Schutte and Waddie Mitchell. Not long after that the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko was created. Now 30 years later Ross has performed at all but two of the annual events.

Ross is now a government packer in Yosemite National Forest forms April to November, and then spends his winter’s day working branding and training colts.

When I first talked to Ross about coming to Durham he was working on a fence on the Rancho De La Rosa “so close to Mexico I can hit it with a rock”.