Renaissance Cowboy: In Praise of Sherm Ewing

by John Willson

Now, isn’t this just what a cowboy should look like?  It is Sherm Ewing of Great Falls, Montana, a rancher most of his adult life in Alberta, Canada and Montana.  He and Tom Scott, a Great Falls lawyer, arranged for me to speak to a bunch of good western conservatives on behalf of Hillsdale College about twenty years ago, and after the talk drove us around ranch country and showed us a Montana that it would be hard for outsiders to find in such a short stay.  Great Falls is a magnificent town, although even then the Ewings and the Scotts and many others were worried about California folks moving in and buying big chunks of range land and changing the landscape forever.  Fat chance of changing Sherm Ewing, though.

This picture was taken in 1996 at Hillsdale College, just after Sherm had entertained our students with hard-nosed words about property rights and individual responsibility and limited government, all in the context of western America.  Just after a student took this picture he autographed my copy of his second book, The Ranch. You see, Sherm is a cowboy and rancher in his soul, but after he sold the SN Ranch to his son and moved back to Montana, he went off on a career as a writer.  By the way, he had come to Hillsdale by himself, flying his own Piper Cub.  He had been flying since his service in the Army Air Corps in World War II.

He says in the Preface to his first book, The Range,

As a rancher, I consider meat production to be the ‘best and highest use’ for rangeland. As a citizen, I accept such broader uses as water storage, soil building, recreation, and wildlife habitat.  As a writer I describe a remarkable and renewable resource, able to sustain a wide variety of uses.  And as master of ceremonies here, I introduce a wide variety of people who have lived their lives on the rangeland.  This book is about a way of life.