Life Lessons From A Modern Cowboy - Dry Creek Dewayne - #869

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
How would you describe what you do if you meet someone for the first time?

**Dewayne Noel** (0:05)
Wow. Well, what the school does is I bring people out for a week at a time and teach horsemanship, the basic fundamentals of working with horses and understanding horses. But that is more of a springboard for life.
We started out with a YouTube channel where I was just wanting to give some basic horsemanship tips and some things for young people who are wanting to get into wrangling or cowboying or packing, and it took on a life of its own. We started getting a lot of questions, a lot of comments on the channel. It's like, hey, if you'll start a school, we'll come. And so it's just kind of grown from there. So it's hard to say. We teach horsemanship, but then we also try to help young people have a more grounded, solid approach to life.

**Chris Williamson** (1:09)
What career did you want to do when you were a kid?

**Dewayne Noel** (1:11)
I wanted a cowboy. That was it. Every little boy in this country at a certain age, they want to be a cowboy when they grow up. The only difference for me was I never outgrew it. That's all I ever wanted to do.

**Chris Williamson** (1:25)
Talk to me about your upbringing, what was childhood like?

**Dewayne Noel** (1:28)
Definitely not cowboy. I had a very solid family.
I'm the seventh generation of my family born in Central Kentucky. My dad, my granddad, my great granddad, and my mom's side of the family too. My dad was a Baptist preacher, and so we moved a lot for his work, but I didn't grow up. My opportunities for farm work, ranches and stuff like that was when I visited my grandparents back in Kentucky. I knew back then this is what I wanted to do. It took a while for me to be able to actually do it. But I was raised in a very close-knit, very solid, very country, patriarchal family, just very old school Kentucky.

**Chris Williamson** (2:29)
What do the rest of your family think about having a rogue Wrangler?

**Dewayne Noel** (2:36)
I don't know. I was a different man. I was a different man back when I was raising my children. Back as a young man, I was wound really tight.

**Chris Williamson** (2:51)
What do you mean when you say that?

**Dewayne Noel** (2:53)
I had a bad temper and I was under a lot of stress for a lot of years. So I wasn't the calm, laid back, easy-going fellow that people see today. So I think my children are all grown. I think in a lot of ways, they're still sitting back trying to compare the old me with the new me that it's only been about five years that I found the place where I could just get some self-control and learn how to chill and get a handle on things. So I think in a lot of ways, my family are just, they're just sitting back watching and trying to justify the one what they see now with what they knew for so many years.

**Chris Williamson** (3:43)
What's the story of your initiation into this life?

**Dewayne Noel** (3:49)
Into the cowboy life? I was newly married and we had a baby, it was just an infant, and I was working. We were in a little town called Alpine, Tennessee, and there was a Berkline furniture factory there that made recliners, and I was working in the shipping and was not happy. Didn't like the job.

**Chris Williamson** (4:13)
What age are you here?

**Dewayne Noel** (4:14)
Oh, I was 26, and I was reading Western Horsemen, and there was an ad in the back in the classifieds about an elk hunting lodge in Idaho that was offering you could come out and if you would work for the summer for free, they would teach you packing. And I just, I said, you know what, I'm going to do it. I'm doing it. I'm taking the jump. I'm not spending the rest of my life working in a factory and sitting here and doing this. I'm going to go chase the dream that I've had since I was a child. And so my wife and our infant, she flew to Hawaii to stay with her dad. And I sold everything we had, which wasn't much. And I got a saddle and my gear and took a Greyhound bus to up into Idaho. And then wasn't nobody there to pick me up. That was supposed to pick me up. So I hitchhiked from there into Chalice, Idaho. And this was way before cell phones. So I found a pay phone and I called the ranch and the manager of the ranch says, I don't know who you are. I never heard anything about you. The owner is rafting the Colorado River to the Grand Canyon with his girlfriend and he never told me you were coming. But he came and picked me up and I stayed on there for the summer and learned a bunch. And then I left there and hitchhiked from Chalice, Idaho to Cody, Wyoming. And when I got to Cody, I had like $9. And so I found a campground where they'd let me pitch my little one-man pup tent. It was $6 a night. I remember it because, and I stayed at that one because they had a shower house. And I'm like, I'm not going to become a scrubby homeless person, you know. So I stayed there and just started calling every ranch, every dude ranch, every outfit, every day calling, calling, calling.