Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis ...

As a sellout crowd jostled its way into the first big show of the 34th annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering on a late-January night in Elko, Nevada, old friends backslapped one another and laughed ...

When Justin Reichert was 18, he caught a ride with a friend from his family’s farm in McPherson, Kansas, to Elko, Nevada, 1,200 miles away. It was 1992, the seventh year of Elko’s National Cowboy ...

The atmosphere was not surprising — Elko, population about 18,000, sits in the northeastern corner of Nevada, an oasis in the Great Basin’s high-desert terrain and the center of the area’s ranching ...