My first impression of the Idaho gearmaking community—those who craft the necessary tools for working horseback on a ranch, on a farm, or at a rodeo—was that it was mostly men isolated from each other by the vast geography of the fourteenth largest and fourteenth least populated state in the Union. My impression was generally correct, but I quickly realized that wide-open empty spaces and a scarcity of people can make for stronger, more resilient community and familial bonds, not the opposite.

It takes only the first day’s round-the-horn introductions at the annual Gearmaker Gathering for this to be clear. Suddenly, what is once a room of craft practitioners separated by miles and hours of mountain and desert distances becomes a room where everyone is connected through family, mentorship, history, values, and inspiration. As the state folklorist, based at the Idaho Commission on the Arts, I’ve developed the Gearmaker Gatherings for eleven years. These intensive events offer hands-on workshops, presentations, invited guests, best business practice discussions, fellowship, camaraderie, and community building. It will also be clear at the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, where the Carter and Severe families will share the skills and stories behind their work.

Chase Carter learned to build saddles from Kent Frecker; both were present at the first Gearmaker Gathering. Kent brought his sons, Tyler and Karsten, who, like Chase, apprenticed with their dad and were learning to take over the family business. Kent learned his craft from Dale Harwood, a 2008 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship, and who sat at the head of the room with his wife Karron as special guests of the first gathering. Chase has since passed the skills and knowledge of saddlemaking to two of his own children, Bronson and Whitley. Chase lives about forty minutes from Dale and Karron’s place in Shelley, and though Dale is now retired from saddlemaking, still seeks his open and willing insight from time to time.

Anna Severe and both sides of her family are firmly grounded by a long network of artisan roots. Anna was introduced to craftwork by her dad, Gary Stowell, who taught her to make chaps, chinks, and decorative leatherwork. Anna’s uncle, Randy Stowell, is a respected buckaroo and ranch manager throughout the Great Basin, well known for his braided rawhide and horsehair tack. On her husband Matt’s side of the family, the Severe name is associated with saddle royalty.

Brothers Bill and Duff Severe were taught leatherworking by their father and cut their teeth working for the famous Hamleys Saddles in Pendleton, Oregon. In 1955, the brothers opened the Severe Brothers Saddlery, also in Pendleton, and built saddles until 2021. In 1982, Duff Severe received the National Heritage Fellowship for his saddlemaking skills. Bob Severe, a second cousin to Duff and Bill, taught Anna the basics of saddlemaking, and she still builds them for working cowboys on Idaho, Nevada, and Utah ranches. Matt Severe continues the Stowell family legacy of finely twisted rawhide used for tack like headstalls, reatas, and hobbles.

In Idaho, the ripples of community and connection aren’t limited to the traditional cowboy crafts. The lines between family and community blur when it comes to the day-to-day, season-to-season cycles of farming and ranching customs. It is a fine balance between managing kids, livestock, the ranch house, the ranch itself—which could be spread across several large connected and/or unconnected plots of personal property, leased property, and government allotments—school, church, community, and weather. Add to that the distances between ranches and farms, home communities, and larger communities that offer commercial, retail, and healthcare services, and you quickly realize that the stereotype of quiet and solitary agricultural families is false. They are often busier, involve more community members, and are more dependent on networks of connections than similar urban families.

If you drive the 150-mile distance between Pingree, where the Carters live, and Castleford, home of the Severe family, you’ll follow the Snake River, one of the great watersheds of the Rocky Mountain West. This part of southern Idaho, known as the Snake River Plain, is recognized for its fertile soil, productive crops, and cattle and sheep that outnumber Idaho’s human inhabitants. Elevations vary from 2,000 to 7,000 feet, characterized by plains, alluvial valleys, sagebrush steppe, and barren lava fields. Stretching from the western border of Wyoming to the eastern side of Oregon, the plain is approximately 400 miles long and occupies nearly a quarter of the state’s surface area.

The area also contains some 70 percent of the state’s total population and nearly all the major cities—Boise, Twin Falls, Idaho Falls, Pocatello. One might assume the Snake River Plain is busy, and along the corridors of Interstate Highways 15, 84, and 86 it is. But drive the twenty miles off the interstate to Pingree, or from Castleford to the Twin Falls-Jerome area, and it is here where you will experience the quiet solitude of your Western imagination. Here, too, is where the quiet, pastoral life turns busy.

Drive through the backroads and sleepy towns of Oakley, Carey, Rockland, Castleford, or Pingree, and, other than the quality of the light, it might be hard to differentiate between day and night. However, poke around the dirt roads that spiderweb from the towns to the ranches, pastures, and public lands of the Snake River Plain and, depending on the occupational season, you’re likely to find any number of community-based activities. Branding season follows calving season which precedes haying, trailing, gathering, sorting, and shipping seasons. None of these are quiet, solitary affairs. Family and community members all have a role to play, and all participants eventually play all the roles. Whether it’s driving farming machinery, doctoring cattle, cooking at cow camps or on trail drives, or sorting and shipping cattle in the fall, ranch crews, families, and communities often coordinate the timing of these activities to utilize all available hands.

Likewise, when natural disasters like wildfires threaten herds of livestock, accidents like horse wrecks or emergencies happen on ranches, drought years devastate harvests, the same community that helped brand your cattle and cut your hayfields comes together in times of need. They organize fundraisers at churches or grange halls. They host online or in-person auctions to pay medical bills. Through communal cohesion and commitment to shared values, dinners are delivered, quilts are made, doors are opened, and balance is restored.

Thankfully, agricultural communities are not defined by all work and no play. Community-based, informal ranch rodeos have seen a resurgence in the last few years. Ranch rodeos are family-oriented events that highlight teamwork and skills found on working cattle ranches rather than the more structured, individualized, and sanctioned rodeos in the professional circuit. Youth organizations like 4-H (Head, Heart, Hands, and Health) and Future Farmers of America focus on K-12 education, community leadership, and agricultural skills. County fairs provide venues to show off and compete 4-H livestock, canned fruits and vegetables, quilts, woven textiles, handicrafts, and home-baked cakes, pies, and pastries. Barn dances and community potlucks are held in the fall when the cattle are shipped and the fields are harvested.

Community values, worldviews, and traditions are also reflected in the material culture of agricultural communities. Horse tack, ropes, trappings, and tools all have a long history of serving as the markers of expressive culture, a bridge between the functional and the beautiful. These items are handcrafted, specific to the maker, passed down within families or sold or traded to those who know their pedigree, prized by communities, and accompanied by oral histories, narratives, and even legends. The Carters and Severes participate in these long-standing traditions, and their lives are shaped by the leather they carve, the rawhide they braid, and the silver they engrave.

Whitley Carter, who is learning the craft of saddlemaking from her father Chase, expresses the intricate connections between family, legacy, occupation, and pride: “When my father was sixteen years old, he was given a quality set of my great-grandfather’s harnesses, as he had a desire to train draft horse teams. My father has taken exceptional care of the harness set and they are still his favorite set to use. Growing up, seeing my father’s love and appreciation for quality harnesses and horse tack instilled in me a desire to own, and someday build, quality saddles and tack for myself and others. It is my hope to be able to improve my skills so that what I build can be passed on to future generations, just like my great-grandfather did with his harnesses.”

In effect, saddles, a pair of braided reins, an engraved belt buckle, or a pair of handmade boots are totems, distillations of family and community values, indicators of common knowledge, custom, and ritual. That these material pieces are used in work, in play, in rites of passage, as gifts, and as sacred possessions is evidence of familial and communal connection to tradition both as history and as an adaptable, resilient future.

Steven Hatcher is the state folklorist and director of the Folk and Traditional Arts Program at the Idaho Commission on the Arts. He cut his professional teeth at the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nevada, where he was an archives assistant and worked on the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.