Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 2 1 46 COWBOY POET D.J. O'MALLEY, 1867-1943 Sometimes wholly spontaneous, sometimes sung with original lines fused to existing tunes, D.J. O'Malley's songs of light-hearted leisure were something his rough-hewn cowpoke cohorts came to admire and his rhymes provided a much-appre- ciated entertainment after the hard day's drudgery on the range was complete. D.J. O'Malley was a legend. Indeed, he was the last survi- vor of the more than 400 cowboys who attended the first-ever roundup at Miles City, in 1881. In the early 1880s, O'Malley, a boy of fourteen, had already become "a full-fledged cowboy," as he described himself. Much later, in 1939, he was the guest of honor at the first annual Reunion of the Range Riders Associ- ation, made up of the range riders who rode the trails in those early days, from 1881 to 1890. O'Malley rode nineteen years as a cowboy, joining the N Bar N outfit as a horse wrangler and working for many years as a cowpuncher at large known as "a rep." And on top of this, he had an uncommon penchant for poetry. Several country-cowboy music encyclopedias credit O'Malley with a few different compositions that have seemingly endured the test of time. At least four of O'Malley's poems are said to be well circulated "wherever there is interest in western range songs," says one source. These are listed as "Sweet By and By Revised," "A Cowboy's Death," "After the Roundup," and the "D 2 Horse Wrangler." When he passed in 1943 D.J. O'Malley's body was taken from Wisconsin to Miles City for burial. Not only was he directly linked to so many of the historic characters of what is often categorized as the Old West, O'Malley left his own distinctive footprint upon Montana's pioneer era. PERENNIAL LOSING CAN - DIDATE FOR PUBLIC OFFICE: MERRILL K. RIDDICK, 1895-1988 He theorized and proposed a new science as a solution to problems of pollution control and water reuse. Thrilled by aviation as a young boy, he performed aeronautical stunts at circuses with Charles A. Lindbergh. Despite the certainty of losing, he ran three utterly out of the ordinary presidential campaigns from the seats of a string of Greyhound buses. Merrill Riddick, a Philipsburg prospector, aviator, and at last, politician, was a print from which there was no other negative. His candidacies for political seats now little more than a for - mality, he switched parties. His career as a Republican was sim- ilarly ill-fated. In a field of four Republicans vying for the U.S. Senate in 1972, he came in fourth, receiving around 1,500 votes. Undeterred by the loss, or perhaps perversely motivated by it, he then "raised the ante" and started his own tongue-knotting presidential ticket: the Puritan Ethic and Epic, Magnetohy- drodynamics, and Prohibition Party. Magnetohydrodynamics, according to Britannica, is "the description of the behavior of a plasma," or, in more general terms, "any electrically conducting fluid in the presence of electric and magnetic fields." The Prohibition component of the title was a double entendre: Riddick saw political fundraising as congenitally dishonest and unfair and he campaigned on the pledge to bar not just alcohol, which, in his estimate, was an incorrigibly sordid problem, but illegal campaign contributions as a means of exposing bribery in government. He would, however, innocuously accept donations of a single dollar or less. He first ran for the White House in 1976, paying for mailers with military pension checks. Using his post office box in Philipsburg as the correspondence address, Riddick described himself in one handbill as "a widower-pensioner, 3 children, 10 grand children, veter- an of WW1 and WW2 and half a cen- tury of reserve service—not addicted to dope or alcohol." Days after Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States in 1976, Riddick affirmed his intention to run once again in 1980. He also ran for president in 1984. All three times he nominally campaigned across the coun- try on the Greyhound buses where he also lived and slept. Two-month unrestricted bus passes, he said, were economically expedient. Instead of posting up in a hotel, "for less than $12 a day," the Social Security recipient told the media, he could live on the bus. The Riddick Field Airport in Philipsburg was named after him in 1976. He died in 1988. DIRIGIBLE BALLOONIST GEORGE LOWRY, 1886-1965 First and foremost, he was a showman. From the exhibition jumps at the Helena Fair and at the Spokane Fair in 1911, to the Montana Eentrics A gaery of by BRIAN D'AMBROSIO D.j. O'maey Mei Riick

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