ELKO, Nev. — In a high school gymnasium, three hours from Salt Lake and seven from Las Vegas, the throaty warble of a fiddle competed with the sound of cowboy boots squeaking on wood. Men ...

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 ...

WATFORD CITY, N.D. — Greetings from the ranch, where I rolled in after midnight following a 24-hour travel day from Elko, Nevada, where I spent a long weekend performing and catching up with friends ...

Waddie Mitchell grew up in the rarefied atmosphere of the Nevada ranchlands near Elko and spent years wrangling — and sitting around many a campfire, listening to stories — before finally hanging up ...

Johnny Reedy, left, and sister Brigid Reedy dance together at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev., on Feb. 4. (Bridget Bennett / For The Times) In a high school gymnasium, three hours ...

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 ...

In a high school gymnasium, three hours from Salt Lake and seven from Las Vegas, the throaty warble of a fiddle competed with the sound of cowboy boots squeaking on wood. Men triple-stepped and women ...