From the Soul
Story By J.P.S. Brown, Photography by Dave Cox

A real cowboy’s life lies firmly in the heart and art of Robert “Shoofly” Shufelt.

A cowboy’s dedication is the same as an artist’s. Both set important goals for themselves, both have a certain criteria they try to meet and maintain with all their might. Both sacrifice years and paydays as they learn their work, and both have had mentors whose voices they remember all their lives. A cowboy knows the picture he wants to make with his bed and saddle, horse and dress and does not like to settle for second best. Levis and Wranglers, yes, nondescript jeans, no. An artist makes his picture with canvas, paintbrush, clay, bronze, chisel and marble, film or poetry. A cowboy makes his with his shadow on the ground. If he denies that he’s ever been a shadow rider, the faces of his partners tell him if he’s done something good—or bad. Usually, he and his pards are his only critics. The artist and the cowboy own the best outfits they can afford. They invest all their pride and money in their tools.

Usually a person gets the desire to become an artist or a cowboy after he or she has seen a real one in action. Good example is the best recruiter and teacher. This often makes journeymen of artists and cowboys. They want to see themselves at work in different countries, so they can paint them, tell about them, sing other songs.

Even if a cowboy doesn’t know how to tell a story or draw a picture of an event or a country or a feeling his work gives him, he can save his experience in his heart. He can take what’s good about his work into his own heart to keep and remember, and that’s often all that comes of it. Most cowboys never get a chance to show all the good they know about cowboying, except in the stories they tell and the example they give.

A cowboy works to provide his countrymen with protein from livestock our Creator put here for us to use. He also works for the fun of it, for the sights he sees and for the comedy of animals and men, even though he often has to risk his neck to do it, whether he wants to or not. If he can’t stand the gamble and risk involved, he won’t do it long.

Artists believe their pictures will be better, more original, more moving depictions of a subject than anyone else can make. They’re as windy as cowboys. They uncover a picture and step back as if to say, “Lookee there what I did. Would you ever believe that scene existed if I had not drawn and painted it the way I did?” Isn’t that like a cowboy saying, “I can’t believe I rode my horse at a dead run off that mountain, steep as it was, so steep he only hit the ground every 50 feet and then caught that steer halfway down that towed us all the way to the bottom and almost to the neighbor’s before we got him stopped?”

The pictures and the stories look and sound windy, but if done for the right reason they’re not a lie, because they come from true and dedicated hearts. Sometimes the good experience that inspired them is all anybody gets to keep.

A few artists with great talent have become cowboys so they could learn to make champion pictures of the cowboy way. The best of these pictures are celebrations of the partners they made and were done with little hope that they would make money. Cowboy-artist Robert “Shoofly” Shufelt is that kind. He has lived the cowboy way for 35 years, and his art is real. Cowboys who know him say, “He’s been there.”

Shoofly was born in Champagne, Ill., in 1935 to Loren Shufelt, a printer, and Dorothy Roberts, the daughter of a farmer-gunsmith. His grandfather Roberts worked his farm with horses.

Shoofly graduated from high school in Wheaton, Ill., then attended art school on a football scholarship at Lake Forest College. He left after one year, because the courses stressed contemporary abstract art. He wanted realism, so he transferred to the University of Illinois, where the studies suited him.

In 1957 he tried out for the Chicago Cardinals professional football team and chronicled his experiences with drawings and sketches. A teammate named Beano Cameron liked them and showed them to his uncle, Tom Gorey, who was a big-time art director. Gorey told Shoofly he could get him a job in a commercial art studio as an illustrator, so he left to apprentice for Kling Studios. He started as a delivery boy for $32.50 a week while he learned commercial art under a mentoring system.

To help pay his bills, Shoofly played defensive back for the Elmhurst Travelers semiprofessional football team. In 1958 he joined the army and played football during his entire enlistment for the Ft. Gordon, Ga., team.

Interviewed at his ranch studio near Hillsboro, N.M., he said, “Our team at Ft. Gordon was good, and football was my duty. When we weren’t playing, traveling, or practicing, I built on a career in commercial illustration. I did freelance advertising art in Atlanta, sketched building renderings for an architect in Augusta, and made enough to buy a new 1958 Mercury car.

“I was discharged from the army in 1961, then went back to Chicago and worked steady until 1965. One day, as I commuted to work on the Chicago-Northwestern train, I met Julie Spottswood from Inverness Countryside. Julian Spottswood, her father, raised racehorses that he ran at Chicago’s Arlington racetrack in the summer and at Turf Paradise in Phoenix in the winter.

“Julie taught me to ride, married me, bore me two boys, and took on two stepkids. In 1970 we bought a dairy farm in Woodstock, Ill. We didn’t go into the dairy business but kept horses.

“I became independent enough to work at home. I converted an old milk house into a studio and had things pretty much my own way. Up until the 1970s, most magazines and catalogs were illustrated by artists. For 15 years, my job had been to draw pretty people for car catalogues and ads for Budweiser, United Airlines, John Deere, and Caterpillar. Then TV began to heat up, art budgets gave way to photography, and artists began to lose their jobs.

“My brother-in-law Paul Beer, a Phoenix lawyer, partnered with Boyd Clements on the Effus cattle ranch near Wickenburg, Ariz., and the Rail N Cattle Company at Catalina, near Tucson. He invited me to ride with the Verde Vaqueros. While there I met Joe Fanning, who ran the Rail N, and I found time to help on roundups. One day Julie and I decided that I would sell our place at Woodstock, move to Arizona, and get rich making cowboy pictures.

“Arizona was in a drought, and ranchers were losing money. The cattle had been taken off the Effus ranch, so my brotherin- law put us out there as caretakers. The kids were small. Julie took a job teaching in Wickenburg, and I started making pictures.

“Although it was a big gamble, the only thing I did right in the beginning was let go of everything else and dedicate myself to Western art. I didn’t know a thing about a cowboy or how to turn back a cow.

“The more I did the more I could see that I didn’t know what I was doing. I began with Indians chasing stagecoaches, although I didn’t know one Indian and had never seen a stagecoach. When I made some cowboy friends and began doing daywork I could see that I didn’t know enough to have anything to say. My pictures had no soul or integrity. I kept trying to draw from a shallow well.

“My goal became to make pictures that were accepted by the cowboys. If I could do that, I’d do right. Of course, they had to sell, because I had let everything else go. I also chose to do pencil drawings instead of paintings—a medium that was not as easy to sell to the public.

“Good ranchers, cowboys, and families who knew their stuff took me under their wings, among them Gordon and Ben Billingslea of the 4 Paw at Aguila and Jim Lytle the veterinarian. “I worked for Cotton Logan on the Coughlin Ranch. He was a big help to me in those early days, because he had faith in me.”

“Grover Kane ran the PO ranch at Patagonia. Jim later married Grover’s daughter Robin. A few years later Jim took over the PO and invited me to help him work some roundups. The cowboys I met on the PO became my favorite crew. I met Gooch Goodwin, who ran his grandmother Helen Ashburn’s ranch on the border at Lochiel. Gooch and Jim have great presence that shows they belong to their work and they brought dignity to my work.

“In 1985 I moved my family to the Rail N. My drawings were getting better and were accepted by the prestigious Settlers West gallery in Tucson, and I started to make a living as a cowboy artist.

Interviewed by telephone at the Means Ranch in New Mexico where he has been manager since 1991, Jim Gierhart said, “Shoofly has my respect. He had to have subjects for his pictures, and he wouldn’t have been taken in by a lot of outfits if he hadn’t been a good guy.”

“When Gierhart moved from the PO Ranch to the Dart Ranch in the Chiricauhua Mountains, I followed him to do daywork and met Leo Turner,” Shoofly said. “He had been wagon boss for the Bell Ranch in New Mexico and is still considered to be the best they ever had. All anybody had to do to learn from Leo was keep his eyes open and his mouth shut. Leo watched me two or three days before he even talked to me, but I guess he thought I was all right, because he finally asked me to do something. He always asked a cowboy to make a sashay instead of telling him to do it, and everybody did their very best for him.

“While still in the Wickenburg area, I traveled to Whiteface, Texas, to do a portrait of rancher J.E. Birdwell and his four sons. That association gave me my first experience with cutting horses in action.

“In my travels I also made a good friend of Fletcher Whitlow, a saddlemaker who started with N. Porter in Phoenix when he was 16. When I took my first saddle to him for repairs he said it was a piece of junk he couldn’t fix and then made me a good saddle. I’m always being given compliments on it. Along with a pair of Blanchard spurs, it has been my passport.

“Everywhere I go I’m reminded of what Buddy Phelps said to me: ‘The only reason to own a cow is to ride a good horse.’ He and Geirhart grew up in Gunnison, Colorado, and are lifelong friends and my top hands.”

Since 2000, Shoofly and Julie Shufelt have lived and worked on their own ranch in the high foothills of the Gila National Forest where the sun sets between them and town.

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