Elizabeth Ebert, ‘Grand Dame of Cowboy Poetry,’ Dies at 93
Elizabeth Ebert kept small stacks of paper in every room of the farmhouse — just in case. She wrote whenever the rhymes blossomed: sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes at the chirp of dawn, sometimes in the summer fallow tractor, where she’d draw a finger across the dusty windshield.
She started with a single line, a single rhyme, and “then you have to fill in all this other garbage,” she once said, with the sort of dry, self-deprecating humor that often infused her verse.
Ms. Ebert, who rose to queenly prominence within the chivalrous ranks of cowboy poetry, died on March 20 at a hospital in Bismarck, N.D., after breaking a hip. She was 93, and cognizant enough to remark, just hours before she died, that it was her wedding anniversary.
