Frontier Man

This story originally appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of UW Tacoma's Terrain magazine.

Wild and tame. Rural and urban. Conservative and liberal. Fact and fiction. Reality and illusion. Michael Allen knows the territory between opposites, the space where creative tension lives. Magic, too. It’s where he finds inspiration for his life’s work and play.

An expert in early American frontier culture, Allen is at home on and off the range. His father was a “fallen Mormon and a Republican who in the 1930s left the farm for town but never forgot his rural roots.” Stewart Allen, known to ride his horse through the Dairy Queen car lane, served a stint as mayor of Ellensburg. Michael’s mother, Betty Gottlieb Allen, was “a practicing Jew and a Democrat.” The couple raised young Michael in Ellensburg, a small town east of the Cascades best known for its annual rodeo. The family lived in an apartment behind the restaurant his parents ran.

The professor of history and American studies would have been the first on both sides of his family to earn a college degree, except that his mom beat him by a couple of years when the former ballroom dance teacher earned a teaching certificate at age 50. She taught physical education at Cle Elum High School well into her 60s to help support the family. (The younger Allen earned a degree in history from Central Washington University — when he wasn’t hanging out at the local rodeo grounds taking tickets for the show.)

In the Allen family, Friday was posse night in Ellensburg. Mike’s dad “came home from work early, hung up his restaurant clothes, donned the cowboy garb of his Idaho youth” and rode his horse a few blocks to the arena where the Ellensburg Rodeo Posse held its weekly drill.

“My mom and I would walk over and join the other posse families” as the group finished its drill, “a precision performance by about 25 mounted posse members to the accompaniment of Eddie Arnold’s Cattle Call wafting out of a tinny loudspeaker above the bucking chutes.”

After the drill, the posse gathered for a couple of beers, then ended their evening with horse races and a wild game of broomstick polo.

Mike liked to stand alone in the tall grass watching the posse drill from a safe distance and listening to Eddie Arnold.

He never much liked riding horses, though. After authoring Rodeo Cowboys in the North American Imagination and founding the Ellensburg Rodeo Hall of Fame, people often asked Allen if he rides in the rodeo. Nope. In fact, he rode the pinto pony his dad had bred for him only a few dozen times over a span of 10 years. But rodeo flows through his veins like a greased pig slides out of a chute.

America shares his fascination with cowboys, Mississippi boatmen and other mythical heroes. “It’s because we’ve become a modern, urban, commercial culture, and we’re nostalgic for a simpler time that symbolizes freedom, individualism, adventure and courage,” he says.

Sitting in his UW Tacoma office, standard bolo tie circling his neck, Allen’s dimples deepen and his eyes gleam behind wire-rimmed glasses. “I have this redneck aspect to me,” he confesses.

Growing up, he wanted to practice magic and write books. “I thought I would be a famous author, holed up in New Orleans or some other exotic hangout for literati,” Allen says.

Teaching turned out to be a pleasant surprise for Allen, a founding UW Tacoma faculty member who received the coveted UW Tacoma Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005.

“The best thing about teaching is that I get to meet a great variety of people,” he says. “I’ve taught about 4,000 students during my career.”

His students speak glowingly of him. “Dr. Allen is an amazing teacher,” says Jonathan Angel, a junior majoring in political science. “He brings history alive and always pulls to mind a quote or a song lyric that fits what we are discussing. He knows so much about pop culture and history at the same time.”

When a student questioned how frontier history could possibly be relevant in today’s modern lifestyle, Allen invoked language of the American West. “Whoa, dude!” he said, citing examples of history’s influences on what we say, think and do today. In his view, knowing American history helps people understand how to exercise their citizenship, to participate in this democracy.

Angel sees that sentiment in Allen’s classes. “He really seems to love this country, and that passion is obvious when he lectures.”

If Allen seems a bit of an enigma, he is — but he can explain. “I read too much Hemingway as a youth. Think about it. My whole life has been futilely aimed at creating a biographical book-jacket blurb like Hemingway’s: ambulance driver, WWI correspondent, Spanish Civil War, Idaho ski bum, big game hunter, Havana and Key West writer.”

Allen’s literary focus these days is on his latest work, Mississippi Valley: The Course of American Civilization, a book he’s wanted to write for 30 years. When he long ago approached his mentor, UW Seattle Professor W.J. Rorabaugh, about the idea, Rorabaugh told him, “That’s the kind of book you write when you’re 60, not when you’re 30.”

So he set it aside and turned his attention to writing on another topic dear to his heart. Western Rivermen, 1763-1861: Ohio and Mississippi Boatmen and the Myth of the Alligator Horse is a social history of pre-steam-engine flatboat men who had to use their own might and ingenuity working with river currents to power the boats. He drew on his own experience working on towboats on the upper and lower Mississippi River.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, one corner of Allen’s office in the Garretson Woodruff Pratt Building is filled with mailbox-like slots containing various sections of his epic tome-in-progress, the book about the Mississippi River Valley. He is almost 60 now, and his mentor would likely agree that he’s ready to write it.

On the office wall is a photo of his teen-era band, The Nightriders, four boys sporting Beatles boots and matching hair cuts, Allen on keyboards. After high school, from 1969-70, Allen joined the U.S. Marine Corps and went to Vietnam. An artilleryman firing 155 mm Howitzer cannons, he learned about hard work and fear for one’s life in a war zone. This year, on Veteran’s Day, he proudly marched in an Ellensburg veteran’s parade. Framed medals from his service days stand at attention on his office wall.

He remembers the day he came home from Vietnam. “I was 20 years old. I flew into Seattle and took I-90 out of the city. When I hit Snoqualmie Pass it was 9 p.m. and dark. I looked out over the Kittitas Valley. I saw the outline of the mountains surrounding the valley and its sprinkling of lights. I could smell the freshly plowed earth, and said, ‘I am not leaving here for the rest of my life.’ I’ve never gotten over the place,” says Allen, who plans to retire in Ellensburg, where he owns a house.

For now he’s busy west of the mountains, helping to parent his three kids, Jim, 19; Davy, 17; and Caroline, 13. And he’s teaching, writing the book he’s always wanted to write, and dazzling crowds as an amateur magician.

“I’m an actor pretending to be a magician,” says Allen, who performs at college and community events. “And I’m not a very good one.” He’s had to adjust his act in recent years, cutting out some of the more physically demanding gymnastics. “I just can’t stand up on my hands anymore.”

Professor Allen's son, Jim, grew up watching his dad from the audience, studying the guy on stage making people laugh. It’s a big reason the younger Allen became a stand-up comedian. Now he performs in a coffee house at Western Washington University every weekend.

He knows first-hand that his father is a good teacher. “My dad is a funny guy, and he has a genuine interest in what he teaches. He has the ability to win people over, and they want to connect with what he has to say,” he says.

Obliging a visitor one afternoon, Michael Allen reaches into his desk drawer for a card to perform a trick. Finding none, he substitutes a business card that disappears from his fingers and then emerges from the guest’s ear.

“Did you see what I did?” he asks. “No? Here, I’ll show you,” he says, breaking the magicians’ code of mystery, unable to resist an opportunity to teach.