With his trick-roping, horseback-riding, target-shooting, and guitar-strumming, Eric Brandrick could well be the closest Rainy River District has to a cowboy.
“Yeah, he’s our old cowboy. He sings and plays guitar and everything,” said Joyce Young, owner of Trail’s End Riding Stable north of Devlin.
Living on a piece of property surrounded by bush, with nary a cow in sight, Brandrick is not your typical cowboy from the wild west. But at 79, he has plenty of stories to tell–and plenty of evidence of a life filled with struggles, cattle, and lots of leather.
“I’ve always been a bit of a leather nut,” he grinned.
His house is full of saddles, belts, holsters, spurs, chaps, halters, and bridles, which he has painstakingly cut, sewn, and decorated.
In his kitchen, a saddle sits on display, one of his best ever. With $500 worth of leather and about 120 hours of cutting and stitching, he recreated it from a photograph and an old saddle-tree.
With etched designs, braided straps, and shiny metal trappings, the saddle makes you wish you had a horse to try it on.
“He’s very meticulous. You should go down to his place and see the saddle he made–it makes you drool,” said Young.
His outdoor shop is lined with bits and pieces of horse buggies and sleighs. A completed buggy sits on display with leather buttoned seats.
Brandrick’s only remaining horse peers out of a nearby shed.
Like most youngsters, Brandrick was a big fan of the cowboy lifestyle as a kid but unlike most, his interest carried on to become a lifestyle and a profitable hobby.
“When I was a kid, Wilf Carter was my idol you might say. I first heard his songs when I was 14. I took a terrible liking to his songs and took to singing them when I was milking the cows,” Brandrick recalled.
Brandrick said he could yodel Carter’s songs note for note until the age of 20.
“Something happened to my throat and I couldn’t yodel anymore,” he said, still sounding very disappointed.
There’s still plenty of evidence of Wilf Carter in his workroom, with music books on a stand and an old Carter vinyl album sitting near a record player along with photos of Brandrick in full cowboy regalia.
Brandrick’s first sight of the district came at the age of seven after a long train ride in a boxcar from Saskatchewan.
“I think we must of been in that damn car a week,” he said.
When the door was finally opened, a young Brandrick was startled at the change in landscape after leaving his prairie home. “We didn’t know what trees hardly were,” he noted.
He grew up on the family farm just north of Devlin, working with his parents and going to school. Brandrick first discovered his creative knack when he got a fret saw and began making models.
“I thought I had the world by the tail,” he said.
A number of small, intricate models sit on a shelf in Brandrick’s workroom–a carriage, a truck, and a tractor that he built when he was a teenager.
Brandrick’s father left the farm when he was in his early teens, forcing him to try to finish all the framework every morning before heading off to school. School became a dwindling priority as he struggled to make things work.
“I never had any education, we didn’t have the money. My parents broke up, my dad left and I was a kid still. I had to do all the work and get to school,” he said.
In 1939, Brandrick was stunned when they lost that farm to tax collectors.
“Mother never told me about financial problems and then all of a sudden, they sold the place right out from under us. I was in a heck of a frenzy,” he said.
An 18-year-old Brandrick managed to negotiate for a smaller parcel of land up the road and built a small home for his family out of a corn crib and pine trees, and fencing for their cattle. His family lived in that home for 12 years and part of it remains behind the house he lives in now.
Over the years, Brandrick has always been able to find the time to dedicate to his other interest–the western lifestyle.
He’s spent hours designing holsters enabling him to draw his revolvers as fast as possible. He would practice by placing a coin on the back of his palm, then grab his gun and fire as many shots into a wooden box as he could before the coin hit the ground.
Although his hearing isn’t a good as it was, he still plays guitar along with his son every Sunday. “My son brings his violin and I play guitar. I enjoy it very much,” said Brandrick.
He doesn’t do leather work for customers any more, and claims he’s getting lazy but his projects hanging on the wall are numerous.
And while he isn’t working for others any longer, he still spends some time in his studio cutting and stitching.
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
