Artist Turns Back Wheels Of Progress

Winters are long in Clark Fork, but artist Ron Watson hardly notices. Seven days a week, from 8 a.m until 4 p.m, he is busy in his woodworking shop.

“There are times,” said his wife, Linda, “that I have to go down there and remind him to eat, he’s so involved.”

Ron makes replicas of any horse-drawn conveyance imaginable - from simple buckboards and Amish buggies, to more demanding Civil War models such as the Rucker ambulance, cannon and caissons, and quartermaster wagons. He has built many different stagecoaches and freight wagons like those that opened up the West before the railroads and scale copies of sheepherder wagons.

He is absolutely meticulous about details, even to the point of building a chuckwagon on the chassis of a U.S. Army quartermaster wagon just as Charles Goodnight did during the pioneer days in Texas.

“When they’re perfected enough, I feel comfortable showing them,” said Ron.

At last fall’s Draft Horse Show in Sandpoint, Jack Cotton - a third generation wagon and stagecoach builder from Deborgia, Mont. - stopped at Ron’s display and “never spoke,” said Ron.

Cotton, who is in his early 80s and is in the Rodeo Hall of Fame, looked over Ron’s work with an experienced eye and finally said: “You got ‘em pretty close, Sonny.”

Ron, 63, laughed. “I took that as a real compliment.”

Ron also participated in the 27th Spokane Western Art Show at the Ridpath Hotel in February.

One of the largest shows of Western art in the Northwest, spectators and artists came from all over.

“We had a very good reception, there,” he said. “You can tell when they know what they’re looking at. They know if I have the wagon hitched right.”

Ron was born and raised on a farm in New England where his father logged and farmed with Belgian draft horses. When he wasn’t needed in the fields, Ron devoured all the Zane Grey books he could get his hands on. Recently he built a replica of the horse-drawn dump truck they used on the family farm, and one of the ice wagons his grandfather drove, with horses, in the 1920s.

A tall man, even taller in cowboy boots and hat, Ron has large hands that are able to do the tiniest bits of work. He sews his own canvas covers for the wagons, fits the leather covers to the seats in the coaches, pounds copper around the wheels, and is even etching glass for a horse-drawn hearse. Each piece that he makes is an exclusive.

Although he admits that he has a “passion for history,” occasionally Ron also builds exotic birdhouses. A selection of his birdhouses can currently be seen in the window at Panhandler Pies in Sandpoint. As he did last year, he has donated a birdhouse to be sold by raffle to benefit the Clark Fork Valley Volunteer Ambulance.

Although a relative newcomer to Clark Fork, where his wife Linda manages the River Delta Resort on the Clark Fork River, Ron says he has received “a lot of support” from local residents.

Hays Chevron and Little Mo’s Cafe have displayed his work - one of which generated a commission. Vicki Woodward, at Evergreen Supply, keeps her eyes out for fine quality oak, walnut, pine and birch for his projects. Karen Tucker at Kincaid Jewelers in Sandpoint engraves his brass and silver plaques, and artist Deian Moore, daughter of Clark Fork resident Carol Bailey, painted a large desert mural that Ron uses as a backdrop at the shows.

It was at one of those shows that he met sculptor John Geis. The outcome of that meeting? One of Ron’s pieces is now in a Geis sculpture. Geis also invited Ron to be a guest artist at the Western Art Show in Grangeville, Idaho, over the Fourth of July weekend.

“Wood was my medium years ago,” said Ron.

After a tour in the U.S. Marines, serving in Korea, he traveled the country, designing and building fine homes and barns. His unique talent captures the artistry of the master builders of a bygone era, or, to put it in Ron’s own words: “I was born a hundred years too late.”

The legacy of his father’s father, who drove the last stagecoach in eastern Canada, lives on in the fine wooden artistry of Ron Watson.

Artist Ron Watson can be reached in Clark Fork at (208) 266-1335.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: Susan Saxton D’Aoust is a free-lance writer and author who lives in Clark Fork. Panhandle Pieces appears every Saturday. The column is shared among several North Idaho writers.