Perry Smith and his father Tex John Smith’s relationship

Perry Smith and Tex John Smith’s relationship was at once a source of Perry’s earliest security and one of his deepest grievances. Their shared childhood on the road and later years of work and travel fostered affection, dependence, and admiration, but the same closeness became a source of conflict as Perry felt unseen and constrained. The relationship’s decisive break came after they built a hunting lodge in Alaska: following an argument, Perry left with only his guitar, while the two men’s later accounts left love and blame intertwined.

Childhood and paternal care

Perry’s father presented their early life as a close family before Florence Buckskin left during the Great Depression. In a typed account prepared for the Kansas State Parole Board, Tex John Smith described caring for Perry, keeping strict household rules, and teaching his children the Golden Rule. He recalled that after Florence Buckskin departed with the children, Perry alone continued to show attachment to him. Tex John Smith said that he eventually obtained custody and brought Perry to live with him, while the other children went to separate homes because he could not care for all of them. Working for low wages, he and Perry lived together peacefully, first in a small home and later in a house car. The account presents the father as both provider and a man grieving the separation from his other children.

Perry’s own recollections also preserve an early image of his father as a figure to seek and admire. When Perry was separated from him, he repeatedly ran away in hopes of finding him. A remembered reunion in a schoolyard remained vivid to Perry, though his father did not take him away then and instead urged him to be good before leaving. Later, after Perry became seriously ill while in institutional care, Tex John Smith returned and took him away. These episodes made the father’s presence emotionally powerful, even when it did not match the immediate rescue Perry wanted.

A shared life on the road

Before Perry was five, Tex John Smith and Florence Buckskin performed on the rodeo circuit as Tex and Flo. Perry remembered the spectacle of his parents’ riding and the crowds’ applause, and his early memories of family life included pride in their showmanship. After both parents’ ailments ended their rodeo careers, the family settled near Reno, Nevada; the parents’ conflicts and Florence Buckskin’s drinking preceded her departure for San Francisco with the children. Perry’s longing for his father continued through this separation, while his feelings toward his mother deteriorated.

After bringing Perry back into his care, Tex John Smith raised him through a mobile, improvised life. Perry finished the third grade, then stopped attending school when his father built a small house car. For roughly six years they moved among Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and Alaska, rarely staying long in one place. Perry remembered that he loved his father then, despite his father’s bossiness and roughness, and that leaving places helped him avoid the discomfort of seeing others regard his father as an odd figure. Their days involved making a living together; in Alaska, Tex John Smith taught Perry to search streambeds for gold, use a gun, and track and skin animals. This practical education gave Perry skills and a shared world with his father, but did not answer his growing interest in other kinds of learning.

Affection and unmet expectations

As Perry grew older, he came to believe that his father understood some parts of life but failed to recognize important parts of him. Perry recalled an aptitude for music, drawing, reading, and writing songs, and felt that neither his father nor others encouraged those abilities. His resentment centered especially on schooling: in a later confrontation with Barbara Johnson, Perry blamed Tex John Smith for keeping him from an education and treating him as someone useful chiefly for carrying out work. That was Perry’s accusation, not a neutral account of his father’s intentions; Tex John Smith’s own parole document described the boy as quick to learn and said he had attended school when possible. The contrast between the two accounts shows how a relationship built around constant work could be remembered by the father as care and by the son as a restriction on the life he might have led.

The father’s written account likewise combined affection with discipline. Tex John Smith described expecting Perry to accept consequences for wrongdoing, but also promised to share what he had with him. He said he hoped Perry would live honestly and offered future material support, including life-insurance money intended to help his son begin again after release. His insistence that he remained willing to provide for Perry coexisted with Perry’s memory of emotional neglect. Neither account erases the other: the father’s provision and attachment were real elements of their bond, as were Perry’s sense of having been denied encouragement and opportunity.

The lodge and the rupture

Their last major attempt at a common life took shape at Trapper’s Den Lodge in Alaska. Tex John Smith had cleared the ground, prepared timber, and hauled stone before Perry arrived, but waited to begin construction until they could build together. They worked through severe weather, with occasional help from an Indigenous worker, and completed a lodge that could sleep twenty people. It included a large dining-room fireplace and the Totem Pole Cocktail Lounge, where Perry was expected to entertain customers. The business opened at the end of 1953, but hunters did not arrive in the numbers the partners had hoped for. The few tourists passing on the highway rarely stayed overnight, and Tex John Smith’s additions, including a Garden of Memories and roadside signs, did not improve the venture’s prospects.

As money and food dwindled, the failed business intensified the strain between father and son. Perry recalled that Tex John Smith blamed him for not doing his share of the work. Their argument ostensibly began over a biscuit, but its force came from accumulated frustration and the pressure of their precarious circumstances. The dispute escalated into a physical confrontation, after which Tex John Smith fetched a gun that was unloaded. He then broke down in tears. Perry recalled that his anger gave way to pity for both of them, but he could not find anything to say that would repair the situation. This moment briefly exposes the vulnerability beneath their habitual struggle for control without resolving it.

Perry walked alone through the snowy woods. When he returned, the lodge was dark and locked, and his belongings had been left outside in the snow. He picked up his guitar and continued down the highway without money; a truck driver eventually gave him a ride. The guitar, one of the few possessions he chose to carry, marks the abrupt end of the life and work he had shared with his father. The evidence does not describe a reconciliation after this departure. In later recollections, the attachment persisted alongside anger: Perry could remember loving his father in childhood while also believing that the man had denied him a chance to develop beyond the work their life together demanded.