Ernie Marsh

Ernie Marsh’s passion for ranching, horses, the American West, and cowboy culture inspired him to pursue the arts of bit & spur making and silversmithing. Characterized by high-relief engraving, engraved steel, and French Gray finishes, Marsh's work is instantly recognizable. The balance of function and beauty in his pieces has earned him the respect of horsemen, collectors, and fellow makers.

Marsh was born in Mountain View, California, in 1962, though he primarily grew up in Washington State. After spending his youth as a bull rider in amateur and professional rodeos, he was working as a ranch hand in Southeastern Washington when he first developed his dream to become a bit & spur maker. In 1990, he took part in a four-week apprenticeship with mentor Elmer Miller.

Today, Marsh maintains the bridle bit & spur making tradition himself through both his own practice and by mentoring new generations. He has participated several times as a master artist for the Wyoming Arts Council's Folk Art Mentoring Program and provided public demonstrations at events including the Big Horn Basin Folk Festival in Thermopolis, Wyoming. Marsh and his wife Teresa have recently converted a house on their property into a bunkhouse for students so they can spend extended time under Marsh's tutelage.

Marsh is a founding member and previous president of the prestigious Traditional Cowboys Arts Association (TCAA), which was founded in 1998 to preserve and promote traditional art forms associated with Western cowboy culture. Through TCAA, Marsh has devoted years to teaching about the significance and finer details of bit & spur making. In addition to having his gear used every day by working cowboys, Marsh also has displayed his work in several places, including By Western Hands, a museum and education center in Cody, Wyoming; the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nevada; and the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where his work is shown annually at the TCAA show.

In 2000, the Academy of Western Artists honored Marsh with the Will Rogers Award for Spurmaker of the Year, and in 2016, he received the Katie Weitz United States Artists Fellowship.

Work Sample

Buffalo Horn Cap Piece - Photo Credit Teresa Marsh

Eagle Bit - Photo Credit Teresa Marsh

Spanish Colonial Spurs - Photo Credit Teresa Marsh

Podcasts

Ernie Marsh

Bit & spur maker and silversmith Ernie Marsh talks with host John Floridis about the craftsmanship behind traditional Western horse gear.

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Transcript

John Floridis: Welcome.

This podcast is part of a series highlighting the 2025 NEA National Heritage Fellows, recipients of the nation's highest honor in folk and traditional arts. I'm John Floridis.

For this podcast, we're going to visit with master bit and spur maker, and silversmith, Ernie Marsh, Ernie was born in Mountain View, California, primarily grew up in Washington State, and now lives in Lovell, Wyoming.

From a young age, he developed a love of ranching, horses, cowboy culture and the American West in general. Ernie has garnered great acclaim and respect across the West and beyond for the balance between the stunning beauty of his pieces and the actual functionality of his work.

I started our conversation by simply asking exactly what are bits and spurs.

Ernie, I think one of the things that I wanted to maybe dive into right off the top is, if someone is not familiar with even what bit and spur making and silversmithing is, let's maybe start there.

Ernie Marsh: Yeah, okay. Bridle bits are what the horse carries in his mouth. It's a form of communication. You know, they're trained to respond to cues and signals, so you don't have to pull on them all day, you know? And so, uh, it's a lot easier on the horse to be highly trained, so he can respond to cues and signals without any direct actual force or pressure, right? So, so that makes you're able to, you can ride that horse every day or every other day for long hours of the day without, without making him sore or, anything like that.

And so that's kind of the bridle bit thing.

And the spurs, people been using them for thousands of years, and they got a bad rap out there in the world because, you know, occasionally someone will be abusive. If you're us ‘em properly, it's exactly the opposite. It's about the motion of giving that horse a signal or a cue. You know, normally a person on a horse, their leg is going to hang to where their foot is like 8 or 10 inches away from the horse's belly.

So if you have an extension there, you can, you can close that gap, and so you, now you can use a very subtle and controlled movement to just touch, touch the animal and say, hey, we're gonna do something or hey, go a little faster or whatever, move over to the left or the right, um, without making a big move, because if you have to make a big move to do that, you're gonna have less control. And that’s, that's when people can have a problem there. They have less control means probably excessive force.

John Floridis: Now, forgive my ignorance, but is, so then is silversmithing, that incorporates both those things? Is it kind of a broad term or…?

Ernie Marsh: It kind of comes from a Spanish California era. Silver mounted bits and spurs and cowboys really don't have that much in their day-to-day lives most generally. Uh, they'll have a wore out pickup truck or, you know, even in the old days, they might not even own their own horse. One hundred years ago, you'd show up on a on a wagon, go to work at the ranch or on a train or whatever, and they'd pick you up. You didn't own your own animals. But you owned your own gear. And that was something to be proud of. If you don't have much, if what you do have is kind of extra nice, it just kind of makes life more worthwhile, you know? So.

John Floridis: Ernie, can y ou talk to me about how y ou try to find that sweet spot of, um, a balance between the functionality of y our work and the aesthetic appeal. I mean, seeing y our, y our pieces… Uh, they 're just stunning. And, um, and y et I know they have to be able to function as bits and spurs, right?

Ernie Marsh: Oh, certainly. I mean, uh, you know, uh, function is job one, you know, Ifsomething's not, Uh, functional, There's no point in, in any embellishment, you know, because it's worthless. So function has to be the main, the main thing, you know? Uh, and that takes, that takes a few years to, to get that down, and it's like I was saying before, the, the bridle bit needs to be a well balanced, uh, loose jawed with signal capability, right? Uh, and what it does in the horse's mouth, you have a different mouthpieces that may suit one horse or one uh, group of horses better than others. So, so there's that, so you have to have a bit of variation in the mouthpiece. Well, you know, when a guy's sorting a thousand head of steers through a gate in a day, I mean, how, how hard do you want that to be, you know, it's going to take all day. So, so let's make it as smooth and easy as possible. So that's the whole point of the bridle bits.

John Floridis: I want to get back to the aesthetics and ask as an artist, which y ou surely are, I mean, what was the original inspiration for y ou to not only make these pieces top notch in their functionality, but also, as I've said, just beautiful pieces of art.

Ernie Marsh: I've always been into art as a. as a child. I was into wood carving and drawing and all kinds of stuff like that. A little bit of painting, but I really sucked, so I didn't do that much of that. But when I got to making the bridle bits and spurs, it was the ornate ones that kind of caught my eye.
But I, you know, I realized that function was the number one thing. Uh, but after I got to where, I thought, yeah, this, these really worked nice in the right hands, you know, I'd go to these cowboy shows, gear shows, Elko, Nevada, Jordan Valley, Oregon. And uh, it doesn't take you very long to get tired of having a, being a guy with the ugliest stuff there, you know? So, it's like, I can do better.

This is, and so, It's sort of evolved together, I would say, I would say my work, the embellishment, the engraving, evolved with the metal work, and I, uh, I put myself through firearms en graving school. Because when I first started doing this in the early 90s, it was, it was pretty rare for a bit maker, bit maker to actually be able to make a living, uh, doing what I'm doing. It's still pretty rare, actually. Uh, there's a saddle maker, a leather smith in almost every town. That's kind of getting by, but that's not the case with the bit spur makers, you know?

We have a lot of imports that come in and so you need to just do better than that, right? I was really struggling to make a living. Building the bits and spurs in the early 90s. And I thought, well, I really like engraving. Uh, maybe I'll, uh, kind of moonlight as a firearms engraver and learn how to do that. And uh, so that was kind of my plan. I was gonna do both. And when I got done with the firearms engraving school in uh, California, uh, I came home, and of course, I didn't want to mess up uh, anybody's firearms. So, I started practicing that those methods on my bits and spurs, and then that that just kind of took off because there wasn't much of that going on at the time.

John Floridis: Mountain View, California is where y ou're from originally. How did y ou end up in Lovell, Wyoming?

Ernie Marsh: From Mountain View, my dad was in the military down there, served in Vietnam era. So he was back and forth to Vietnam when I was a little kid. He got out of the military in ’68 and we went to first southern Oregon and then to western Washington, and we moved moved around there quite a lot, and then eastern Washington, and after I got out of high school, uh, went to eastern Washington, back to the up north to the Colville area and working in the woods, and then uh, back to the coast, falling timber, and then I, moved to eastern Oregon, building bits and spurs.

We did about 10 years, went to West Fall, Oregon, bought us a little hay outfit with some cattle, and then 2011, we quit Oregon and come to Wyoming, uh, to Star Valley areas at first. From there, uh, we came with my wife. I got a job in Cody at the post office., so we come over here to Metitsi for a year, so we've moved all over the place. I've, I've drug my shop all over the country and then she, uh, she quit that deal, and we moved out here to level. We live about 20 miles out of level now. Hell, I've probably moved twenty-some times, you know?

John Floridis: So Wyoming seems to fit y ou pretty well?

Ernie Marsh: Oh, I love it. Yeah, I'm not leaving Wyoming. I don't expect to.
Uh, we, we bought another, w e're buying a property in Greybull. So we bought a property down there. We're building a building where we want to be able to accommodate. Multiple students at a time.

Right now, we live probably 15 miles straight north of Greybull on the river, so we're kind of in between Greybull and Lovell, and we're kind of out of the way, tucked out of the, out of the way, and it's, it's not that handy to get here all times of the year, you know, in the winter especially. Uh, but I expect to build. I mean, that's our goal now.

We're working on it, uh, to build a, like a facility down there, be able to offer, uh, other, other things as well. I, I know some very talented artists that would love to show up there and do a little 4 or 5 day class on blacksmithing or leather carving or boot making, and I also know a lot of other engravers and silversmiths, but I would also love to host here, have have some get togethers.

John Floridis: You mentioned teaching and students. I wanted to talk to y ou about teaching because I know that that's become a big part of what y ou do and that y ou feel a real responsibility to impart what y ou've learned over the y ears of y our life and your work, and impart that to other folks and to y ounger people. Can y ou talk about that and what that means to you?

Ernie Marsh: Yeah, I mean, there is a lot of interest in learning it for a hobby and also for a profession. It's not a, it's a much better hobby than it is a profession. I have to admit that. Uh, but it, you know, it's very rewarding and uh, I get excited about people when they're when they're learning.

Uh, I used to get my inspiration from, from the old timers that I learned from and met and talked to. But as time goes by, uh, they start disappearing. And so I think I can draw inspiration now from these younger people, they want to learn that the trade. And when they get excited about it, I get excited about it.

And, you know, it's it's hard to stay excited about something for 35 years, when you've, you know, you've done it so long, but that seems to be, uh, the recipe for doing it. You know, when I’m, when I'm sharing it. And they, they're just not getting it and they're struggling and then, you know, I try to put it to them 3 or 4 different ways. And then the light bulb finally comes on and we both have a little celebration, you know.

And, and I've got students that are doing quite well. I have some of them have chosen to do it as a profession. Uh, and some of them just just do it part time uh, as a hobby and, and as long as they're all having fun and enjoying what they do. That's the biggest privilege that I have is being able to make a living doing what I want to do.

It keeps me humble. You know, I've had some real jobs. I, I tried that. You know, and I enjoyed it. I work hard, but this is way better.
You know, if you could be your own boss. Do what you want to do, like they, like the famous saying is, it doesn't feel like work, you know?

So that's good, and one of my, one thing I, I credit the most, uh, is my association with the traditional cowboy arts association. In 1998, I was asked to be a founding member, and I was the young guy in a group at the time.

And so for me, that was that was a real honor to be chosen to to be a founding member with all my big heroes. I mean, there was, there was some real famous gear makers that I hadn't even met yet, but I just thought, wow, this is, this is kind of scary. I better try real hard if I'm going to impress these fellows, you know, because they've been doing it for 40 years when we started this group, you know, so, but that group has allowed me to get more involved with the education part.

Because, you know, you just can't take time out of your day when you're already, I wouldn't say struggling, but you're putting a lot of hours in to make a living already, and so you don't have that framework for students to come and take time and still get your own bills paid.

So, as part of a group like that, uh, you know, we have a scholarship program, uh, that helps people, uh, a fellowship program now is what it is, uh, TCA fellowship that allows people to come and visit your shop and, and you get, uh, compensated for your time. As a group, you can accomplish so much more. As far as the educational part goes.

John Floridis: Well, I wanted to touch on too, just the importance of um, Western cowboy culture and the authenticity of that versus, let's say, the Hollywoodification, of, y ou know, y ou know, of what people seeing movies or TV or whatever, and the importance of the authenticity, the authentic Western cowboy culture. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Ernie Marsh: Well, you sort of need to live in both worlds, right?

You gotta, as a gear maker, you want to make items just as nice as you can make them, they should be as well made as what you, you can do, and you owe that to your working cowboy customers, because they rely on that gear every day to make a living, but uh, to be successful, uh, you need to sell to a broader group of people.

Um, cowboys, you know, God bless them, they love what they do. I've done that in my early years, you know, for a living. They're not rich people. Right? And so it's, it's not even fair for you to expect them to pay your rent and your bills and raise your kids and everything.

So a gear maker, in my opinion, needs to, to walk in both worlds, because there's a, there's another group of people. They're getting older now, but they, they grew up twirling cap guns and watching Bonanza, and they, they wanted to be a cowboy, you know, to their misfortune, you know, their folks sent them off to college, and they had to go out and be executives and make, make tons of money, you know? And, uh, but doggone it, they still wish they would have been a cowboy.
Maybe those are the folks that collect high quality cowboy items, heirloom quality type items, and, and also, I mean, they may not use it professionally, but a lot of them have horses. And so they're still involved. So you're kind you're kind of, you kind of need a broader group of customers, but they come from both worlds.

Nothing makes you prouder than having a, you know, a young 20 something year old cowboy that makes a living on a horse, uh, save his money and buy something real special for himself that you've made. That is a big honor. He thought enough of your work to do that. Hopefully his children at some point will inherit that item, and it'll, it'll have value on down through the generations.

That's kind of what makes this meaningful to me is how it affects other people, right? If you make somebody a nice bridal bit and they put the homework in and really trained up a nice horse and, you know, they do something real cool with it and, you know, it performs really well enough for somebody to say, hey, that's a really nice horse. Who made that bride for you, you know? It makes them feel good about themselves. It's a little attaboy for what they've accomplished and also for me, you know?

And the same with a nice piece of silver work. Uh, you know, some, some professional wears a piece of your work to the office or wherever they go and somebody, somebody makes a comment and it might be a pair of earrings, might be a belt buckle, might be an executive and a professional business that, you know, they get that compliment. Hey that looks really nice. Well, Their days just started out better, you know, if you've made them feel good about themselves, you know? And that's kind of a reward for everybody.

And I mean, I'm sure glad there's people out there taking care of the real important stuff, you know, like roads and bridges and national defense, so that I can maybe, uh, improve on somebody's day in some way or another, you know?

John Floridis: After my conversation with Ernie, I asked him if he could add just one more thing….His thoughts on being recognized as an NEA national heritage fellow.

Ernie Marsh: To be awarded the 2025 NEA National Heritage Fellowship, has been an amazing experience for me. It's actually pretty humbling to be included among the past recipients. I did a little research and there's been some pretty talented artists of all kinds in that group and several in the cowboy trades that I've been privileged to know personally. But the fact that my mentor, the late Elmer Miller, was selected in 1993, kind of makes it seem like it's come full circle. And that makes it extra special. I'm just thankful for the experience, and to have my trade, get a bit of exposure in the mainstream of American society. Hopefully that'll benefit future craftsmen would choose this profession.

John Floridis: That was Silversmith, Bit and Spur Maker, and 2025, NEA National Heritage Fellow, Ernie Marsh. There's a tribute video featuring Ernie on the NEA website. You can find a link in our show notes or visit arts.gov forward slash heritage for more on all of the NEA National Heritage Fellows.

I'm John Floridis. Thanks so much for
listening.

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