Scotty Bettise has long had a way with words.
At the age of 90, she still writes poetry, and cowboy poetry is her specialty.
“My dad was quite the horseman, and I had a pony when I was little,” she said. “I just had horses and kept on with that.”
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She often travels to history events and conferences around the state to read her poetry about farm and ranch life in Montana, among other things.
Her inspiration for those poems is often mined from stories handed down about life on a homestead in eastern Montana and from her mother, who was a bit of a poet herself.
“In the early years, they just memorized so much poetry. My mother would have little spurts of poetry coming out of her mouth all the time. Here’s the way she got me up in the morning: ‘Up and at ’em with a heart for any fate, still pursuing, still proceeding. learn to labor and to wait,’” she recalls with a smile.
Farming, ranching, and growing up in Lambert are just some of the subjects she has written about. She has also penned poems about her time working as a nurse. After graduating from the hospital's nursing school in the 1950s, she started at St. Vincent Hospital and had a long career in nursing.
“This was her uniform when she was a student,” Joan McCoy said of Bettise, who was praised for her pioneering spirit.
McCoy worked with Bettise when she was first starting her career more than 30 years ago.
“She started the Emergency Nurses Association here in Billings, and she was part of the first team to respond to emergencies, including the burn team. Of course, she was one of the first flight nurses too,” McCoy said.
“That was interesting,” Bettise recalled. “I was always so worried about coping with whatever patient I was going after that I didn’t ever worry about the helicopter part of it.”
As a nurse, she was part of the planning committee for one of Montana's most memorable events—the Centennial Cattle Drive—even riding her horse in it.
Part of a long life filled with rich subject matter to write about.
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