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Expressive Idaho features master folk artists and apprentices who make their art right here in the Gem State. This series is produced in partnership with the Idaho Commission on the Arts’ Folk and Traditional Arts Program, with funding support from Jennifer Dickey, Andy Huang, Dr. Suzanne Allen, MD and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Idaho cowboy artists continue the art of gun engraving

“I have my drawing table in the living room. My wife allows me to have that. And I do that so I can be part of the family instead of away from home all the time in my shop.” —Dean Philbrick
Arlie Sommer
/
Idaho Commission on the Arts
“I have my drawing table in the living room. My wife allows me to have that. And I do that so I can be part of the family instead of away from home all the time in my shop.” —Dean Philbrick

The art of gun engraving is alive and well in eastern Idaho, thanks to a few dedicated cowboys who are willing to put in the hours of drawing and practice required. More than 50 years ago, Dean Philbrick of Irwin, Idaho began to study the craft with a mentor. Now, through the Idaho Commission on the Arts’ Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program, Philbrick mentors aspiring engravers, helping ensure a storied art tradition lives on.

“Guns are a really unique piece of art in their own right without any engraver ever touching them,” said Philbrick. “The guy with the engraver comes along and says, ‘well, let me put some marks on that for it, make it fancier.’”

Philbrick’s apprentice, Casey Backus, is a distinguished cowboy artist in his own right. A horsehair hitcher, braider and leather craftsman, he’s now trying to improve his silver engraving to round out his portfolio and gain more creative control over the multimedia pieces he crafts.

Luckily he met Philbrick, who’s not only willing to share technical advice, but also the critique needed to really grow.

Casey Backus and Dean Philbrick stand in Backus’ workshop where he engraves, hitches and braids horsehair, and works with leather.
Arlie Sommer
/
Idaho Commission on the Arts
Casey Backus and Dean Philbrick stand in Backus’ workshop where he engraves, hitches and braids horsehair, and works with leather.

“I said, if you’re going to come be a student of mine, don’t expect me to pat you on the back every time you do something because I’ll tell you what you’re doing wrong,” Philbrick said.

And while Philbrick is eager to teach, he’s wary of those who want to jump right into engraving without first laying a solid foundation in drawing and composition.

“Engraving starts with a piece of paper and pencil,” he said. “If you can’t draw it, you can’t cut it.”

He cautions those who would get involved on a whim – the discipline requires a lifetime of effort and continual improvement.

“I’ve been doing this a long time and I’m still learning,” Philbrick said.

Through his horsehair braiding practice, Backus knows the diligence necessary to learn an art form. He’s already skilled at drawing and knowledgeable of the elements that make an illustration captivate a viewer: shading, flow, balance and proportion. He even has the basics of engraving down, having learned to make scrolls and other patterns with a common engraving technique known as bright cut.

As an apprentice, Backus hopes to up his game and add more detail.

“I want to be able to make flowers and leaves,” he said. “And plus working with Dean, eventually I’m hoping to hit it down the road with portrait-quality engraving in steel.”

Philbrick re-focuses Backus to simpler aspects.

“What we’re doing right now is trying to do a design and layout, and sharpening of tools, and making nice, smooth, cuts.”

And Backus acknowledges that it’s the subtle things that make all the difference.

“The things I thought I was doing properly, I wasn’t,” he said.

The two engravers are members of a larger community of engravers, the Fire Arms Engravers Guild of America, which convenes annually in Las Vegas to share work, promote the art and trade ideas, tools and skills. Philbrick admires the efforts of others as much as he enjoys the craft himself.

“If you go to a firearms engraving show or just go to a local gun show, you’ll find decorated firearms. And they’re so unique,” he said.

“If you really look at them, really study them, they are as individual artwork as if you had gone to an art museum & you were looking at oil paintings and sculptures.”
Dean Philbrick

In Idaho, Backus already has a market for his art. At the Art Museum of Idaho Falls Beaux Cadeaux Show, he displays belts made of leather and braided horsehair, a leather and horsehair rifle sling, cowboy gauntlet cuffs, conchos (saddle fixtures for attaching gear) and jewelry like earrings, necklaces, bracelets, pocket watch fobs and hatbands.

A small crowd gathers around his booth to watch a demonstration of engraving.

Casey Backus displays his cowboy art and demonstrates engraving during the annual Beaux Cadeaux Art Show at the Museum of Eastern Idaho in Idaho Falls.
Arlie Sommer
/
Idaho Commission on the Arts
Casey Backus displays his cowboy art and demonstrates engraving during the annual Beaux Cadeaux Art Show at the Museum of Eastern Idaho in Idaho Falls.

“This is basically a practice plate,” he explained. “I’ve got steel, copper and brass. They all cut a little bit different, you know, based on the hardness.”

Adorned in headgear that allows him to view his work through magnifying lenses, Backus leans over a two-inch metal plate, clamped into a ball vice. He’s running a tool that slightly resembles a tattoo gun.

“What you should be doing is pushing the work into the cutter, rather than pushing the cutter across the work,” he said. “So, it’s important that this baby spin around and tilt. And you know, you work it like that.”

Backus considers himself part of a long lineage of cowboy artists who’ve elevated their handiwork to art, making exceptional gear for riding horses and working cattle on the range.

“The traditional stuff that we do is, it’s functional first,” he said. “I would never build something that isn’t usable. It’s going down a path that traditional cowboy artists, they shouldn’t go.”

Philbrick agrees with Backus’ craft-skewing perspective of cowboy arts.

“I don’t think I’ve ever embellished a firearm that you could not take to the range and shoot, or take it out and plank tin cans with it or whatever,” he said. “But most of the time when you’re done with a firearm and you put that amount of time and that much money into it, it’s generally a collector’s item.”

Philbrick shows a gun he’s planning to engrave next to the original sketch. The engraving will be in a very detailed style called bulino, where the detail is vast but miniature.
Arlie Sommer
/
Idaho Commission on the Arts
Philbrick shows a gun he’s planning to engrave next to the original sketch. The engraving will be in a very detailed style called bulino, where the detail is vast but miniature.

But gun engraving will evolve with ever-evolving firearms. Many of the arms that gun engravers work with are antiques, and it’s not always because engravers prefer to work with relics.

“With some of the firearms that are being made, the hardness of the steel is so hard that being able to cut it might entail the idea of annealing the metal to soften it a little bit so you can cut it,” Backus explained.

At Philbrick’s home, workshop and saloon, historic firearms decorate the walls along with leather gear, an old fiddle, a woven fishing basket and other artifacts from a simpler time. Perhaps in rural Irwin, Idaho where one is surrounded by lurching mountains and meandering, swan-filled brooks, the past is closer. Sitting at the drafting table where he ideates gun designs, Philbrick and Backus ponder the past and the future of gun graving.

“[A] major turning point with firearms is right around the turn of the century when they came out with smokeless powder,” Backus said.

Smokeless powder enabled bullets to travel longer distances and the development of this led to changes in the designs of firearm barrels, including the use of new, harder metals to harness the pressure of the explosion. These changes make many modern guns more difficult to etch in into, even impossible.

While the threat of un-engravable guns is on the horizon, the two aren’t giving up just yet.

“If you’re a true artist, you’re trying to perfect your technique until the day that you die,” said Backus. “I practiced karate and the group I practiced karate with is very traditional Japanese. They refer to masters only as people that have passed on because while they’re still alive, they’re still trying to perfect something.”

"Today I'm going to have Casey working on borders and borders involve straight lines. It's all freehand, so there's different tools we use to accomplish that ... and you'll be able to see it on the TV while he's working on it," said Dean Philbrick.
Arlie Sommer
/
Idaho Commission on the Arts
"Today I'm going to have Casey working on borders and borders involve straight lines. It's all freehand, so there's different tools we use to accomplish that ... and you'll be able to see it on the TV while he's working on it," said Dean Philbrick.

Philbrick is confident that a day will come when Backus only calls to talk over a project every once in a great while.

“Every engraver has their own style and Casey is developing his own style right now,” said Philbrick.

Backus would like to eventually engrave detailed, Bulino-style portraits in steel guns, but he understands that this goal is far off and will take a lot of effort to achieve.

“We’ll just see how far down the road I can go,” said Backus. “You know, there is no finish line.”

This piece was produced for the Expressive Idaho series in partnership with the Idaho Commission on the Arts’ Folk and Traditional Arts Program, with funding support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Suzanne Allen.

It was love at first listen when I first heard Ira Glass on This American Life. The program inspired me to study environmental journalism at the University of Idaho so I could tell stories that would also change lives. I officially started my radio career as a KUOI college DJ there and went on to work for the local public radio station, Northwest Public Radio, archiving reel to reel, writing for web and hosting.

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