"The Moonshine Steer", posted unattributed earlier in this thread, was written by Gail I. Gardner; the DT entry should be updated accordingly. I presume he included it in his collection Orejana Bull (1935), though the poem circulated separately prior to that time.

In Katie Lee's Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle, she devotes much of Chapter 5 to discussing with Gail how his poems have been pirated frequently without attribution. To quote briefly from the horse's mouth (p.51):

"After the war I showed that poem [Sierry Petes] and some others I'd written to some cowboy friends, among them Billy Simon. Bill decided to cook up an old tune for it and started singing it around cow camps and rodeos. This was the first time I got the idea that a lot of my poems would do for songs.

"A Wickenburg dude wrangler by the name of George German was also a radio singer and he wanted my Sierry Petes and my Moonshine Steer to publish in a collection of old cow songs he was getting out for his radio station in Yankton, South Dakota, in 1929. [...] I suppose that is where those radio punks first got hold of it."

I haven't found indications of when the poem was first written, published or put to music, or whether it is now officially in the public domain.


John I White, in the book Git Along, Little Dogies (1975) adds:
'Gardner says he himself sang "The Sierry Petes" the first time for the cowboys attending one of a series of neighborhood rodeos staged on the Z-Triangle Ranch near Wagoner owned by James Minotto. The boys like it. Liked it so much that for each of the next few years Gardner had to come up with a new one. Those that he feels have made the best songs are "The Moonshine Steer" and "The Dude Wrangler." The former, which can be sung to the tune of "Roving Gambler," […]' [italics mine]