ELKO, Nev. >> This isolated town in the northeast Nevada mountains is known for gold mines, ranches, casinos, bordellos and J.M. Capriola, a destination store with two floors of saddles, boots, spurs and chaps. It is also the birthplace of the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a celebration of range song and poetry that draws thousands of cowboys and their fans every January and receives some money from the federal government.

That once obscure gathering became a target in the budget battle a world away in Washington last week, employed by conservatives as a symbol of fiscal waste. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat and the majority leader, invoked the event in arguing against Republican cuts in arts financing in the budget debate, setting off a conflagration of conservative scorn.

It put cowboy poetry and Elko, a heavily Republican town with a population of 17,000 about 230 miles east of Reno, very much on the ideological map, like it or not.

By every account, Reid is an admirer of what takes place here. He grew up in small-town Nevada, is a fan of cowboy culture and has boasted in news releases of getting money for the Western Folklife Center, which sponsors the event. His mention of the gathering, as an example of what he views as valuable projects financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, appears to be an innocent — if unfortunate — political misstep by a leader who is known for occasional political missteps.

“He was trying to defend the National Endowment for the Humanities and the NEA and he thought, this is something that he was familiar with and he’s always liked and he was holding this up as an example,” said Charlie Seemann, the executive director of the Western Folklife Center, a converted 98-year-old hotel on Railroad Street. “And, whoops! In this political climate it was too good a target: Cowboy poetry, say what? We’re paying for that?”

Reid, through a spokesman, declined to comment.

In fact, the amount of taxpayer money going to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering, which has met since 1985, is someplace between small and minuscule.

In most years, the government provided about $45,000 to the Western Folklife Center; the conference costs about $650,000 to $700,000, with two-thirds of the money coming from ticket sales. The NEA provided seed money in the early 1980s that allowed researchers to gather oral histories from aging practitioners of what was than seen as a dying art, and to finance what turned out to be the first cowboy poetry gathering.

Yet no matter. The Cowboy Poetry Gathering has been mocked by Sarah Palin on Twitter, most recently on Friday, and on Rush Limbaugh’s show.

The gathering and Reid have been denounced by prominent Republicans in Congress — Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana drew loud cheers as he attacked Reid’s position at a rally outside the Capitol last week — and by a host of Tea Party supporters on full battle alert in the budget fight in Washington.

“Given where we are with our financial situation — and some people would argue regardless of that — this is not something that the federal government should be doing,” said Thomas A. Schatz, the president of Citizens Against Government Waste. “If people want to support a certain amount of activity in the arts or humanities, they should be paying for it. And the fact that Senator Reid for some reason picked this as an example of how extreme the Republican budget was — he might have picked something else.”

Inevitably, some of the argument, as it were, is taking place in verse. Rep. Jeff Flake, a conservative Republican from Arizona, posted this on his Twitter account:

Way out in the prairie
To a rustler named Harry
Being broke ain’t no reason to sweat
Just sit in yer barn
Spin a rhythmic yarn
And you’ll pay down the national debt!

One of the most established cowboy poets, John Dofflemyer, a central California rancher, came to Reid’s defense on his worth-a-click website, www.drycrikjournal.com:

Easy to get emotional on the Senate floor, misspeak
extemporaneously to take the snipers’ potshots while
trying to save the arts for humanity like a little girl lost
in the crossfire, or before investing more on war.

If Reid has succeeded in bringing to light a fascinating aspect of Western culture that is not known to many Americans, it came at a price.

“They brought it up on the Rush Limbaugh show,” said Dofflemyer, who is 63. “They’re trying to make a mountain of a mole hill. Taking away money from the humanities is not going to balance the budget. What do they want to do — send it to Libya? Afghanistan? Iraq?”

Paul Zarzyski, 59, a rodeo cowboy and a regular reader at the gatherings, acknowledged that at first glance, the idea of cowboy poetry might seem strange.

“A lot of art forms at first brush might sound peculiar,” he said. “After you learn a little bit about them, and the people who perform them, you find out that they are as significant as any kind of art forms. Cowboy poetry comes out of a culture that most people don’t understand. Most of that criticism is urban and uninformed.”

The event itself started with 1,000 attendees — in January because there is not much else for a cowboy to do in the winter, and here because it is the middle of cattle country — and now attracts 6,000 a year. It has inspired dozens of other poetry gatherings. It lasts about a week, can cost participants hundreds of dollars to attend all the events and includes, besides poetry and singing, workshops on rawhide braiding.

The poetry gathering will no doubt survive if the final budget cuts end a subsidy for the center, as most of the revenues come from ticket sales. But Seemann said winning grant approval from federal agencies gave the organization legitimacy that made it easier to compete for private grants.

Hal Cannon, the founding director of the Western Folklife Center, said the uproar had sent tremors through other cowboy poetry gatherings. “I don’t know anyone in any nonprofit organization who isn’t nervous,” he said.

© 2011 The New York Times Company