The Western States Cowboy Poetry Collection, housed at Utah State University, grew out of a concerted effort by western state folklorists in the early 1980s to collect, document, and present cowboy poetry. The idea for this work grew out of meetings of state folklorists in Washington D.C. at the National Endowment of the Arts Folk Arts Program and at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, a meeting with the Nevada Humanities Committee with various western state folklorists, and meetings of state folklorists at Utah State University in conjunction with the university's Fife Folklore Conference in 1983.

Out of discussions at these meetings, the group decided to take Arizona folklorist Jim Griffiths's suggestion to present cowboy poetry within the western states. Hal Cannon, then Director of the Utah Arts Council's Folk Arts Program, and Steve Siporin, then Folk Arts Coordinator for the Idaho Commission on the Arts, wrote a grant from the Institute of the American West (in Sun Valley, Idaho) to the NEA Folk Arts Program to collect and document cowboy poetry and to present a cowboy poetry event. The grant was awarded and Hal Cannon was hired as program coordinator by the Institute of the American West to manage the grant and fieldwork. State folklorists conducted fieldwork with cowboys and ranchers in their state. For western states that did not have a state folklorist, Hal Cannon hired folklore fieldworkers to conduct the fieldwork; Gary Stanton was the primary researcher. As well, some of the collection came from a wide reaching "letter to the editor" campaign to rural newspapers in the West conducted by Hal Cannon.

The poetry gathered during this project makes up the Western States Cowboy Poetry Collection housed in the Fife Folklore Archives at Utah State University. (Along with cowboy poetry, many cowboy poetry books were gathered during this project with support from the Skaggs Foundation; these books are also housed in the Fife Folklore Archives.) From this important fieldwork project came the impetus for the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering held in January of 1985 in Elko, Nevada, the heart of Buckaroo Country, with support from the Northeastern Nevada Museum and the Northern Nevada Community College.

Folklorists involved in the fieldwork project, and the states in which they conducted fieldwork, include: