Scottish Games in the United States
  Traditional Highland Games in the United States are better known as Caledonian Games. Scots sponsored traditional Games in Boston as early as 1853. In 1868, the just founded New York Athletic Club had it’s first competition with the New York Caledonian Club, featuring events which had been part of the Caledonian Games in 1873 under the inspiration of George Goldie, the college’s Scottish gymnastic instructor. It would appear that the Caledonian Games were the direct forerunner of modern day track and field events in the United States.
  Now, Scottish Games or Highland Gathering can be attended somewhere in the United States on almost every weekend from early Spring to late Fall. The athletic competitions still provide the core and backbone of the Scottish Games today but dancing, piping, and drumming have been added to the competitions. The games have gradually grown in size and scope to their present form which includes Scottish foods and goods for sale, a gathering of the clans and dancing that all Scots love. Weaving these things together is the spirited, yet haunting, skirl of the bag pipes - the most ancient of musical instruments.

The Scottish Influence on Cowboys
  From the mid-1700s through the late 1800s many Scots-Irish migrated south from the ports of Baltimore and Philadelphia into Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. The music of their homelands was a part of their lives and gradually started to influence - and be influenced by - the mountain music of Appalachia. These first and second generation Scots and Irishmen moved through Arkansas and Mississippi until they reached "The West" and became part of what was known as "cow punching" - they became cowboys!
  On the frontier, on cattle drives, on the open range, and in the bunkhouses, the differences between Scot and Irish were blurred. Cowboys whiled away the hours singing their songs and telling stories from home. Gradually new words were written. Today scholars of cowboy lore are resurrecting the original Scottish and Irish songs that became America's cowboy favorites. Jamie Raeborn became Buffalo Skinners; The Nightingale became Wild Rippling Waters; Home, Boys, Home became The Button Willow Tree; and Streets of Laredo uses an ancient Irish tune, and on and on.
  Alone on the range a great deal and swept away by the beauty of the West, the early cowboys became poets. These were strong, independent men that wrote poetry about their life in the outdoors. Some of it is beautiful but much of it is riotously funny - exaggerating events and spinning a yarn in rollicking rhythmic rhyme - exactly like their forebears in Scotland and Ireland. Much of this early poetry is preserved, but more importantly, cowboy poetry is enjoying an active revival coast to coast.