William Carl “W.C.” Jameson has lived a life that most Americans can hardly imagine. A cowboy, student, lifeguard, dock worker, radio announcer, soldier, treasure hunter, singer, songwriter, musician, storyteller, artist and prolific author, he has managed to earn a living for years by doing whatever he chooses while hardly ever punching a time clock or sitting in an office.

Jameson was born and raised in the little West Texas town of Ysleta in December of 1942 (Ysleta is now a Tigua Indian pueblo inside the city limits of El Paso), where he entertained himself as a boy by exploring the deserts and mountains on both sides of the Mexican border, just 400 yards from his home. “I was a reverse illegal,” he says. He tells how he had his first opportunity to go on a treasure hunt when he was just 11 years old, and how he helped a group “unload gold bars in the Guadalupe Mountains.” It was the first of an estimated 200 treasure-hunting expeditions across the western United States and in Mexico.

During his high school years, W.C. began playing the guitar and writing songs. He is a little reticent about his early years (he doesn’t like doing interviews), but recalls that he “played football a couple of years” and “rodeo’d a little.” He may be trying to be modest; other reports indicate that he was an accomplished boxer and rodeo performer during those years. He does admit to serving in the military and becoming a martial arts expert. He also recalls that he “gradually fell in with some touring musicians,” and that he met Waylon Jennings, who worked at a cotton gin before he became a country music star, and other “heavy hitters” of country music during his younger days.

In the meantime, Jameson “timidly signed up” at Texas Western University (now University of Texas at El Paso) three years after he graduated from high school, earning a degree in biology in the late ‘60s. But he was “curious about a lot of ...

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