Some kids move around a lot, but few live in as many places as Jackson Pollock did. By the time he was sixteen, he had lived in eight different cities in three states—from Wyoming to California to Arizona, then back to California (twice!), and once more to Arizona.

His family never stayed for long in any one place, but Jackson made the most of his boyhood tour of the western United States. At nearly every stop, he learned something that helped make him one of the world’s most recognizable artists.

FIRST STOP: CODY, WYOMING

Jackson was born in 1912 in this town named for its founder, Buffalo Bill Cody, the great Wild West showman. Though he spent only the first ten months of his life there, Jackson never stopped reminding people that Cody was his hometown. That’s how important the lore of the Old West was to him. In fact, when Jackson moved to New York City to become an artist, he was known for strutting around town in a cowboy hat and boots. Some people laughed at his rodeo garb, but Jackson was just being true to his heritage.

AGES ONE TO FIVE: PHOENIX, ARIZONA

After a brief time in San Diego, California, the Pollock family moved to Phoenix when Jackson was just a toddler. His parents purchased a small farm on the outskirts of the city. For the next four years, Roy and Stella Pollock raised hogs, cows, and chickens and sold eggs, melons, and apricots at the local market. It was in Phoenix that Jackson learned an important lesson: he was not cut out to be a farmer.

Jackson had a hard time adjusting to life in the desert. His family’s three-room adobe house was very small. From April through October, Jackson and his four older brothers had to drag their beds outside and sleep in the yard. Although the stars shone brightly, Jackson was terrified of the wild landscape beyond.

In the daytime, Jackson refused to venture past the kitchen door unless his mother accompanied him. The farthest he dared go was a neighbor’s house, where he hosted tea parties and played with a little girl who lived nearby.

On the rare occasions when Jackson did step outside, it seemed as if catastrophe always followed. One day when he was four years old, he found an old log in the barnyard and decided to chop it in half with an axe. An older boy named Charles Porter offered to do the job for him, because Jackson was too young to be using such a sharp tool.

The boys placed the wood on a chopping block. “Tell me where you want it cut,” Charles said. Then, as Jackson pointed to a spot, Charles raised the axe high and slammed it down—kerrunk—splitting the log and lopping off the tip of Jackson’s right index finger.

Jackson ran screaming to his mother, who quickly bandanged the wound. To add insult to injury, an old bull rooster had ambled by and gobbled up his severed fingertip.

(Jackson’s finger never fully healed. Whenever he was photographed, he always hid his right hand inside his pocket or behind his back.)

Yet another disaster befell Jackson when he was riding into town with his mother one day. An angry bull had escaped from its pen and charged at their wagon. The Pollocks’ horse panicked, sending Jackson and his mother crashing to the ground.

Fortunately, a quick-thinking farmer happened to be passing by and was able to scoop them off the road to safety. The frightening incident stayed with Jackson throughout his life. Years later, he still had nightmares about the rampaging beast that had nearly trampled him.

It wasn’t only large animals that caused trouble for Jackson. He even had run-ins with little creatures, too. One time he was tasked with clearing his family’s farm of gophers, a job that sounds harmless enough. But not for Jackson. He was in hot pursuit of one of the elusive critters when suddenly it turned and attacked, biting down hard on his hand.

“Take him off! Take him off!” Jackson wailed. His brother Charles swooped in and dislodged the furious gopher. Fortunately, Jackson escaped without losing another finger.

AGES FIVE TO EIGHT: CHICO, CALIFORNIA

Jackson was not alone in his difficulty adapting to life in Arizona. His mother also wasn’t happy there. So in 1917 she convinced her husband to auction off the family’s livestock and move to Chico, California, where they purchased a small fruit farm.

Picking peaches off trees turned out to be a lot easier than milking cows and slopping hogs, and the Pollock boys had plenty of time for other pursuits.

Jackson’s brother Charles was the first to become interested in art. A sensitive boy with a talent for calligraphy, Charles dazzled his family with lifelike drawings of pigs and submarines. At their mother’s urging, he was excused from farm work and took weekly painting lessons at the home of an art tutor. Before long, Charles was spending most of his time in his room, mixing oil paints and clipping illustrations out of magazines to create a “library of art.”

Not only did Charles love to make art, he also liked to cultivate the look of an artist. He grew his hair long, wore expensive silk shirts, and—using money he saved from his paper route—bought himself a pair of fancy shoes. Although Jackson showed no interest in drawing or painting, he began to envy the dapper, sophisticated image Charles was fashioning for himself. Now when people asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, Jackson replied: “I want to be an artist, like Charles.”

AGES EIGHT TO NINE: JANESVILLE, CALIFORNIA

The next stop for the Pollock family was Janesville, a town on the border between California and Nevada. Here, Jackson’s parents tried something different: running a small hotel.

During the year he spent here, Jackson made friends with two Native American boys in his school. Orlo Shinn and Cecil Williams were known as the best illustrators in his class. They could draw horses bucking in just about every position. They knew rope tricks, too, which impressed Jackson even more.

Another encounter with Native Americans also left a lasting impression. One morning, Jackson was hiking with his brothers when a group of Wadatkut Indians passed by. The boys followed them to a clearing just outside town. From the shelter of pine trees, they watched as more than a hundred tribespeople gathered around a ceremonial pole. Suddenly a man wearing a bearskin appeared. With a blood-curdling shriek, he charged into the circle. Then he led the group in a ritual called a Bear Dance.

As the crowd began to chant, the “Bear” pulled people inside the circle to dance with him. Others poked the Bear with sticks. When the Pollock boys asked about the event, they learned that for the Wadatkut, dancing—as well as painting—was a sacred form of art that brought them closer to the spirits of their ancestors.

When Jackson grew older, this connection to the unseen spirit world would become a focal point of his own art-making.

AGES ELEVEN TO TWELVE: PHOENIX AGAIN

In 1923, after three years in Janesville and the nearby town of Orland, California, Jackson and his family returned to Phoenix.

By this time, much had changed. Jackson’s brother Charles had left home to attend art school in Los Angeles. His father was supporting the family by working as a land surveyor for the United States government. And Jackson was no longer a kid scared of being chased by gophers. Yet although he had grown up while moving from place to place, Jackson still had another lesson to learn.

One day, Jackson and his brother Sande were hiking through ancient Native American ruins outside of Phoenix. The boys had often visited the site, exploring the cliff dwellings and hunting for arrowheads. But this time an altogether different surprise awaited them.

With their father leading the way, the boys scaled a high cliff wall and stood on the ledge overlooking Cherry Creek Canyon. There, on the back wall, they discovered a tiny doorway. It led to a secret room used by the ancient Indians who had carved the cliff out of the sheer rock face more than five centuries earlier.

Following the beam of their father’s flashlight, the brothers gazed upon the wall. What they saw was a set of human handprints left behind by the masonry workers who had toiled inside the chamber hundreds of years before. As the boys took turns placing their own hands against the imprints, Jackson realized that this mark was the ancient Indian artisan’s way of “signing” his work.

Years later, Jackson Pollock would sign his abstract “drip paintings” in the same way—with a carefully placed handprint, as if to say “Jackson was here.” From Cody to Phoenix and all the places between, he had made the West his classroom. And everywhere he went, he learned something new.