Smitty Expresses His Thoughts About Snow

Just look at this face as Smitty takes in the first snowflakes of the season.

His expression says it all, as far as I'm concerned.

Care to write a caption?

A New Blog That Caught My Attention (for 50+ Riders)

Sheri, one of my blog readers from western Washington, has started a blog with an interesting subject--that of having and riding horses at 50+.

Pay a visit here.

Sheri appears in this photo with Champ, the horse she inherited from her daughter. She just rode Champ in her first show last weekend--you go, Sheri!

Here is Sheri's motivation for starting her blog, as stated to me in an email:

Hope to do my best to bring the older generation back to horses.  So many older, healthy, been there, done that horses going to slaughter or sitting idle.  I run into many older people who mourn the fact that they no longer have any contact with horses and are now afraid to ride.  It seems the majority of their hesitation centers around a past negative experience or health challenge, as we saw in your recent blog.   here to tell them that they CAN do this mentally, physically and fiscally.

(An FYI: My own blog post on this subject received more comments than any other topic in my three steady years of blogging on horse topics.)

If you have more to contribute to the topic, I'm sure Sheri would love to hear from you.

New To (or Back Into) Showing: Is This You?

Today, the topic up for discussion is showing. Specifically, getting started in it, and/or getting back into it after a long hiatus.

Do you fit this profile? If you do, I would love to hear about some of your experiences and impressions.

Some starter Qs:

* What's the draw--what do you hope to get from the experience?

* What's your venue--where do you show or hope to show, and in what?

* What's your main challenge?

* Where are you getting help, guidance, support, encouragement?

* What's different than you imagined it would be?

FYI, we are noticing an uptick of mail from Horse & Rider readers who do fit this profile of either getting into or back into showing. That could mean a number of things. One thing it means FOR SURE is that the topic has my attention.

Awaiting your always-informative commentary.

Photo by Cappy Jackson

Road Trip Scenes from The Big Empty

I'm wrapping up a week's hiatus from magazine work, which gave me the chance to go visit some family in North Dakota.

Even though it's a pretty long run, I like to get there by driving. It's a trip of over 1,100 miles, and this time, I covered quite a lot of it by getting off the interstate system and out into two-lane country, farther north.

Which, in eastern Montana/western North Dakota, translates pretty much to The Big Empty. Think "Lonesome Dove," when Gus and the boys finally make it up to northeastern Montana. Those scenes could have been shot just about anywhere up here.

Not only is there hardly anyone living out here, but, as I can attest from the traffic (lack thereof), hardly anyone ventures out to drive across these parts much anymore, either.

Yesterday morning, going west on Highways 2 and 200 toward Lewistown, the only "oncoming" I encountered in 3 hours' time was a set of cowboys, rounding up cattle that had escaped a barbed-wire fence. They were going right down the middle of the blacktop and were as surprised to see my car as I was to see them. (It doesn't take long to assume aloneness out in most of the The Big Empty.)

Sharing here a few on-personal-safari  photos that I took while crossing a little-seen place of great American vastness.

Wherein, I Achieve Something From My Bucket List

Yesterday, I was finally able to do something I've wanted to do for a very long time.

I got to visit the Evelyn Cameron Gallery of her pioneer photography in Terry, Montana.

Never heard of her? That's OK--most people haven't, even though she is in the Cowgirl Hall of Fame and was the subject of a PBS documentary in the mid 199os.

Cameron was born to a life of privilege in Britain, in 1868. Her family was so well-to-do that it employed 15 servants, one of whom was assigned to brush Evelyn's hair twice a day. Evelyn rode sidesaddle and did not know the meaning of work of any kind.

She left that life behind after she married and accompanied her husband to frontier Montana, where they ranched and tried to raise polo ponies on the unlimited grasslands between Terry and Miles City. She did almost all of the ranch's manual labor on her own, embracing the independence this gave her. To help make ends meet, she took up photography, selling photos to cowboys, homesteaders, newlyweds, and anyone else who wanted a keepsake photo from a glass plate negative.

Evelyn carried her 9-lb. camera strapped to her waist, put her tripod in a rifle scabbard, and rode horseback from place to place to take her 34 years' worth of photos. After her death, her photo gear and some 1800 glass plate negatives sat untouched in a basement for 50 years, before they were discovered and made known to the world.

Evelyn's life and story have fascinated me for ages, as has that part of Montana that now claims her. Tidbit: She was the first woman in her area to wear a split skirt for riding horseback, and was once threatened with arrest for daring to appear in such a garment on the main street of Miles City.

If you can ever get your hands on a copy, you can learn her whole story in the book "Photographing Montana: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron," by Donna M. Lucey. This is where I first learned of her and saw some of her photos documenting early life in Montana.

November's Horse & Rider--What's In Store

Horse & Rider's November issue will be out any day now, and I'm excited for you to get it and share your thoughts.

The cover rider is reining trainer Dave Moore, of Florida. He provides great insights about the importance of putting "wait" on a horse--in other words, training it to wait for the rider's cues rather than to make decisions on his own.

The Q&A Interview is with Craig Cameron, originator of the Extreme Cowboy Racing sport. Craig outlines what the sport is all about, and helps shed light on why its popularity is growing.

And then, just for fun, we provide a pictorial of show fads and fashions of the 1970s. Careful--coffee-up-nose snort alert on that one!

Cattle as Cute Companion Animals

OK, this may seem like an off-topic post (see subject line). But bear with me, because it's really not as off-topic as one might think.

I've been doing some thinking on the subject of livestockism. Which would be a term for strong prejudice for or against a particular kind of livestock; a term for attributing positive or negative qualities to a group based on personal belief. (Think racism.)

Many people exhibit what could be called livestockism when it comes to horses (noble, helped us settle the West, deserve to run free if born free, subjects for rescue and adoption, great companion animals, should not be considered as food, etc.), and when it comes to cattle (fair game for horseback sport, socially acceptable to be raised as food, livestock vs. a pet/companion animal, and so forth).

Just to underline how deeply ingrained our cultural livestockism can be, imagine a flipflopped world, in which cattle were the pets/companion animals, and horses were the fair game for cattleback sport. Picture donating funds to a cattle rescue, or conducting a circle ceremony at the gravesite of a euthanized steer, or sending your heifer over the Rainbow Bridge.

Then pay a visit to this Website, cutecattle.com, and share your thoughts. (I found this by doing a Google search for the phrase 'cute cattle'--just to see if anything would turn up--and lo and behold, it did).

  

Playtime Inspired by the TV Cowboys

OK, I have to confess that I am getting a huge kick out of everyone's comments about the TV cowboys of the '50s and early '60s, and their influence in the kids of their era.

A few recollections from my own kidhood:

* Endless games of cowboys & Indians. Or, the alternative, good guys & bad guys.

* The decision on whether to name our first pony Trigger, after Roy's horse, or Buttermilk, after Dale's. (Buttermilk won.)

* The hoarding of Hopalong Cassidy boxtops and milk-carton tabs, which were "sent in" (to some mysterious place) to receive Hoppy prizes.

* The opening bars of "The William Tell Overture," signaling the start of the Lone Ranger's spot in the Saturday TV show lineup. ("A fiery horse in a cloud of dust, and a hearty 'hi-yo, SIL-ver!'")

* The Christmas wish list that invariably included such items as cowboy boots, cap-gun six-shooters, cowboy-TV-theme board games, and the like. Our parents stayed up until the wee hours of Christmas Eve, putting a Western town set together for us under the guise of Santa.

* The chance to express favorites with choice of school lunch box. Would I "go girl," and choose a Dale Evans lunch box? Stick with horses, and get a Fury lunch box? Take a more grown-up approach, and opt for the "Bonanza" characters? (And speaking of which, who was YOUR dreamboat Cartwright brother?)

Creeds of the TV Cowboys

When TV and baby boomers both were young, any cowboy role model worth his salt had his set of rules for kids to live by.

Here's a roundup of those creeds and commandments, accompanied by a lovely piece of writing that paints a great picture of the Saturday-morning TV scene recalled so fondly by so many.

More Baby Boomer Nostalgia (Fury and Joey)

Today seems to be the day for the universe to be sending out horse-nostalgia vibes for us baby boomers.

No sooner did I find out about the impending closure of the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum (see previous post), I opened an email to find this link to history of another TV favorite for kids of my generation--the show about Fury, the black stallion.

This was yet another TV show, featuring horses, that imprinted virtually every TV-owning family with children in a certain era. In the days of only three mainstream television networks, just about all Saturday morning programming was geared toward youth-age viewers (the better to sell cereal and the like), and the majority of shows were some variety of horse opera with kid appeal.

There was the Roy Rogers Show, with Dale, Trigger, Buttermilk, and Bullet, the dog.

There was the show with Fury and Joey, and Jim, at the Broken Wheel Ranch.

There was the Lone Ranger and Tonto, with Silver and Scout.

There was the Hopalong Cassidy Show. And the Sky King Show, about the cowboy with an airplane. 

And others some of you will no doubt wish to chime in and add.

This programming, in an era when media influences were so much more concentrated (and thus more universal than today), stands tall as one of the greatest PR campaigns the horse world ever knew. Its influence on people of a certain generation has helped fuel and support much of the horse industry's base for, what--half a century now?

But as the impending closure of Roy's museum underscores, the fuel source is not endless.

I consider myself to be among a blessed demographic, just to have experienced the Saturday a.m., horses-on-TV phenomenon that seemed so everyday-normal when I was a kid.

But eras do end, sometimes underscored by events that become historic markers--and I can't help but wonder if the closure of the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum isn't one of those markers.

Your thoughts?

You Know It's the End of an Era When...

....the Roy Rogers Museum announces it is closing its doors.

Citing a faltering economy, high expenses, and the aging of Roy's longtime fans, Dustin, grandson of the late singing cowboy, confirms that the museum will shut down at the end of this year.

Contents of the museum will either be sold or placed privately.

I know I can't be the only horse lover of a certain age to be saddened by this news of a passing era.

I named my first pony after Buttermilk, the horse ridden by Roy's wife Dale. And how many of us still hold up Trigger as THE iconic horse we wish were ours?

(Cue the opening bars to "Happy Trails to You"....until we meet again.)

What's the One Thing You'd Like to Know About....

...bringing up a weanling?

Here's a picture I took yesterday of my weanling, Smitty, as he modeled his very first horse blanket. (It's not quite the horse equivalent of a human infant's onesie, but close. It seems teeny compared to the big horses' blankets!)

Smitty went through some prep work before I made the move to put this blanket on over his head and buckle the straps. He learned the head-down cue I wrote about a couple of posts back. He had his back legs and underside desensitized to the tickling feeling of dangling straps (I used a longe whip's tail end for this, so I could stand back out of range in case he kicked.) He got rubbed over the back and sides with the blanket a time or two. He got a chance to get used to the sound of the nylon fabric rubbing against itself.

The actual blanket application was a non-event because of these prelim steps. In fact, because it was a cold morning when I put it on, he seemed to snuggle right into it with a measure of horsey gratitude. Smitty doesn't know this, but wearing a blanket is going to prepare him for other things in life, like wearing a saddle and feeling light pressure against his sides.

Raising a horse is a special experience. If you've never done it before, you might have a question or two about it. And even if you HAVE done it before, each new weanling is its own experience, with potential for a question.

Got one?