You may not know these horses, but I feel compelled to name them. Instant Little Man. Belgium Waffle. Rub the Lamp. Rainman. Roseau Platiere. Charisma. Streetwise. Empire. Condino. All killed on the orders of unscrupulous owners, trainers or agents, sometimes as part of a high-stakes insurance money grab and sometimes by a hired assassin named Tommy Burns, who came to be known as The Sandman.
In the late 1980s, Chicago attorney Steven Miller, who was trying to fathom the disappearance a decade earlier of a candy heiress named Helen Brach, opened a true can of worms. His investigation led to a horseman named Richard Bailey, who had courted the rich widow, and from there the net spread to include top-ranked show jumpers and trainers. Of the almost two dozen people charged, all but one was convicted and many served lengthy jail terms. The show horse industry’s “dirty little secret,” as a Miller colleague put it, involved “a virtual who’s who of the nation’s equestrian world.”
That world clearly was rocked by this case, not the first of its kind. Twenty-five years ago, horses at prominent Thoroughbred racetracks in the U.S. were dying so frequently that insurance companies refused to insure the animals. Cynical grooms at Belmont Park would wonder aloud in the morning, “Anyone die last night?”
The history of racing is pocked with stories of murdered horses. For Bay Jack, the winner in 1869 of the Queen’s Plate, the end came during a competition in Strathroy, Ontario. A competing jockey, intending perhaps to check Bay Jack’s speed for a forthcoming race in Toronto, had given him too much laudanum. The death of the bay colt, described as “a noble, beautiful looking animal … a model of equestrian grace and beauty,” occasioned a day of mourning in Strathroy. As one witness put it, “Had the man charged with administering the drug been caught he might have been lynched, so great was the feeling in the matter.”
There is a joke in the sport horse world that goes like this: to compete at the highest levels you need two things — money and more money. After 1986 in the U.S., you needed yet more money. Tax changes prohibited horse owners from writing off losses. A million-dollar horse aging, underperforming or gone lame no longer constituted a depreciating asset but rather an expensive liability. For some owners not burdened by a conscience, the solution lay in calling The Sandman.
Tommy Burns had tried stuffing Ping-Pong balls up a horse’s nose, then suffocation using green garbage bags, before he settled on electrocution. The method was simple and quick. He would cut an extension cord down the middle, then attach an alligator clip to the exposed wire at each end. He would then fasten one end to the horse’s ear and the other to the horse’s rectum before plugging in the cord. The dead horse would fall like a collapsing tower. His intestines would rupture, as they do when a horse dies of colic, and it took a careful and suspicious investigator to notice tiny burn marks on the horse’s ear.
Burns confessed to killing twenty horses this way over the course of ten years, earning anywhere from $5,000 to $40,000 per execution. In his wake, some insurance companies have withdrawn from the horse business entirely; others remain on full alert. And well they should when people pay millions for a horse.
The Canadian show jumper Jim Elder worries that these vast amounts of money tarnish the sport. “These days you have a rider, trainer, buyer — all these middlemen. When so much money is involved …” Elder, a lifelong rider-trainer-buyer who has never paid more than $5,000 for a horse, does not finish the sentence. He just shakes his head.
“I never rode a horse I didn’t like,” he says, sounding a little like Will Rogers. At sixty-four he still feels boundless enthusiasm for horses. “Every horse has his niche. They’re all good for something — hunting, hacking, jumping.” A place in the universe for every horse seems a far cry from The Sandman, whose clients would sometimes ask him to kill a horse and then, months later, the replacement.
An elite horse is a vulnerable horse, prey to all kinds of menace short of murder. At the height of Big Ben’s career, his groom used to sleep in his stall at major horse shows, so great was the fear that someone would spike his food, which would have led to a doping charge against Ian and the elimination of the horse from the event or worse.
In 1991, Monty Roberts was in Germany working with a brilliant speedster called Lomitas — the top-rated Thoroughbred racehorse in that country’s history — who balked at starting gates. Monty resolved that problem and helped spirit the horse away to California when blackmail letters threatened harm, but not before the horse was poisoned with a heavy metal — just enough, one letter had warned, to make him sick. Once again, a winning horse — “a freak” — paid the price of being better than the rest. More than ever, it is dangerous for a horse to be splendid, or splendid and suddenly not so.
I think I understand why Ruffian and others of her stature can move us to tears. To ride, even to watch, an elite sport horse is to feel the bearing and power, the nobility more than anything, that flows from a quality horse.
Ron Turcotte once observed that Secretariat had become a heroic figure in the time of Watergate, that shattering blow to our trust in high office. The timing, he believed, was no coincidence. There is something to his insight. The bloated salaries and egos of professional athletes have bankrupted a once reliable source of heroes, so the horse — a four-legged athlete with no desire to take drugs, snub reporters or hold out for extra millions — nicely, and majestically, fills the bill.
CHAPTER 8
EPIC RIDES
I know that [Mancha and Gato] understand the man who shared so many perils, hardships, hunger, thirst and weariness with them, in the long pilgrimage through the Americas that has placed them with the immortals of the equine race.
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM, IN HIS PREFACE TO Tschiffely’s Ride: Ten Thousand Miles in the Saddle from Southern Cross to Pole Star
MY ATTRACTION TO horses complements another I have — to remote places and lost eras. I am not alone. When tourism is the fastest growing industry in the American West, when visitors to Montana jack up the price of land by buying it (thus T-shirts reading “Montana sucks — now go home and tell your friends”), when dudes outnumber cowboys in Alberta, then the cowboy way may indeed be imperiled by eastern zeal. But it all speaks, finally, to the pull of horses, and it was The Horse that drew me to the Willow Lane Ranch in foothills Alberta.
At that time, my four long days in the saddle during the summer of 1995, including two days on a cattle drive, constituted epic rides for me. My body said so. Only later did I begin to collect stories about the real thing.
If I hold in awe such riders as A. F. Tschiffely, Barbara Whittome, Butch Cassidy and Felix Aubrey — who have a place in what might be called the long-distance riders’ hall of fame — it is not because I, like them, know what it is to ride a horse every day for weeks or months or years at a time across or down continents.
Aubrey almost rode himself to death in 1848 — to win a bet. Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who fled Wyoming and a gaggle of U.S. marshals, rode to the very tip of South America before the end came in Uyuni, Bolivia, in 1909. Tschiffely rode the other way in the 1920s — from Buenos Aires to Washington, a two-and-a-half-year trek. Whittome crossed Russia on horseback in 1995 to prove a point.
And while the jocular City Slicker movies feasted on the clichés of the cattle drive, it is sobering to ponder the genuine article. A typical cattle drive in the nineteenth century once meant a thousand miles in the saddle — one way.
The first cattle trail in America spanned the distance from San Antonio, Texas, to Abilene, Kansas, and was carved out by Jesse Chisholm, a half-Cherokee cowboy. Other trails — the Sedalia, the Western, the Goodnight-Loving — would follow.
The longest cattle drive of all began in 1866 when Nelson Story sewed $10,000 into the lining of his clothes after finding gold in Montana. His idea — buy cattle in Texas, sell them at a profit in Kansas — seemed solid.
But two troublesome elements — Kansas farmers opposed to cattle tramping their land and cattle rustlers called “jay
-hawkers” — proved too much of a barrier. Then Story remembered how desperate for beef were the men of the Montana gold fields. He and his crew then headed cattle west along the Oregon Trail. But at Fort Laramie, the U.S. Cavalry warned him of hostile Sioux; at Fort Phil Kearny, which was virtually under siege by Red Cloud’s warriors, the fort commander ordered Story to corral his herd. He could go no further.
8.1 At the end of long and perilous cattle drives, all paths led to the saloon. (photo credit 8.1)
Undeterred, Story bought Remington rapid-fire rifles for all his men. Unless he pressed on, he would have to sell his cattle to the army, but at nothing like the rates he could command on the gold fields. That night around the campfire, Story took a straw poll among his men. All but one voted to push on, and next morning, October 22, the lone cowpuncher was forced at gunpoint to join the others. Story and his men did indeed battle the Sioux and who knows how many other obstacles along the way. On December 9, though, they arrived in Virginia City, near the gold fields, with six hundred head of cattle, four hundred less than they had set out with. They had traveled almost two thousand miles.
We tend to romanticize cattle drives — the black coffee round the campfire (cowhands used the butt of their guns to grind up coffee beans), the stars and the sagebrush, the lure of the open trail.
But the work was hard and conditions harsh: vaqueros, or cowboys (a term that originated in Ireland and only found common usage in Texas around 1900), ate a steady diet of dust by day and slept on the same dust at night. Semiwild long-horns were notoriously cantankerous and would use their massive horns (often five feet from sharp point to sharp point) to kill an unhorsed man. Swollen rivers, angry Indians, deserts and outlaws could any or all of them kill the cattle driver.
The diaries of Cyrus C. Loveland, who moved cattle from Missouri to California in 1850, are both memorable and telling. Provisions gone, living only on beef and having driven the cattle continuously for two days and two nights to cross the desert, he and his men look a ghostly crew. Here they are at the Truckee River, near present-day Reno, Nevada: “The last night on the desert we were so overcome with sleep that we were obliged to get off our horses and walk for fear of falling off. As we were walking along after the cattle it certainly would have been very amusing to anyone who could see us a-staggering along against each other, first on one side of the road, then the other, like a company of drunken men, but no human eye was there to see, for all alike were sleeping while walking.”
Rare was the trail driver over the age of thirty. Most men quit after ten to fifteen years. Years of sleeping in the open on cold, hard ground, all the while ignoring sickness and injury, produced the “stove-up” cowboy — a man who faced ill health for the rest of his life.
The exquisite skills these men possessed were much admired, not least by cowboys themselves. “It was a pleasure to see them work,” wrote John Clay in My Life on the Range. “They swept round a herd with an easy grace and careless abandon.”
The cattle drive moved in somewhat hierarchical fashion. The trail boss took the lead, with his best men riding right behind at “point.” Others farther behind rode “swing” and “flank.” Bringing up the rear and eating the most dust of all were the “drag” riders, usually the youngest or least accomplished. Stampede was a constant threat, and at times the cowboys would force the cattle to circle, singing loudly to quieten them (thus the “singing” cowboy).
There existed a close fraternity among the men, who were governed by a code of conduct. Cowboys were expected to be cheerful even when sick or tired, never to complain, always to be courageous (sacrificing their lives for the herd, if necessary) and to help a friend — even an enemy — in distress.
Care of your remuda (Spanish for “replacement”) of six or so horses per cowboy was part of that code. The hand who abused horses was sent packing. “An empty saddle,” the saying went, “is better than a mean rider.” When the trail boss assigned a new hand his horses and said nothing about their idiosyncracies, this was taken as a compliment to the new man, a vote of confidence in his ability to handle any horse. And if the boss wanted a man to quit, he simply took away that man’s favorite horse.
Erwin Smith, at the age of eight, started work at the JSC Ranch near Quanah, Texas. He longed to become an authority on the Old West and in 1905 he set out with his box camera for some of the biggest ranches. His black and white photographs — remarkable for their quality and packed with detail — rank among the first and the finest to capture real life on those sometimes awesome ranches. (Richard King, for example, a steamboat captain turned rancher, founded a ranch in the late 1800s that boasted 1.3 million acres, a hundred thousand cattle and ten thousand horses.)
Ranch horses were often wild mustangs taken from the plains. They were short, wiry and tough, and even tacking them up was a battle, as several of Smith’s photographs demonstrate. In a particularly telling one, a horse, though saddled, has decided not to be ridden: the mare is high on her haunches, her neck and head far back. A long rope leads from the bridle down to the cowboy on the ground. The rope is so firm yet relaxed in his grip he could be flying a kite.
The photograph suggests that horses and riders were playing roles in a drama acted out daily. Indeed, Smith calls this series of photographs The Usual Morning Fight. Any antics that occurred around tacking might recur three or four times a day — every time the cowboy changed horses.
8.2 Self-portrait of the legendary photographer of the old west, Erwin E. Smith, 1908. (photo credit 8.2)
Such spirited horses help explain the sizable spurs evident on the cowboy trying to bring his horse down from the clouds. Like most cowpunchers in Smith’s photographs, this one wears a Stetson, a high-crowned wide-brimmed hat that spoke more of practicality than of fashion. The layer of air between the top of the hat and the wearer’s head offered protection from the sun; the four-inch brim shaded his eyes. To top it all off, the hat was waterproof.
But on cattle drives there was no real protection from the weather. A nineteenth-century painting depicts a drover during a fierce winter storm. He wears sheepskin chaps and he’s bent over miserably in the saddle, with both hands in his pockets, a scarf over his mouth. The horse has icicles hanging from his nose and tack; his eyes are almost shut. Cattle even a few feet away are barely visible in the blinding snow. All look as if the wind at their backs has found a way into their bones.
One blizzard that hit South Dakota in 1886 blew for eleven days. Cowboys froze to their saddles. Like the men and animals in the painting, herds simply put their backs to the wind and drifted with it. Thousands of cattle died in this, the biggest “die-up” ever.
No blizzards or die-ups on my cattle drive. At the end of the day — a hard day, I thought — were clean sheets, a fine meal around the ranch table, even a hot tub for my rubbery thighs. For the first time in my riding life (until then, doled out hourly in a paddock or covered arena, maybe a trail), I would learn that saddle soreness is a minor term for major pain.
The Willow Lane, a working ranch ninety miles south of Calgary and run by Keith and LeAnne Lane, is small as Alberta ranches go: a string of twelve horses, almost three hundred head of Simmental-Hereford-cross cattle on 1,625 acres and a bed-and-breakfast-cum-vacation business to make ends meet. Twice a year, Keith, daughter Lyndsay, a wrangler and a few guests drive cattle from the ranch to a forest reserve where the wind-stunted limber pines grow. The twenty-four-mile cattle drive, in deference to ranch hands with soft hands, is stretched over two days. Real cowboys would do it in one, albeit a long one.
Keith Lane looked the part of cattle rancher, with a dark band of sweat around his gray felt cowboy hat, keen eyes (the yawning silver buckle on his belt proclaimed a trapshooting championship) and a walrus mustache I found myself staring at. Variously, the mustache and its tangled sideburn neighbors were, I concluded, the color of the setting sun, of ripened grain, of a red-brown heifer. The salt-and-pepper gray no doubt came from years of worrying that the pri
ce of beef would fall. Again.
When he doffed the hat, his face was revealed in all its two-toned glory. The top half, an egg-shaped hairless dome, was white, but below a demarcation line over the eyes, where the hat sat, there began a windblown, sun-beaten territory that ended abruptly at the collar. Decades of working outside will do that to a fella’s forty-three-year-old face.
LeAnne Lane, formerly of Rosemary, Alberta, seldom rode, what with running a B and B. But I knew she could ride. In the living room her father, Reg Kesler, looks Marlboro Man-handsome on the GWG jeans poster that proclaimed him All-round Canadian Cowboy Champion of 1951. Lyndsay, the Lanes’ fifteen-year-old daughter, rode a horse as though born on one. The blood lines at the Willow Lane run pure.
It being a working ranch (as opposed to a dude ranch), there was work to be done. I boarded a big gelding named Lightning, whose great girth only occurred to me hours later when my legs began to drift apart like continents. Accustomed to English riding, I was slow warming to western saddles, which seem to weigh more than I do, but I took comfort in the familiar smells — of leather tack and the horse. The feeling I got when I first mounted was also one I knew and loved: you are astride a high creature, feeling small and large at the same time.
Day one. I joined the team. Our task: move fifty or so cattle from one pasture to another as a kind of dry run for the cattle drive; then pluck out a particular cow, no. 9 (identified by a tag in one ear); then drop off in the high hills some toolbox-sized salt licks with the pack horse; then fix a few fences. As I rode over the hill just behind the cedar ranch house and the clutch of Russian willows that gave it its name, I suddenly, and really for the first time, understood the phrase “big sky country.” I felt utterly at home. On the range. On a horse.
Wild About Horses Page 21