by Ben K. Green
These horses were snorty and rearing a little bit when I turned them out. They were afraid of the horse with the pack on him, and they tried several times to break across the opening and get away. But Beauty and I had different plans. I had gotten them onto a fenced road when a car came along, so all of them tried to break over the fence. By this time I knew there was something wrong with these horses. I had begun to get real suspicious of my Indian jockey friend.
I penned these horses that night at a little town called Hope. They had gotten wilder all day, and by that night they were so spooky that when I threw them a little alfalfa hay, they tried to run over the fence.
The next night I camped at Artesia. I was sitting up at the Cattleman’s Café in Artesia, after supper, when I got into conversation with an old-time cowboy. After we visited awhile, I told him about my horses. He said he hated to laugh at a stranger—but he damn near got down on the floor of that café. There were a couple more fellows came in, and he told them about it—then they broke out laughing, too.
I finally said it didn’t seem so damn funny to me, and if some of them could get their breath long enough, I would like for them to tell me what they were laughing about—then maybe I could laugh, too. After all, I was furnishing the horses for the laughing.
This old pock-marked, half-breed, new-found friend of mine wiped his eyes and told me that the Indians had herded those ponies down into the valley and had held them there on sleepy grass. I know now, though I didn’t then, that the seeds of sleepy grass contain a dopey substance that acts on a horse much like today’s modern tranquilizers. And that good trade that I thought I had made turned out to be a bunch of wild, unbroke horses.
I went to the hardware store the next morning and bought me a bunch of three-quarter inch rope, then cut and tied myself some fifteen hackamores. I drove the horses over to the railroad stock pens and got them into the chute. Then I put these hackamores on them, with each of them dragging about ten feet of rope. This was new treatment for the sleepy-grass horses; and every time they jumped, one stepped on the other’s halter rope and pulled his head around. The pack horse wasn’t much trouble to put the pack on that morning, and the young horses couldn’t run away because of the rope they were dragging that they stepped on all the time.
I got back home in the late summer. All my Indian horses had their heads sore from the hackamores, were easy to catch, and had begun to get civilized. But if I hadn’t had a three-weeks’ drive for them when they came out from under that sleepy-grass dope, I would have never broke ’em to ride.
I regretted that I lost Ol’ Nothin’, but he wasn’t as bad off with the Indians as I would have been in that double harness!
A Note about the Author
Ben K. Green, a native of Cumby, Texas, was the
kind of a Westerner who almost crawled out of the
cradle and into a saddle. He spent his childhood,
adolescence, and young manhood on horseback.
He studied veterinary medicine at Cornell
University and did postgraduate work at the Royal
College of Veterinary Medicine in England. Dr.
Green did subsequent research on toxic plant life
involving more than three hundred different plants
that are deadly to domestic livestock. After he gave
up his practice and research, he returned to Cumby
where he lived, raising good horses and cattle, until
his death in 1974. His other books are Wild Cow
Tales; The Village Horse Doctor, West of the Pecos;
and Some More Horse Tradin’.
This is a Borzoi Book
Published by ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Published May 27, 1967
Repinted Thirty-one Times
Thirty-third Printing, July 2007
© Copyright 1963, 1965, 1967 by Ben K. Green
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Distributed by Random House, Inc.
Published simultaneously in Toronto, Canada,
by Random House of Canada Limited.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66–19378
The chapter “Gray Mules” appeared in the July 1965
issue of Southwest Review.
The following chapters appeared in
Horse Conformation by Ben K. Green:
“Gypsy Hoss Trade,” “Homer’s Last Mule,”
“Nubbin’,” “Angel,” “Maniac Mule,” “Matched Mares,”
“The Rockcrusher and the Mule,” “A Road Horse
for a Broodmare,”
“Cowboy Trades for a Wagon ’n’ Team,”
“Poor Heifers—the Judge
—Wild Mules,” “The Parson’s Mare, Bessie,”
“Horse from Round Rock,” “Mule Colts,”
“Mine Mules,” “Traveling Mare,”
“The Schoolmarm and Ol’ Nothin’.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-76094-4
v3.0