Horses

This week Pippi will have a birthday. Since she likes horses so much, I thought I would share some horse stories. Past members of our family had a lot of dealings with horses. Here are some of the stories I remember:

THE HORSE WHO REFUSED TO MOVE
My Mom was born on a farm near Sugarville, Utah. They had a mare who was a special horse. Mom’s family was forced to sell the farm when the government or some other entity began pumping water out of the ground to drain a swamp or something. Then, the well on the family farm went dry. They sold their mare to the neighbors. Later the neighbors moved too. Years later, some of Mom’s family went back to the farm where the found the mare still living on the abandoned farm.

RACE HORSES
My Great grandfather Oscar A. Robertson came to Montana in 1864. Believe it or not, at one time in his life he had race horses. Here is the story in my father’s words:
Q. Didn’t you say he [O.A. Robertson] gambled a lot of his money away too?
A. Well, he really wasn’t a gambler. He had race horses. He spent a lot of money on race horses. Now, he really didn’t gamble any money away because from what my Dad [O.D. Robertson] told me anyway, and what George Cooney said (who used to ride for him as a jockey when he was a young fellow), that he never knew him [O.A. Robertson] to lose a race. He bet quite heavily on them. They’d put up a $50,000 purse - winner take all. And instead of running just one race, they’d run heats. And he’d [O.A. Robertson] bet on each heat. Generally, they’d let the opposition win the first heat. And they’d really bet on the second heat. They’d just nip ‘em on the second heat. And on the last heat, they’d whop ‘em good!
George Cooney said he never knew of O.A. Robertson to lose any of those match races , and they put up a $50,000 purse. Of course, they used to have a lot of money. And they spent a lot of money on horses because he sent some of his brood mares back to Kentucky after the railroad came through and had them bred at $5,000 a piece to raise colts. So you know, he had the best there were in those days. He had good blooded stock.

In addition, my Uncle Les owned race horses and spent quite a few years on the race horse circuit. My Uncle Gene also owned race horses.


BREAKING HORSES
My grandfather, O.D. Robertson used to break horses so they could be ridden. He said it took two weeks. Once he spent two weeks breaking horses for a man, and the man never paid him. Years later when the man passed away, Grandpa submitted a claim against the estate for his money. He got the money he was owed.

BRANDS AND HORSES
My grandfather had a brand, but I can’t remember what it was. I know it had an R in it. To use it on horses, he had to brand his horses on their jaws. That wasn’t a good place to brand horses, so he used my grandma’s brand, the lazy B K to brand the horses on their hip, which was a better place.

HORSE RANCH
In Grandpa’s [O.D. Robertson] own words:
I took up a ranch and filed a Quit claim Deed. You could prove up in five years, see, but it proved to be on railroad land. After I lived on it for three years, the railroad took it away from me. And then I bought from the railroad company. I run horses there. I had a regular (?) horse ranch. I bought a bunch of horses at an administrative sale and took them down there. Those horses wasn’t worth nothing then. Four dollars a head I paid for them, borrowing money from the Union Bank and Trust Company to buy them with. Then I brought these horses and shipped some of them to Sioux City, Iowa – a hundred head of them; a hundred head of them to St. Louis, Missouri. Got eighty dollars a head for them. Then, I shipped the rest to Canada and sold them up there.
When they had this boom in Alaska, I sold out my ranch there and went to the Dawson City Stampede.

MY MOM & HORSES
My Mom was very leery of horses. I gather, she'd seen some terrible accidents and deaths that involved horses. I remember both her and my Dad saying, "You never can tell what a horse is going to do."