In 1955 I brought one of the cattle horses into town and rode him in the parade. I had Donna East on the horse riding double, and she was dressed in a skimpy little indian maiden costume. She was very fair skinned and got a terrible sunburn...she also learned something interesting about horse sweat and a nearly bare bottom. I dropped her off at her house so her mother could oil her down and went over to the rodeo grounds. Glenda Tucker (there seemed to be a lot of Tuckers) begged me to ride "Old Snip" so I warned her that he didn't take much rein and he stopped and turned on a dime. She kicked him into a run and raced around the area, then pull back on the reins..."Old Snip" squatted and threw on the brakes...Glenda Tucker turned at least two flips in the air before she landed. She got up and laughed about it...but she didn't want to ride anymore.
I ended up having to ride "Old Snip" across the river and back to Lyman Jackson's place in the dark and sleeping in his bunk house.
I last saw Donna East a couple months later when I was invited to their home in Loveland or Littleton for a weekend (They had moved), on a three day pass from the Army. She wrote me in the Army for awhile...then stopped.
I have been thinking of those old times in Las Animas:
The horse "Old Snip" was the first horse I owned...I later had a quarter horse ranch in Orinda, Ca (but that's another story).
Lyman Jackson was about 80 some years old then and his wife Mary was older. Mary was almost completely blind and almost completely bald...she wore a scarf on her head. Lyman had a 10 acre irregated farm just past the bridge a couple miles toward Rixey on highway 50. I believe the next little farm was Chet Calcote's grandparents (Chet gave me his old clits so I could play football). Lyman farmed with a huge team of horses with vile tempers...they hated humans. He had a tractor but didn't know how to use it.
My freshman year (1950) I had the problem of getting to school..we lived 20 miles away and NO BUSES. So, I boarded at the Jackson's for twenty dollars a month (Mary got the money). Lyman kept bitching that he bought the food and she got paid.
I started doing chores...fed the horses, pigs, fixed fence...hunted down the eggs from their free ranging old hens. Lyman was plowing with the team one day and something broke...so he took the part to town. I decided to go out to the shed and check the tractor out...I connected up the battery, checked the oil, water, gas, and started it up. It had a nice set of hydrolic plows mounted...so I went out and plowed the place (it took about an hour). Lyman came home with the part and was thrilled (he never did learn to drive the tractor...he drove a car like he was hearding cows).
Lyman had another operation...he leased about 20 miles of the Arkansas River and had about 200 head of mother cows pasturing and dropping calves. He was afraid to check the herd by himself, because if he was thrown and hurt...he'd be out there for years dead! So, once a week, I rode one of the giant hard riding evil work horses and he rode "Old Snip", and we checked fence and counted calves. We rounded them up when all the calves were dropped and branded them, cut the young bull calves, the turned then loose again.
Lyman loaned his team out to "Grover" who I believe was Chet Calcote's Grandfather...who owned a cow operation someplace around Las Animas... anyway one of the work horses DIED. So, "Old Snip" was drafted to work with the other work horse as a team. By the way "Old Snip" wasn't old...about a four year old...Lyman had named every saddle horse he had ever owned since the 1880's "Old Snip". He tended to cuss spontaneously and didn't have time to remember the horses name.
"Old Snip" was a superb cattle horse...one of those you pointed at a calf and he cut it out with no reins and he would crawl through barbed wire fence...if you held it up aways. Well, his fence knowledge and the fact he could open gates with his teeth got him into trouble.
I got home from school one day and Lyman was in tears..."Old Snip" was down. He had gotten into the pig feed and eaten so much he was foundered. Lyman was holding his old single action 45 on a 44 frame up to the horses head and "Old Snip" was laying there grunting and rolling his eyes. I grabbed his arm and pleaded with him to get a vet...he said he had known horses all his life and this horse was going to die...and if he didn't he'd never be worth a damn, he'd be stupid and his hooves would grow out a foot every month. Then he said, "I'm done with this....Old Snip is your horse...see what you can do!"
My father happened by about that time, so we poured a pint of mineral oil down "Old Snips" throat and put a piece of garden hose up his butt, and poured about three gallons of soapy warm water into a funnel.
That got "Old Snips" attention and he got up, relieving himself all over the corral. From then on...I rode "Old Snip" and Lyman rode the work horse.
"Old Snip" continued to get into trouble by opening gates...
The morning of Santa Fe Trail days in 1955, I got up at dawn and the damn horse was no where to be found...Lyman and I finally found him by tracking his hoof prints. He was two farms away, upside down in an irrigation ditch with just his nose sticking out of the water. We had to get the old work horse to pull him out...I washed him up and rode him into town for the parade. "Old Snip" was thrilled to be around all the excitement.
Jesse:
We lived south of Cordes-Oberlander (Oberlander was single then...but had a long distance romance going with a gal in Colorado Springs) about a mile and off the road east about a quarter mile in a big old rock house....that was about two miles due east of Bishops who lived on the Haswell Rd. We ajoined the Pointons ranch and Everharts ranch. Cordes hauled me to Rixey with his girls, and we played cards a lot with Bessie and John Bishop...also Ray Kenchloe who lived with them. It was Grover Swift! So Chet is still picken and singen...I was always jealous of him...I tried the guitar...learned three cords, but could never get enough coorination to sing and play at the same time.
The Bisherds lived a mile east and a mile north of Oberlander...Levi Bisherd and his brother (can't think of his name) went to BCHS about a year or two ahead of me....they went off to the navy together. They used to take me jack rabbit hunting at night with their old pickup and a spot light...we shot hundreds and fed then to their hogs. Then there was "Shorty" who live back in there in a chicken coop...it was only about 6 foot ceiling...he was only about 5 foot. He would stop by our place about once a week and ask what we were eating for dinner...if he liked it he would stay. Another older guy lived back in there and raised broom corn...he had to cut it and process it all by hand. He had one leg shorter than the other, and when he got excited he would go in circles.
Straight north of us about three miles was Frank Riders ranch...he leased from the school district. Straight north of us about five miles was the Rudolph Myers ranch, he had two daughters he sent to Missouri to a girls high school...but summers they were home. They could ride, cuss and shoot...they were two tough girls. Rudolph used to herd cattle in his Cadillac, and when his wife rode in the car with him she rode in the back seat with a blanket over her head. He sold out to Garvey Farms out of Kansas...who had the largest farming operation in the US at that time. Old man Garvey gave us the rights to his wheat crop in the summer of 1954 because it was so poor...we combined wheat till it started snowing....I don't know how many thousand acres....had a hell of a time selling it because of production controls...most was sold in the middle of the night to mills for cash.
There is a picture and story in the old Bent County Democrat papers of about March 1955 of the remains of our house after the fire...taken by Karen Hickey....the first girl I ever kissed!
If I recollect there was a windmill and tank south and east of the house and a old cistern just a few feet west of the well that had caved in. AmI right. Levis brother was Arnold.. Knew Rudolph he was the Spadys uncle. You should have rubbed elbows with the Cooper girls, We lived across theroad east of the Coopers a mile north of Rixey. Jesse
Jesse: You're right, the well was hand dug...about six feet across, hand rocked with local white flat rock and about a hundred feet deep. It was dry! We had the "Well Man" come and live with us for a month...and he hand dug it about thirty feet deeper while I cranked up the dirt...but it was still dry! We had soft water trucked in from Ft. Lyon and put in the cistern.
I never knew Rudolph and the Spadys were related...I heard Rudolph bought a mother cow set up on the western slope. The Myers girls had a Dodge Coupe that they drove just like their father...they used to stop by and pick me up and take me with them to town to roller skate. It was against their religion to smoke, drink, cuss or go to the movies and a long list of stuff....my lips are sealed!
I inherited the place when my father died...the goverment paid me for years to not be a farmer. Charlie Everhart paid me to pasture his cattle. I stopped by the place in the late sixtys and Charlie told me he had been trying to buy the place for many years...because it squared up his holdings. He wrote out a check...I looked at it...it looked good to me...I went in and had Oakly Wade make out a deed and I signed it.
About two or three hundred yards due east of where the house was the oil field people hit a hell of a water well....they cased it with three inch pipe and capped it. We never used it. They found a lot of natural gas and some pockets of oil in that area...but after punching a few holes they ended up with the well on the Cordes-Oberlander place. I think I heard it was piped to Ft. Lyon.
I knew Alice...but John Dethridge started dating her when she was about 12 years old! ha!ha! Of course he was about 12 years old also!
Someplace near where you lived was a guy name Joe "something", he leased a farm near the ditch, had a heavy set wife who always had a baby nursing. He had a dream of having a dairy. But he didn't have any money!
He managed to get an old simi truck and cattle trailer, put a couple barrels of gas in the truck and headed for Wisconsin. Some dairy up there GAVE him fifty pedigreed Holstein calves...just dropped. He got a bunch of buckets with nipples on them and some calf formula and nursed those calves all the way home. He hand raised them and they looked at him as MaMa and they were his girls. He was really broke by the time he had all of them inseminated by a champion bull...he had everything he owned mortgaged to the hilt...except his girls. The bank started taking everything, so he told us he was heading to Kansas to find a dairy farm and he was taking the girls. We knew the truck was long gone...so we were curious how he was taking them. He said, "I'm walking them to Kansas!" "They'll follow me anyplace...I'm their Mama!"
He left the next morning with 50 pregnant heifers marching in a row behind him right up highway 50. His wife tagged along with the pickup and the kids. A year or two later he visited my folks in Kansas and told then he marched the girls to a dairy farm south of Wichita and was making a good living with his girls and their children (his heavy set wife still had a baby nursing).
