Several years ago now, I wrote a screenplay called, The Old Red Horse. It is a contemporary story about a man who has returned home against the wishes of the town he was raised in. As the story unfolds it centers around all of the things he has done in his life and how they all come back to what he learned as a kid riding his old red horse. Don’t want to give the ending away here, just in case some producer out there should decide they wanted to make the script into a movie, but the horse’s name is Star. I would like to introduce those of you who don’t him, to Star. For those that have had the pleasure of riding him, using him for a diving board in the pond, or roping off of him, working cattle with him, or just being around him, you can probably conjure a few memories as well.
This is Star when he was a four year old coming five or maybe a three year old coming four; actually I think that is it; three year old coming four.
The author is modeling a Roy Rogers fringed jacket, Lone Ranger Mask and his favorite beat up straw hat.
We or I should say I bought Star as a two year old with my $100 I had gotten for my calf that year. I couldn’t ride the calf and he would’ve never lasted for as long as Star did so I think it was a pretty good trade off. Dad took me out to Bee Lewis’ place. It was winter time, raining and all of Bee’s horses were soaking wet at least his colt’s were. I thought Star was the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen. You’ll find out why here a little later in this story. Many times since then I have revised that thought, especially when he would untie himself and leave me walking, as he went over the horizon with his tail in the air and laughing as he headed for home. Most of the knots I know and can tie today were learned just to keep one step ahead of Star learning to untie them.
As you can tell in the picture above I had a little problem of keeping my weight in my sturrips back then but that never stopped the Lone Ranger from forging ahead after the outlaws and it didn’t keep Star and me from doing likewise either. I had been riding for years before we got Star, he was actually my third horse to own. The other two were white and both were, ’good kid horses.’ That is if you had a kid you really hated, that was stout enough to turn them away from the barn and mean enough to use a branch off of a thorn tree to get them to move.
The one called Snowball, white horse number two, would only run towards the barn and when going towards the barn that was the only speed he would go. The speed didn’t bother us, my Uncle Steve (who was four months younger than me) were usually riding together and we liked the fast trip in. There were just two problems with the fast trip to the barn. The first and least significant was the fact that our barn roof was just barely higher than Snowball’s withers (the high hump in a horse’s back where it meets their neck, for those of you none equestrians out there) so we had to dismount before the barn’s tin roof scraped us off. Sometimes, actually most of the time, the high speed dismounts were the most exhilarating part of the ride.
The other part that was a severe drawback was getting Snowball to the other side of the pasture so we could make the exhilerating ride. If you tried to ride him away from the barn it was a constant tug of war on the reins doing a lot of left and right turns but not making much distance across the open range (as us young whiper snappers liked to think of the ten acre pasture). By the time you got to the other side of the ten acres it was nearly nightfall, if you started your conquest early enough in the morning) and you’d get one run in if you were lucky.
If you led him to the pond, it was on the far side of the pasture, not only did he lead like a well trained cement block but then you had to find a way to mount up. Out there on the prairie there was nothing to climb up on. Since I didn’t own a saddle, until the one you see in the picture with Star, it was a tough climb. It required a lot of digging into his front leg with your bare toes and wiggling. Why didn’t you just boost each other up you ask? Because the one not mounting had to hold Snowball in place. Otherwise you went to the barn as you were getting on in the same fast pace as you did when you were on his back. Going at a high speed while riding a front leg, holding onto a double handful of mane, is a little more exhilerating than we cared for. There was no mounting Snowball and holding him still at the same time.
As resourceful young men will do, Steve and I found out that if we jumped on the barn’s tin roof and made an awful racket, Snowball would come blasting out at a full gallop (even though we just referred to it as a run back then). So, we developed the barn roof technique. One of us would mount up and the other would jump on the barn. The jumper had to be careful though that horse and rider were a sufficient distance out from the barn roof so that Snowball didn’t decide to try and run back inside. We did try a mounting technique we had seen in the movies and that was to leap from the barn roof onto the already running horse’s back as he came out of the barn. Since the barn was of the open front type with no door, just thirty feet of open for Snowball to run out of and because he was already at top speed by the time he came into our view, this method lack a little in efficiency. Either we’d try to anticipate where he would show up and jumped early, this usually meant we were ten feet or so to one side or the other, or we would wait until he was spotted and jump. Problem was, our rate of decent wasn’t nearly as fast as Snowball’s rate of acceleration. After a few attempts had failed we gave up this idea. Our barn roof rouse worked for about a half dozen times and then he just got to where he would sull up and not move no matter what you did.
The only time Snowball would work properly was if Dad came out and watched. Then he would lope, change leads and be as mannerly as he could be until Dad got tired of watching and went in the house. Then the whole story changed in a hoof beat.
Cotton Eyed Joe was a one eyed, soured dispositioned horse that was a lot harder to ride than Snowball, but Dad was still calf roping some then and Joe would go to a calf. Since I was way too small to flank calves and in those days there weren’t any such thing as break away roping’s and since Dad didn’t really want to mess with teaching a kid my age to calf rope, (you’re too young I’ll teach you when you’re bigger)I didn’t get much good out of Cotton Eyed Joe.
When Dad started asking me what kind of horse I wanted out of my calf money I said I didn’t care as long as he wasn’t white. I still don’t have a great feeling of fondness for white horses (sorry Lone Ranger). This may be why when I looked at Star’s chestnut hide, I thought he was the best horse in the world.
Star was an unbroke, dark chestnut when he shed out in the summer and red in the winter, horse colt when he arrived at the Smith place. Dad started breaking him and after a few weeks, very few I believe, like one, we had him castrated. While he was a little sore from the brain surgery I started riding him. I was in the fifth grade and no, I wasn’t really twenty years old like my youngest brother might try and tell you, Star was the first horse I ever helped break to ride.
He not only taught me how to ride and break horses, a trade I’ve used many times over the years to put food on the table and gas in the pickup, he taught me how to work cattle, tie knots, rope, swim a horse, mount pony express style, roman ride, cuss, and God knows what else he either directly or indirectly taught me. He also taught my brothers and sister to ride and about half the kids in Nowata. He carried me home on many a dark night without ever taking a bad step and we did out run a hailstorm once that ended up in one of my poems.
Star lived his whole life on that ten acres, at least the part from two years old on. He lived until one month before his thirty fourth birthday and he believed he was still the ruler of his pasture until the day he died. He was the most cantankorus horse that ever lived at times but he put up with me and my siblings learning to ride and us getting good hands. He put up with being a baby sitter for my kids. He never liked riding in a horse trailer until after he had a wreck in one (it came lose going to a roping and he passed the pickup that was pulling him) after that he loaded with no problems. It was almost like he knew he was going to be in a wreck someday and dreaded it happening. After it was over then; Oh well.
Star was the type of horse that was truly a kid’s horse because anybody who could half way ride could get on him and go. You could use him for anything and we did. I guess the best story that sums up the old cuss was when my brother Tracey was trying to gather an old wild cow he had, to take her to the sale. Several of his buddies and their horses were trying to get her roped along with Tracey on his young horse.
Tracey said every time they’d get close enough to throw a rope that old cow would pull a maneuver on them young horses and away she’d go. He finally went over at Mom’s and got Star. Even though he was in his late twenties, Tracey let the old horse have his head and he said, It was just like he was in his prime all over again. He run up on that old cow and stayed right on her hip until I got her caught. Then I had Janey bring the trailer and we used those young horses to pull her in with. I was so proud of the old Star I nearly popped.” That was the kind of horse he was.
This is Star, thirty years later, after coming to live with us. I can’t thank him enough for being my friend and adversary all those years. I’ve owned a lot of horses since him but he is, The Old Red Horse.
