THE ROMANCE OF THE HORSE

This is Meriwether on Highway 2 where you turn north to the ranch of Kari Lynn Dell

A guy in Montana who writes military thrillers wanted me to tell him what it felt like to ride a really good horse if that person were an early Blackfeet Indian.  Keying off things I had read, I told him that a high-powered horse that was in sync with the rider became one with the human, the two melded into a shared understanding of what needed to be done and how to do it.  For killing buffalo, the horse would carry the man alongside the running prey and match its speed closely enough for the man to send an arrow into the right place.  If it was before stirrups (a major invention), then he would have tied a rope around the middle of his horse in such a way that he could tuck his knee under in one direction and his heel under in the other.  He and his horse and the running buff would become one unit until the wounded animal fell.  The guy was impressed that I knew all this.  He seemed to think I had done it myself.

Of course, I hadn’t.  Neither had Bob, though he had a willing horse.  It was Hughie Monroe’s half-Arab bull-dogging horse who no doubt thought Bob would leap off onto the buff’s head, bearing the 2,000 pound animal to the ground.  This horse’s original name was something fancy in Arabian, but he had a back-up name, “Gunsmoke,” and then we ended up calling the horse “Gunnysack.”  That’s what he answered to.  But he was broke for bull-dogging  and when he stopped, he just sat down.  Abruptly.

Bob and Angus Monroe in the parade dedicating the Lewis and Clark statue in Fort Benton in 1776.  

Floyd Monroe, Angus' son, had a famous horse named "Printer's Devil."

Bob didn’t acquire his horses for their skills.  What he wanted was models for sculpture, so he bought horses for the way they looked.  It was helpful, of course, if you could ride them.  The guest horse, the one with the smoothest gait, was Playboy, a sorrel with a rump like an apple, so smooth and round.  This was the prettiest model, the one in “Lone Cowboy,” and “Four o’Clock in the Morning.”  There was only one flaw: this horse could suddenly buck so violently that few could stay on.  In fact, the reason he got the horse was that it would not buck on cue -- just it’s own notion of good timing, which was actually better than one might think.

Bob bought him from Rex Hoyt, Kari Lynn Dell’s relation up past Meriwether, which is not considered a town but a “populated place,” elevation 4,081, far enough out to get driving time to anything qualifying as a town unpredictable, depending on the weather.  Del Bonita Port of Entry to Canada is not far away.  But the main landmark is the grandeur of Chief Mountain.  Descent, one of the most all-time famous bucking horses was from up there and Playboy was related.  He escaped an entirely different career because when he was taken to a bucking horse sale, he wouldn’t buck. When Bob went to pick up his new horse, everyone gathered to see if Bob would try riding him -- frankly, hoping to see him bucked off.  This place was “populated” with rodeo people and Bob was an outsider.  Again, Playboy wouldn’t buck.  In fact, when Bob got far away enough to escape an audience, he unloaded the horse and rode him around.  He didn’t buck.

"Lone Cowboy" by Bob Scriver.  A portrait of Playboy and Bob.

But many years later Bob and I went out to the pasture where his horse and mine were kept and Playboy bucked.  Maybe it was too early in the morning, but the horse waited until he was belly-deep in a stream we were crossing and bucked Bob off so that he landed on the worn-down narrow path with a shoulder on each side, popping his sternum loose from his ribs.  It never really healed so Bob invented a harness leather corset with buckles that he wore over his clothes.  When Playboy died years later out in that same field, Bob got a veterinarian to do an autopsy and it turned out he had kidney stones.  Most of his life no one rode him and he was entirely peaceful when modeling in the shop.

But Bob’s great love-affair, not unlike Kari’s hero’s love for “Muddy,” was with Gunnysack, not least because the horse was high-lifed and when ridden on a parade, generally put on a show.  In fact, he had to have a quick-stop tie-down because he had a hard mouth and tended to run away whether what in front of him was a line of on-lookers, a barbed wire fence or a cliff.  There are many stories about Gunnysack in my biography of Bob Scriver.  

I had two horses in those years.  One was a big brown gelding that had once been a relay race horse belonging to the well-known Bullshoe string.  He was cheap, knew what he was doing, and wouldn’t do anything risky, which meant most things.  But when lined out at a run, he would rock along for miles.  I suspect that his origins were in the Cavalry and Mountie military horses -- tall, brown, and tough.  His name was Skeeter which was totally inappropriate.  

The other one Bob named Zuke.  We bought him at a dispersal sale.  He was fathered by a stallion named Sunspots, who reared and writhed in the show ring.  But Zuke was a pet.  In fact, he would have made an excellent clown horse for a rodeo, easy to teach tricks and never hostile.  A small pinto, he loved to come in the house and would open screen doors to invite himself to enter.  He had two faults.  One was that he sometimes fell flat on his face -- I never did figure out what tripped him.  The other was the one that took his price down.  When it got really warm, he let his dingle dangle (use your imagination) which was VERY unromantic.

Jack's measurements were the model for this, but he was not a bucking horse.

There was another horse we bought from Rex, a sorrel roan, broke for pulling.  We had bought a reconditioned spring wagon, which was a variation on the theme of buckboard.  It’s at the Montana Historical Society now.  We used it in parades, often for senior citizens and kids, until one year when politicians swarmed it, overloading it so much that it broke down.    The horse’s name was Jack, and he was a big peaceful fellow.  

I don’t think he came from the original “big horse” stock of the Blackfeet.  The agents were in favor of big work horses because they didn’t inspire dreams of riding down buffalo.  Anyway, when the Great Northern Highline railroad tracks were being built across the reservation, big horses were the source of power.  No one asked the Blackfeet for passage nor did they bother to pay, so the locals adopted the same attitude and for a while the local horses were pretty hefty.

Today the romantics are in love with wild horses: mustangs, small horses with long manes and tails, usually dun, mouse, clayback or even linebacks with a black streak down their spine and faint horizontal stripes across their butts.  I never knew any of them well enough to learn their names, but one herd was kept for a while on Bob’s brother’s ranch next to Parsons’ -- no relation to the character in Kari Lynn’s book.  Laurel Scriver, Harold’s daughter, was visiting for Indian Days with her sons and infant grandson.  We picnicked out there and the horses came to see, bringing along their spring colts.

The memory is vivid.  Grass was long and green in the summer sun.  The baby’s father lay him down in it with no clothes on so that he could put sunscreen, bright blue for some reason, all over him, which the baby loved.  The horses made an observant ring to watch carefully.  It was like some ancient blessing ceremony.