Horse Tradin' (35 page)

The ponies were fat, good-sized for Indian horses, good solid colors, and showed more than a little breeding. The old Indian jockey started out by telling me that he would give me five ponies for the horse that outran Daughter of the Sun. I didn't show much interest. I had counted them, and there were twenty-three in that valley. We got down off our horses and walked around among the ponies. They seemed to be real gentle. There were only two that had saddle marks to show that they had actually been used. But the others didn't shy from us—didn't booger or try to run off—and acted like they had been raised in a lot by a farmer, instead of on an Indian Reservation. I had already decided that the old jockey was the top horse-Indian of the tribe, and I was giving him credit for these ponies all being so gentle.

We spent about three hours, and he kept inching up a few more ponies until he finally got pretty mad and said he wouldn't give more than fifteen ponies for any horse he ever saw, and that he didn't like making talk with a paleface horse trader all day. I told him fifteen would be enough if I got the two that had the saddle marks. He agreed, and I unshucked the riggin' off Ol' Nothin'—using a bay horse with saddle marks for a pack horse. He
stood still until I got the pack on him, and he led off pretty good when we started out. However, I decided to turn him loose and drive him with the rest of the ponies.

I started out of the mountains, driving the ponies in front of me up the trail that I had come in on. They were the gentlest, slowest moving, young fat horses that I ever saw. You could ride up and tap one on the rump with a lariat rope, and he would hardly flinch.

I made camp that night at a little set of corrals by a spring. They evidently belonged to some rancher who used them occasionally to pen livestock. I had about run out of oats for Beauty, but I had enough for that night.

The next morning I saddled Beauty and went into the corral to catch the bay horse that I had used for a pack horse the day before. He was a little bit snorty and didn't want me to walk up to him, so I had to hem him up in the corner to catch him finally. I thought this was just because I wasn't an Indian and that he would get used to me in a few days. But when I started to put my packsaddle on him, he threw a walleyed fit, and the rest of the ponies crowded up in the back side of that corral snorting and acting like wild broncs. I had to tie this pack horse's foot to his shoulder and put a twitch on his nose before I ever got my packsaddle on him. I sure did cinch that packsaddle tight, and then I wrapped him and that whole pack up with a big rope, which I tied with a diamond hitch. I had an idea that he might be going to buck with the pack, and I intended when he got through bucking for him to still have it on. Sure enough, when I let his foot to the ground he threw a fit, but it didn't last long. There was no gate on this corral, just some long pole bars. I pulled them down and rode around the back side of the corral, easing
my ponies out onto the trail and heading them east. I was getting back down into the lower country, and the road was getting plainer and easier to follow; I could see that I would come onto a fenced road in another two or three hours.

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!

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'.