Feral Horse Adventure.

During the winter of 1971-72 fresh out of the Maine Corps I moved my budding family back to my home state of New Mexico with the intent of getting into the cattle business. We moved into a small house located on the edge of the desert near the Uvas Mountains with a view of the Rio Grande Valley north of Radium Springs.

Riding jobs that earned enough to keep my little family going were few and far between, and so I ended going to work at White Sands Missile Range as a steel tier and an apprentice concrete finisher.

On the week ends I cowboyed when I could and looked around for horses to break to supplement our income. In about the middle of March 1972 I saw an add in a paper advertising a horse auction to be held at a location near Alamagordo, NM, the horses being feral horses gathered by the Bureau of Land Management off of the huge White Sands Missile Range.

They were advertising good unbroke saddle stock, mares and studs for the low price of $125.00 dollars a head. I decided to take a horse trailer to the sale with the intent of buying a horse I could break for myself.

On the Saturday of the sale my brother and I hauled a borrowed trailer to the livestock sale in Almogordo about 150 miles away over the San Andreas Mountains to the east of us in the foothills of the San Francisco mountains west of Ruidoso. There were many people already there when we arrived and we saw that the lot of horses numbering about two hundred head were a sorry lot.

There were some old rangy studs and mares, but it appeared that I would not be able to find a good horses in which I wanted to invest my $125.00. After searching and eyeing each horse individually, we finally found a pretty good looking bay stud horse that had some good conformation, but looked as though he had been starved and didn't weigh over 700 pounds but with a little feed he might grow to weigh at least 1,000 lbs.

When the time came I bid on the horse and ended up buying him. Once I had him then came the hard part, getting him loaded into the trailer. It took us about two hours to load him because I didn't have a horse to pull him into the trailer, and no matter how I tried I could not get a mounted cowboy to help me load him. This horse was the kickingest, bitingest animal I have ever seen, he didn't want to load in the trialer and when we finally forced him using ropes, he kicked the trailer sides and fought and whinnied the entire trip back home.

We finally got him home and unloaded him into a small pen I built next to the house just for him. The next morning I started trying to break him, or perhaps he started breaking me. After several weeks of working with the horse I finally concluded that this horse was too old, had been wild too long and had been a stud too long to be much good to me as a saddle horse. I decided to sell him as a bucking horse to a rodeo stock contractor, and he could sure buck.

A strange thing happened with this horse when we had him. If a person entered his pen he would automatically charge towards you and then whirl and kick. Several times he almost gave me a viscious kick in this manner and so I watched him carefully all the time. One Saturday I was home working around the house when my wife screamed at me to look out at the horse corral. I ran immediately to where I could see the horse in the corral and there saw something that made my heart almost stop.

Our fifteen month old toddler Justin was inside the corral sitting directly under this wild horse with him arms wrapped around one of the horse's back legs, pulling his fetlock hair and just cooing away to the horse. I had no idea how he got there, or when he did it, but I knew that it was going to be impossible to get him out from under that horse without him being killed.

The funny thing is that this wild range stud with little to no previous contact with man was standing there like a statue. He did not move a muscle, but his head was turned as far under his body as it would go and he was calmly and softly nickering and sniffing Justin from diaper to head. All this tough old wild horse had to do was step on the little fellow, or kick him and he would be dead.

My wife who has always been a marvel at handling horses walked slowly up to the corral fence and started clucking at Justin saying, "Justin, come on son, come to momma." Justin stayed under the horse for a few more terrifying moments during which time the horse never moved and then with a happy laugh crawled towards his mother and when he was close enough she was able to reach under the corral's bottom rail and snatch him from danger and into her grateful arms.

My wife and I with our little son hugged between us gave a prayer of thanks to our God for saving the life of our little first born son. Unable to break him I eventually sold this horse to a stock contractor who used him as a rodeo bareback bronc horse, and I was told he was a good one. I have always had a soft spot in my heart for this horse who could have easily killed my son, but who seemed to instinctively know he was a baby and nothing to fear.