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Recently
while reading an old Western paperback, a chapter described an old
Western saddle house. This certainly brought back a lot of pleasant
memories for me as I recalled each of our saddle houses down through
the years.
One of the first additions to our Ochiltree
County farm after the first good wheat crop was sold was building
a small wooden, tin-roofed barn in which to milk our cows and store
our saddles. It had two stanchions in one end for milking and saddle
racks and feed barrels in the other for our horses. We used metal
feed barrels with lids on account of mice and rats.
As our operation grew in employees, Dad built another saddle rack
mounted on a truck wheel that turned allowing six saddles in up
and down fashion to be stored. Just spin the rack to reach the saddle
you needed. It was pretty fancy for the times but did the job quite
well.
Down on the Parsell Ranch on the Canadian
River we had a large wooden barn with a hallway running between
stalls, feed bins and milk stanchions. We hung our saddles from
ropes tied to the rafters and our saddle blankets rested over a
long pipe held up by barbed
wire to keep the rats from chewing on the gear. We were constantly
hunting cats, especially mamas with kittens, to help with the rats.
The local coyotes seemed to appreciate our cat-hunting efforts.
My favorite saddle house was on the ranch in New Mexico. It had
a concrete floor, was built of rocks, had a low tin roof and a tin-clad
tight door. The feed bins were located on the other end of the long
shed so we had few mice problems. We learned to feed the barn cats
inside the saddle house and leave them shut inside until the next
morning.
There were eight wooden saddle racks, and many had the initials
of old previous cowboys who had worked on the ranch once owned by
Jules Bivins. There was a coal
oil lantern hanging by the door if you left that early in the
morning. You could smell leather when the door was open, and a work
bench held all the tools for replacing horse shoes and trimming
horse's feet. An exposed two-by-four overhead held a rusty collection
of worn-out horseshoes of every size and design.
Here at the Trew Ranch, our wooden saddle racks are 60 years old
as I built them myself right after we bought the place. Originally
the room was built for harness with large two-by-four hooks to hang
the horse collars, hames and leather strapping. Though the old saddle
house has not been used since I retired in 1985, you can still smell
the screw worm medicines we used in the 1950s and see the oily shelves
where the Neatsfoot oil cans stood. We believe the original barns
were built in the early 1920s when cattle prices were much better
than normal. If those old walls could talk, wouldn't it make an
interesting article for the newspaper?
by Delbert Trew
"It's All Trew"October
12, 2010 column
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