WWWiiiizzzzzzzzz….
…the sound was so close to my right ear I instinctively put my hand up to my ear to see if it was bleeding. It wasn’t. But it was so close I knew it had to be intentional. I never did hear the gun go off, but i knew what it was. By the time I pulled my hand from my ear checking for blood, the second wwwwiiizzzzzz… had ripped by my left ear. I heard the gun shot this time. There was no doubt what it was; it was bullets whipping past my head.
I could sense my horse Prince’s flee energy start to surge through his body. I lightly tightened the reins. He stood motionless at the command, his ears pointing forward, twitching. Chief, free in the lead on a half-shank had bolted forward at the first crack of the gun. Seeing Prince wasn’t with him, Chief wide circled, galloping back towards us at full gallop. He circled around us coming up beside Prince on the left flank. The two horses nuzzled, both with a slight snort, tell the other it was ‘ok’.
I stayed frozen. I could hear the sound of a truck bouncing across the field behind me. I never turned to look at it. I knew it was coming. Whoever on that truck fired those shots was a marksman. Those shots had been a ‘don’t move’ warning. You don’t argue with a bullet. I didn’t flinch a muscle.
This little trek across a flat section in the Black Hills of South Dakota had started four years earlier. It started in a little red, four stall barn-stable on a back county road, ½ a mile from the Village of Baden; 80 miles due West of Toronto, Canada. That was where I met Dale Horst and the plot evolved.
A week before Dale was about to move his two horses, leaving the other 2 stalls open, at the same time, as the fate-gawds intended I was looking for a place to move my two horses, one being Chief, a three year old, and two year old Prince: both sons of ‘One Eyed Jack’, which had attained almost legendary status in the world of Appaloosa. Dale had a seven year old Arabian for his 100 mile endurance races and a five year old quarter horse for his Western speed events.
I learned about the 2 available stalls quite by accident….needless to say! I was having my pre-breakfast Sunday coffee at my regular greasy spoon family owner, Petro Canada restaurant, glancing at the local Farm Gazzette newspaper when 3 words in the want-ad-section caught my attention: “two stalls available” the ad read. I called immediately. “yes, the stalls are still available” said the drawling voice at the end of the phone. He described the location which was only one concession over from where I was. ‘Is it Ok, if I meet you over there in about an hour?’ I asked. “Yes that will be fine” was the answer.
I pulled off the gravel road onto the red barn’s laneway which separated the small barn from the house. The side door of the house opened with a tall, lanky older gentleman, slightly stooped at the shoulders emerging. He slowly shuffled towards my van. As I stepped down from the van, he reached out his hand in a friendly handshake gesture. We shook hands, starting a 25 year friendship.
“Hi, I’m Lyle Woolner”.
‘Howdy, I’m Dave Maxwell
Lyle was a 4th generation dairy farmer. With his 2 sons and their families, the Woolner family farmed 700 acres with 300 plus milking cows. No horses.
‘C’mon, I’ll show you the stalls.” He opened the 4 ft double sided painted red barn door. I followed him in. This section of the barn was 25 ft long by 25 ft wide. There were stwo 10 X 10 stalls on both sides of the 5 ft centre isle with a 5 ft saddle space along the back wall. The concrete floor was solid and well swept. The walls and ceiling had been recently white-washed, making it a bright room with the wire protected lights over each stall and centre isle. The stall doors were sliders which although decades old, had been well maintained and rolled easily. The outer walls were the concrete foundation of the actual barn above us. The front and divider walls consisted of five, stacked 1’X2” solid oak planking held together by the original square headed 3 ½” spikes. There were no bars to the ceiling above the planks so the horses could reach their heads out into the centre isle and visit.
Lyle pointed up at a 3’ X 3’ trap door in the ceiling. “The upstairs is full’a’hay. You can just drop down however many bales you need. Keep track of how many you use’n’we’can settle up at the end of each month’. Pointing to the 2 stalls on the right side, he went on: ‘them 2 stalls r-yours. Them other 2 belong to a Dale Horst. I’ve known Dale since he was in diapers. Lotsa folks don’t like’em. Mostly cause he don’t hold back if he’s got somthing’ta say. If he don’t like the way you’re treatin’ your horses, he’ll let you know real quick’n’hard. If you’re thin skinned you’ll find’em a tough go. If Dale don’t like ya, you’ll have to move. Dale ain’t what you’d call a cowboy, he’s what I’d call a horseman’. No truer words were ever spoken.
‘This ain’t a boardin’ stable’, Lyle continued. ‘Seems everybody wants to own a horse but no one wants to look after’em’ Yu gotta do the feedin’ the waterin’ and muck out your stalls. You Ok with that?’
I nodded my head in agreement while muttering ‘Yup’.
“I’ll move the muck away from time to time. I like to keep the place fairly tidy.” He looked me right straight in the eyes and asked ‘Well, yu want the stalls’r’not?”
Again I nodded my head in agreement. “Yup, fer sure I do.”
‘Ok then’ he said extending his handshaking hand again. ‘You seem like a pretty decent feller’. I took his hand in mine and we shook. The agreement was iron-clad. If I shook Lyle’s hand in friendship once, I must have shaken it a thousand times in friendship and with a thousand smiles.
‘When you wanna move your horses in?’
‘A couple of weeks from now, at the end of the month it that’s ok.’
“Yup, that’s fine by me’. The stalls are yours now. Why don’t you come back to the house after church on Sunday’n’meet the Missus. C’mon over about one’n’join us for tea’n’desert’.
‘That will be very nice. I will. Thank you’.
We closed the stable door behind us, walking out under the 20 X 12 pillared overhang. “That gate in front of us beside the shed is the entrance to the pasture. There are a few apple trees in it, but mostly it’s grass. You’n’Dale should do a fence check. The top three lines are hot so ya might wanna mow down any long weeds or grass that might short it out. Ok then…see you Sunday afternoon. Oh yeah, Dale will be here Saturday mornin’. Might wanna drop by round’10 to meet’em’. He might appreciate you walkin’the fence with’em.
‘Good idea, I’ll make a point of doin’that. Much thanks Lyle. See you Sunday.
I jumped into the cab of the van, turned it around and we both waved ‘bye’.
Horsty
Ten o’clock Saturday morning, I turned the van back onto the red barn’s laneway, pulling behind the two horse aluminum Fleetlight trailer which had its double doors open with no horses inside. Dale Horst was here. With a little trepidation, I walked past the bumper-pull trailer, and black duelly-wheeled RAM 350, super-cab pick-up truck with its Cummings diesel engine insignia on the from panel and walked towards the stable at the back of the barn.
As I stepped around the corner of the barn I was met with: ‘You Maxwell?’ It was more of a sneer than a question. I’m Dale Horst.’
‘Yeah’, I said responding to my name sneered question, the sneer of which I ignored’. At the same time I extended my handshaking hand in friendship which he looked at with contempt and then ignored. I felt like a 7 year old kid who had been caught in the grocery store trying to steal a wad of gum. I almost apologized for who I was and for being there.
‘I had hoped Lyle wouldn’t have found anyone to take those 2 stalls’, he went on. I really prefer for no one else around, just me’n’my horses. But I guess I’m stuck with you for a while at least.’ Now I felt like a five year old who was being scolded for something he didn’t even do or know about.
‘You’re over at Littweiler’s boarding stables, is that right?’
I just nodded my head ‘yes’ saying nothing in case I said the wrong thing.
‘Known Dwayne’n’Sue since high school. Went to their wedding’, he went on. ‘They run a good boarding stable don’t ya think?”
I was finally able to pull my eyes off his burning stare, glance towards the paddock and respond to his contemptuous tone with a full sentence. ‘Yeah, I’d say so’.
“Then why don’t ya just stay there he hurled back at me.
Not this time. He’s not backing me up this time. No more. I stopped glancing into the paddock, looked him square in his belittling stare saying, ‘because it’s time I started looking after my own horses. I’ve learned as much as I can there. It’s time for me to move on.’
“I get that”, he said finally breaking his hate gaze. ‘I was talking to Dwayne last night. He said you went out to your horses every day. He also said you always helped him or Sue out with the work whenever you went out, is that right?”
‘I guess so.’
‘Dwayne said you went from a pee-green rider to dark-green, that right?’
‘I don’t know what that means’, I admitted.
‘Pee-green means you knew less than nothing, when ya got there. Is that true? Sue said that for the first three weeks you were there, they use to sit on the porch and laugh watching your horse lunge you in the paddock. She said you use to walk around the outside perimeter of the corral holding onto a lead line with your horse standing in the centre of the circle at the other end of the lead line lunging you around’n’around’. He started laughing at the thought…at my expense. ‘That true?’, he asked with a slight ½ smile snear on his lip?
I exhaled. ‘Yeah, pretty much’, I admitted. ‘It wasn’t so much that I didn’t know the way it was suppose to be done, it was just that I couldn’t get the dam horse to the outside. He always ended up in the centre with me walkin’around him. Took me a while to figure it out’, I laughed.
For the first time,, Dale lightened up a bit and started to laugh. ‘Yeah, I heard it took you a while. How did you work it out’?
‘One Sunday afternoon, Dwayne, Sue and a bunch of the boarders were standing around the coral watching me walking around in a circle with Chief just standing in the centre of the ring and the whole group of’em started laughing…some so hard I thought they were going to bust a gut. I was so humiliated, I stopped walking and trying to get Chief to move and walked towards that horse with an ‘if you don’t stop embarrassing me I will beat you to death attitude. He knew I was deadly serious this time. He just looked at me, trotted to the end of the line and started trottin’around’. Everyone around the fence applauded and laughed. I finally got it right’.
‘Sue said you took your hat off and bowed to everyone!’ he laughed.
‘I don’t remember that, but I probably did’. I admitted.
“C’mon, lets go check the fence line’, he said.
It appeared my admission to my total humiliation at the hands…make that hoofs…of my horse satisfied Dale for at least a minute or so.
‘That’s what we mean by ‘a pee-green rider’, he added.
The pasture, about 3 1/2 acres’n’a’half in size, hadn’t been used for a year or so, so there was lotsa grass. Lyle had obviously gone around the fence line with a bush-whacker and cut any weeds or grass tall enough to interfere with the hot lines. Looked like he’d tightened up all the lines as well. Everything was in good shape. Dale took the lead in the fence inspection with me slightly a step or 2 behind. About a 1/3 of the way around the pasture, Dale looked at me with, what I knew to recognize as his ‘laughing at me’ smile on his face. Musta seen that smirk a thousand times…always in good humour, and most often with good reason! And then he started again…
…’Dwayne said the first time you rode with him you flew out of the saddle.’ I couldn’t stop from laughing at the memory, ‘Afraid so’, I owned up to.
‘Dwayne said you flew out of the saddle like you’d been shot out of a cannon and you ended up totally upside down, still holdin’onto the reins with your feet and body fully extended upside down over the head of your horse and that you did a full arc and landed flat on your back on the ground in front of your horse. Dwayne said he’s never seen anything like it. He said your feet had to be at least 20 feet in the air before getting body slammed to the ground. He was amazed at how hard you hit the ground and even more amazed your horse…what’s his name…?” ‘Chief’, I muttered.
…’he was amazed Chief didn’t crush your skull with his hoofs.”
I stopped hearing Dale’s words, when my mind flashed back and went back to remembering that hoof coming straight down towards my face with Chief’s eyes looking right into mine. He seemed to know I was dead if his hoof hit me. In one motion he ripped the reins out of my hands, shifted his body to the side and planted his hoof with his entire weight within inches of my skull. I watched as he went into a full body roll, landing on his shoulders, and then roll over onto his back with his four legs full in the air and kicking, and watched him roll right back onto his feet. He shiver-shook himself, circled around me, put his muzzle to my face, as if to ask if I was Ok, and then as if knowing I was Ok, he snorted his snot all over my face as if telling to let go of the reins next time and to get back onto my feet. The body slam knocked the wind out of me. Chief’s snort-snot brought me back to the point where I could roll onto my stomach and tried to get up. Chief stepped to the side of me, took one step forward, looked at me, then looked at the dangling stirrup as tho willing me to grab onto it. With my right hand, I grabbed the stirrup. Chief took two side steps pulling me to my feet. I remember getting to my feet, leaning against him in a daze. Chief just stood there waiting for me to gather my senses.
Dale pulled me back from my flashback. ‘Dwayne said at first he thought you would end up dead or crippled but that you crawled back into the saddle and rode back to the stables with him.”
I broke out laughing at the memory. ‘Yup,, afraid so. I still hurt all over every time I remember it.” Now we were both laughing at my pain.
Dale punched me on the shoulder saying ‘don’t worry Maxwell, we have all been there. We will be there again. I want to meet that horse of yours. Dwayne says he’s a great athlete. Sounds like he saved your life…that will only be the first time. He will again.’ . Dwayne also says you’re “alright”. I guess you can stay for a while at least. We’ll see how it goes.” Dale stuck out his hand, this time we shook. Thus started another 30 year friendship.
Horsty
True to his billing, Dale Horst is first and foremost a horseman. I asked him why people referred to him as a horseman vs being called a cowboy. He had the obvious answer. ‘Two reasons’ he said. ‘Do you see any cattle around here?’
‘Nope’, I laughed.
‘Do you think there might be at least one around if I was a cowboy?’
‘Yup…at least one’, I dumbly responded.
‘But more importantly’, he went on ’I don’t ever want to be paid that little for that much hard work. Cowboys work 24/7, are on their horses over all terrain, at least 12 hours a day, work outside in horrendous weather, including snow storms, to look after some flea-infected, four legged animals that are going to be killed and ate anyway. They are a dying breed. The big agri-business cattle farms have replaced them all. Bein’a cowboy might be a romantic idea, but the reality just ain’t much fun. Today, if you wanna find a cowboy, go to a local country and western music and dance pub, and you’ll find all the ‘wanna be’s’ wearing their clean hat’s’n’boots’ every Saturday night. Me…people can call me whatever they wanna, but a cowboy I ain’t.’
To me Dale Horst was a horseman. At 5’9” he wasn’t a particularly tall guy, but he threw a long shadow. Mennonite by birth, he use to laugh at how he was probably the first ex-communicate Mennonite, the irony being of course that Mennonites are viewed by the Amish as being shunned Amish, so all in all, he was continuing the religious processes. He was a muscular guy with the broad shoulders of a football running-back. He combed his mid-length brown hair back over his ears with the centre combed with the part of the right side. He was square -jawed, with an equally squared forehead. According to Lyle, Dale was in a saddle before he could walk. When he was in the saddle, you knew he belonged there. When he rode, there was no ‘niceties’ in his style. He was solid in that saddle. When he gave a command, there was never a question in the horse’s mind, what was expected of it, and it did it with no hesitation. Dale had light hands, and the horses seemed to know that whatever he was asking them to do was the right thing at the right time and that they could do it…easily. I never once heard him shout or even talk to a horse when in the saddle. They just responded.
Before the Robert Redford movie, the Horse Whisperer came out, there was a trainer billing himself as the Horse Whisperer, which is probably where the name of the movie came from. Both Dale and myself were interested in learning about the new ‘breaking’ techniques, this guy was suppose to be introducing. I got the book, left it at the stables for Dale to look over. We chatted about it one Saturday morning. I asked him what he thought about what he’d read so far. ‘It’s Lakota’, he said?
‘What? What’s Lakota?’
He explained. The Lakota are the First Nation people of the Dakotas. The People of Crazy Horse. They use to use stress free horse breaking and training for hundreds of years. What this guy is saying isn’t new….it’s Lakota. Funny isn’t it. I’d heard of Crazy Horse, most likely from all those cowboy movies I use to watch. They were the guys circling the wagon trains shooting arrows while being shot down with rifles by the invading whites. AAAAhhhhh….the writing of history goes to the victor as they say. In any case I digress.
‘Yeah’, Dale said. ‘The Lakota believed in stress free horse training. Mostly they started with foals with the idea that by the time the foal grew into a two year old it was already handled enough that it was broke by the time someone climbed onto its back. They’d use weighed down buffalo robes to get the foal use to having weight on its back. As the horse got older, they increased the weight as the horse grew. In the winter they would use deep snow banks the first time a rider got on a horse back. In the summer, they’d go into a deep river or lake. It gave the rider a softer landing if they got thrown off. And for the horse, it was more focused on being in deep water or snow than a weight on its back that was lighter than the weighed down buffalo robe weighed. Brilliant training methods. In the meantime those cowboys were off wrecking as many horses as they were actually able to break. So what this guy…what do they call him…the horse whisperer…is just following the Lakota training methods. Too bad he didn’t give’em credit in his book eh? Me, I’m more of a horse-listener. I try to catch whatever it is my horses are telling me.’
From that point on, I tried to develop into a horse-listener too. It was the first time I ever thought of Crazy Horse as a real person and not just some crazy-injun like the movies taught me. It was the first time I ever heard the name Lakota, that they were real people living in the Western plains. To learn they were miles ahead of cowboys in working with horses was an entirely new concept. Little did I know how much this little chat with Dale was to shape my life.
For the first three months at the little red stable Dale’n’me co-existed. He had an iron-clad, ‘don’t touch my horses’ policy. He meant it. For those first three months, Dale would feed’n’water’n’muck his horses every morning and night. I’d do the same. Most often we’d be at the barn at the same time. At the end of three months, what in essence was a probation time for me with him, we were sitting on bales of hay when he made the announcement…’Maxwell, you surprised me. I never figured yu’d hang in. Seems you’re pretty serious about learnin’stuff. So, here’s the deal if you’re up ta it. Lets split the work load. One of us do the morning’chores the other, do the night chores…wanna do that?’
Honestly, I was stunned. Hard to believe sitting here now, after having spend thousands of hours in the saddle, and travelled tens of thousands of miles with my horses to ride, but that offer of splitting the chores was like right up there with winning the Stanley Cup to me (for the uninitiated that is the Golden Grail for us Canadians). Horst was allowing me to touch his horses. It was an honour. It meant I had passed the Dale Horst horseman’s first acid test. It was the first of many to come. We agreed on a working schedule and we both stuck to it. Neither of us ever missed our duties. We loved our horses, we loved being with them, looking after them was never a chore, just something we looked forward to every day. People say there are two miracles every day…sunrise and sunset…for Horsty and me, our daily miracle was being with our horses. It was always such a gift.
Over the next few years, Horsty would invite me to trailer with him to his horse stuff. Our horses knew each other well, got along well, and travelled well together so it was always easy travel. If we were going to be away for more than a day, Lyle would look after the other two for us. Lyle had always had horses in his life, using them as plow horses in his youth, but he’d never been in the saddle. ‘Never had much interest in that’ he’d say in his slow talkin’drawl. Horst was a celebrity wherever he’d show up. I was the ‘tag along guy’. We use to laugh at how many women use to swirl around him at every event. ‘I’m gonna get shot one day by one of those women’s husbands’ he’d laugh. ‘Shot for only thinkin’about’it, never doin’anythin’about it’!.
It was true. Horsty had this strange magnetism about him. Some of it was because of his reputation as a great horseman, but there was a lot more to it than that. I didn’t really get a sense of just how magnetic he was to women until we were in Texas and four of the ones he had been dating and sleeping with all showed up within an hour of each other. ‘Jeeze Maxwell, ya gotta help me out here all these women have guns in their cars’ he panicked. ‘What can I do, I don’t really know any of them very well!?’ ‘Suggest right now that you’n’me go riding that might work.’ It did. I pushed the lets go riding point because after all I flew all the way from Canada to go riding the PanHandle with him and now was a good time. It worked…at least to the point where the gals accepted Horsty taking me riding was the right thing to do, and to the point where he never got shot by any of them. But the Horsty’n’women saga is a book unto itself, so moving on….
The sport that interested Horsty the most was long distance endurance riding. We would also go to the Western events, which were more fun than anything else. There was always a bon-fire every Saturday night, the beer flowed easily with Brooks’n’Dunn blaring away on the loud speakers. These were mostly family events but take my word on it, there was a seriousness amongst a few of the competitors that matched any Olympic competition. No one wanted to lose an event. Whenever one of the more competitive riders won a ribbon, we’d never take it…just how many ribbons do we need anyway? The ribbons cost the club .75 cents and that money was better spent on the annual banquet. We just wanted the braggin’rights…for that week. There was an amazing comradery amongst the western riding groups that I never did see amongst English riders. I loved being with both groups for different reasons, but for sheer fun, love of their horses, and spending time with their families and horses, the western groups ‘won’ far and away. The English riders always seemed to take themselves so seriously, and were too often ‘uni-focused’ on the disciplines they demanded their horses to do being it dressage, jumping, polo, eventing and so on. But the sheer joy of riding always seemed to be missing. Most likely because the stakes of winning were higher. The exception to this was the hunt clubs.
Now the hunt clubs were fun. A party from beginning to end with a bit of riding and trying to find the hounds in between. But even they took things a bit to seriously for my taste. I was invited to not come back to the hunts because I didn’t dress appropriately. On one heavy rainy Sunday ride afternoon, I wore my Auzzie oilskin duster and hat. Everyone else rode in their ‘pinks’. I was the only dry rider in the group but I had broken the ‘written code’, I had dressed inappropriately and was advised my membership was revoked. Get this…it was the first time in the 75 year history of the club they had ever revoked anyone’s membership. I’ve gotta be honest and admit it wasn’t the first time I’d broken the ‘dress code’ in the 2 years I rode with them. I don’t ever remember actually dressing to code. I could never see the point of putting on a blazer”n’ shirt’n’tie to go riding. And of course, the members couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t see the point. I think I got dumped because too many of the newer members seemed to be arriving less and less formal, and it was obvious I was a bad influence…which of course I was.
I had a lot of fun with the hunt club and remained friends of many of them for many years. I also learned some riding techniques, and most importantly I took my first cross country fence jump. I learned a very important lesson taking that first jump, one I would never forget. I learned jumping a 4 foot fence is mighty painful in a western saddle. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out why! It was time to get an English saddle too. Secondly, I learned it is very hard to cover up how much pain you are in when you take a four foot jump in a western saddle. That horn isn’t on there for it’s looks. Take my word on it; you’ll only do it once.
Both Dale and myself got bored with the endurance riding. Riding a hundred miles in one day in two fifty mile circuits ain’t all that much fun. Despite the fact Horsty’n’myself usually placed in the top five of every ride, I decided to pack that in when I realized I’d just ridden 75 miles and hadn’t seen a one hundred yard stretch of scenery. I wasn’t aspiring to make the Olympic team. I just wanted to enjoy riding and being with my horses so on one ride, I dropped to a walk, and me’n’Prince just meandered along the trail. Prince was so much happier and so was I.
Mind you there were some very decent riders amongst that group, I was privileged to ride with both Canadian and American Olympians, but there were no bon-fires, and most people went back to the privacy of their trailer-RV’s to spend the nights watching the same TV shows they watched at home. But because of Horsty’s elite riding level, I learned a tremendous amount about conditioning horses. And oh yeah, remind me to tell you the story about how I was banned for life from every competing in another US Olympic sanctioned ride. I even got an official letter from the US Olympic Endurance Association advising me of my persona’non’gratus’ status all because those boys’n’girls couldn’t get their horses to run along side a train…but like I said…that’s a different story.
The spirit of Crazy Horse raised his head again over breakfast at our greasy Petro Canada family restaurant one Sunday morning when Horsty was looking at the local tourist section of one of the Toronto papers. ‘Look at this’ he announced. He turned the paper toward me with his finger pointing at a 1/3 of the page sized picture of this thing called, ‘The Crazy Horse Memorial Centre’. I’d never heard of the place, nor had Horsty. ‘Look at this’ he said ’they are carving a monument to Crazy Horse into a mountain. The head of the horse he is sitting on is seventeen feet in itself. All the faces of Mount Rushmore can be fit into the one side of this thing. It is the largest sculpture ever done. We’ gotta go there?’
‘We gotta what!!?’ I said with my highly intelligent dumb-assed quizzical expression on my face.
‘I always wanted to ride the trails of Crazy Horse’ Horsty went on. ‘I heard’a’him when I was a kid. Here we are talkin’about him 200 years after his death. He is still a spiritual leader of the Lakota. He was suppose to be an amazing rider. The US cavalry never could catch him. The cavalry use to torture Indians to try to find him. No one ever gave him up. No white ever knew what he looked like. He was totally protected by his people. Imagine what a great guy he had to be!’.
This gushing on Horsty’s part was a new side of him I’d never seen before. I knew this much, he was serious.
‘Ok so, how would we do that?’ I inquired.
‘To start with we have to trailer the horses to South Dakota. And we have to condition the horses to be able to do hundreds of miles of trails’ speaking as tho having conditioned the horses to do a hundred miles in a day was now kids stuff.
‘How far is South Dakota from here?’
‘It’s only about a thousand miles’ he responded as tho it was just down the street.
‘Only a thousand miles. Oh good. For a second there I thought it was quite a ways away. Guess not!’. Thus started the ‘Ride the trails of Crazy Horse’ quest.
The ‘Ride the trails of Crazy Horse’ quest
And a quest it was. So how long was this little adventure going to take? We decided to make it a six week run. For Horsty that meant the trip would have to wait a year. He had three weeks holidays and was going to arrange to not take holidays this year and take a double holiday next year. Seems this little adventure caught even Hosty’s bosses imagination with the result …’yup’… do it. So he had his six weeks. With that out of the way, we could get down to serious planning. For me, I was a strategist with a government at the time, so arranging six weeks holiday was also a simple task on the basis I moved my projects that far ahead. You would think throwing two horses in a trailer and motoring a thousand miles down the highway to go riding would also be a simple task. Turns out…not so much.
The starting point was to track down just where Crazy Horse trails actually might be. The Lakota had a number of different branches. It’s not like they all lived in one place or stayed there. They were nomadic and moved around, in and out of various hunting grounds. It made sense to start at the most obvious starting point and work our way out from there. The Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota seemed like the logical spot. Then we decided to do a 300 mile circumference from that spot with the thought it gave us at least a decent range to work with. When we laid that out on a map, we were into the Bad Lands and Black Hills of the Dakotas, up into the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming and Montana. Ok then… therein are the trails.
We knew there weren’t a lot of people up in them there hills, and we kinda figured there would be at least a few days when we would be in the wild’n’wooly west with virtually no civilization around…or at least we hoped so. This turned out to be a ‘good call’. We started making a ‘what if’ list.
‘What if we had to live off the land’? We wanted to try to live off the land as much as possible which meant we had to start learning more about what we could and couldn’t eat. Given the Dakotas are literally ‘due West’ we figured the vegetation was pretty much the same as Ontario. It was. I was delegated to take this training on given I had already lived off the land for three years. For me, this was some ‘good memories’ and some ‘not so good memories’. I had become pretty good at knowing what to chew on and what to leave alone. I never did get comfortable with mushrooms tho. I just figured, wow, one bad one and I’m dead so why bother. Even today, mushroom’s on my steak ain’t something I cotton to. There are lotsa other veggies you can eat other than some fungi given a fancy name.
‘What if, one of us got seriously injured’. Not being the two brightest light bulbs on the Christmas tree, our concern wasn’t whether or not we could fix a broken arm or leg or neck…we just reckoned we already knew how to do that despite the fact we never had …see what I mean about not being the brightest lights! Instead our concern was getting back into the saddle. We went back to working on getting the horses use to our climbing up both sides of the saddle. It is one of those things you let go unless you are conscious of maybe needing it. We might…so we did.
‘What if, we lose a shoe or one comes loose.’ Both Horsty and I were accomplished at putting shoes on the horses. But the point it raised was just how much stuff can you actually carry with you? The terrain for those regions was mostly just out and out hard which meant shoe problems would most likely involve straightening out a shoe. We opted for a pair of pliers to pull the shoe off, and then go with either one of the better neoprene boots which were starting to make their way onto the endurance circuits or what was called ‘the iron liquid’ which was a paint-on which created a hard-hard coating over the hoof. Neither of us cottoned-to the iron liquid because we felt it would prevent the hoof from breathing so we went with the neoprene boot. Obviously not as good as putting back on a shoe, but it resolved the problem of a serious hoof damaging issue if a shoe couldn’t be nailed back on. The western states are horse country so at worse we would be looking at one of the horses using the boot for a few days. We didn’t expect to be going through any marsh land so we didn’t anticipate there would be the chance a boot would be sucked off.
The ‘what if one of the horses came up lame’ question we didn’t really have an answer for as much as an idea. The idea being we’d plead our case to one of the local ranchers to see if they would rent us a horse and let us board the injured one.
One major ‘what if’, we never really had to contend with in Ontario was snakes…rattlers….apparently an issue in the Bad Lands. HHHuuummmm….we’d better read up on that. So we did. According to the ‘How Not to Die if Bitten by a Rattle Snake’ Book For Dummies, it says ‘action must be taken immediately. An ‘X’ musts be cut at the point of the fang bite and the blood must be sucked out. Now Horsty and myself weren’t all that squirmish when it came to blood. We’d both patched up blood spurting cuts on both humans and horses, so we decided that if one of the horses got snake-bite, one of us would hold the horse halter to keep it steady while the other did the blood suckin’. But if either of us got the bite, we’d just let the other one die. Better than having to explain to our friends how we saved the other. Nope…you’re gonna die was our motto! I never did see a rattler until I visited The Battle of the Big Horn Memorial Battleground…you know, where that idiot Custer got all his men killed. Was one 10 footer, fully stretched out just waiting to attack me. Fortunately, it was asleep but seeing it sure woke me up.
With the major ‘what if’s looked after we were down to minor issues such as the camping gear. We would have 4 saddle bags plus a back-back so we figured we’d have more than enough space to carry whatever we’d need.
We moved into a higher gear in conditioning the horses. Or at least that was our excuse for spending every non-working hour in the saddle. Pretty much every weekend, we would trailer somewhere. We’d work on getting through rivers the horses had to swim through, steep enough hills we’d have to get off and tail-grab to get up it, and then turn around and slide our way down the same hills only this time in the saddle. We enjoyed every second of it…the horses didn’t seem to share our enthusiasm.
Like all great dreams, it all came crashing down one September morning when Dale announced he was leaving Canada and going to live in Texas. He had been offered an amazing offer to manage a ranch. It only made sense he should take the job. The depth of the cut to my disappointment was shortened when he pointed out, ‘Hey…now we can go riding in Texas instead…we can ride the PanHandle’. This took a bit of the sting out of the trip but I was deeply saddened that he was leaving. Oh well…and moving on.
I did fly to Texas a few times to ride the PanHandle with Horsty but as is inevitable with long-distance-friendships, they get replaced with new friendships. We kept in touch for quite a few years after that but the trips to ride in Texas-Oaklahoma became more and more infrequent. Ultimately Horst left Texas to work in France. Definitely a horseman.
Saying goodbye to Horsty as he loaded his horses onto his trailer was truly a sad day…for both of us. In life, we learn there are many forms of love. Friendship is a form of love regardless of whether it is for a member of the opposite or same sex. Over the two years I had always looked forward to spending time with him. To say I learned a lot about riding and horses from him would be an understatement. Most importantly, he taught me to ‘listen’. I would miss him. The degree to which we miss someone is the same degree of love we have for that person. I would miss Horsty deeply. But…. I digress.
The year passed slowly. The Crazy Horse trip was cancelled, or so I thought. But the thought wouldn’t go away. The Crazy Horse books stayed at the stable. Lyle decided to not bother renting out the now empty two stalls, leaving me to my horses and my thoughts. I had fallen into the ride every day mode. With both Chief and Prince needing attention everyday ‘something’ needed to be done above and beyond just the feeding and muckin’out’. It was a year after Horsty left the barn, I was riding in the Ganaraska Forest when the thought struck me. My riding had evolved into ‘solid’. I had done a couple of endurance runs…still no fun…and had fun at the Western speed events when it struck me…jeez…why don’t I just do the Crazy Horse run on my own? I was riding alone all the time, trailering alone, camping on my own, looking after the horses on my own, just who was it I was waiting for? You Can Do This, I thought. I knew I could!!
The Passport
Ya ain’t goinna’get into the United States these days without being classified as a terrorist unless you have the right paperwork…that being a passport. You can thank George Bush for this inconvenience…along with too many other war crimes you might want to think about. In any case… ya need a passport to get across the border into the States. Never having had one, I needed to get one.
Should be an easy thing to do eh! They are given out to thousands of people every day. No problem, thought I. I’ll just meander in to the passport office, fill out a few forms and ‘voila’, they’ll mail me a passport. I hadn’t expected to have to do an interview. Now that was an interesting experience. The interview went kinda like this.
‘Name?’ I told her.
Social Insurance Number? I gave it.
‘Place of birth?’ AAAhhhhh…. Toronto I think! That AAAhhhh…came right back to me like a boomerang. ‘What do you mean? Were you born in Toronto or not?’ This lady had no sense of humour.
‘Well…I’m not right sure where I was born’. By the expression of distain on her face I could tell she wasn’t to use to this as an answer. ‘Were you adopted?’
Oh man, I thought, this is about to get convoluted. It ain’t gonna be simple at all. ‘Well…kinda…but not really. Seems I was kinda passed around’, I answered.
Now the expression on her face went downright quizzical… (ain’t that a grand word).. .with the pained expression meaning of it. ‘You were kinda passed around. Is that right?’ She asked. ‘What does that even mean?’
‘I think it means no one really wanted much to do with me and when it was time to move me on, they passed me onto someone else. No one adopted me.’
‘When were you born?’
‘Not sure about that either. Somewhere between March to June in (…no one gives their age after a certain age right?).
Another frown crossed her brow. ‘Let me get this straight. You don’t know where you born or when you were born,
‘Is Maxwell your birth name?’
‘No..it’s not. I don’t know my birth name.’ Well that did it!
In her best officious tone, she went on: ‘You don’t know when you were born, where you were born, you weren’t adopted so there’s no record, and you don’t know your birth name. Is all that accurate’. Her typing all this down on her computer with such a serious expression on her face made me nervous. I’m sure that from her position, all this seemed pretty improbable. Funny…I’d had to deal with this lack of information a thousand times over my lifetime. Whenever it came up, it never worked out well. Now I was wondering if I’d even qualify for a passport. ‘Yup, that’s accurate’.
‘And you want us to issue you a passport of the basis of this lack of information?’ she asked incredulously” (Now I’m just showin’off…ain’t the English language grand?’).
Well, it certainly sounded ridiculous to me too.
‘Do you have a birth certificate?’ she added?
‘No.’
‘To get a passport, the first thing you will need to do is to get a birth certificate.’
‘How do I do that without having a name?’
‘You will have to go to the name registry, to get your name to get your birth certificate to get your passport.’
I have been in this maize-of-officialdom before. Never did make it out. ‘What name do I tell them at the name registry?’ I asked.
‘Oh that’s right’, she said. ‘You don’t know your birth name. I really don’t know what to do.’ She picked up the phone on her desk. I thought I was about to be arrested. ‘John, can you please come in here for a moment’?’
After a moment of silence during which she typed, a gentleman arrived at her office. She started explaining to him. ‘John, Mr. Maxwell, doesn’t have a birth certificate, doesn’t know his birth name, place of birth, date of birth and wasn’t adopted, so there is no actual record of his being Canadian. Is there anything we can do to help him?’ I was surprised at how unaccusingly she gave him that information. There was a sign of empathy in her voice.
John, looked out the window. ‘How do we know you’re a Canadian?” he asked.
‘Well…if I’m not a Canadian, I want all my tax money back. I started working when I was seven and have never stopped, so if I’m not considered a Canadian I want all my money back!’, I said in attempted humour given I wasn’t about to get a passport anyway and was now bemused by the entire game. Much to my surprise, after their initial ‘what the heck did he just say’ expression passed, they both started laughing. ‘I don’t think too many illegal immigrants are going to be saying that one’ John said.
He looked at me directly. ‘I came across a situation like this maybe twenty-five years ago. Let me look into the situation and I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, just go to the cashier and pay your passport costs as tho everything is going through normal process.’
I was shocked. This wasn’t what I expected at all. I had expected to immediately be rejected. I stood up, thanked them both, and went to the cashier’s counter. Two weeks later, my first passport arrived in the mail. I was stunned. I opened it, looked at the official stamps and for the first time in my entire life I knew I was in fact a Canadian. I guess Crazy Horse wanted to meet me.
The Border
It was an odd sensation realizing I had a passport. Mostly we take all that stuff for granted in this country…but we shouldn’t. What made it particularly odd for me was the number of immigrants who I knew who became Canadian citizens who then applied for and got their passports. I had always been nervous about applying for one. When I was a kid, I was ‘forever’ told I wasn’t allowed to play hockey, or baseball, or soccer or football because I didn’t have a birth certificate and couldn’t prove when I was born. Until I got use to it, it had been a devastating experience. But now I had a passport. It struck me as a few pounds of stress had been removed from my shoulders once I knew I was at least as Canadian as someone who was born in another country and immigrated here.
With passport in hand, I could now start mapping out the trip.
It was early May when I decided to head out to the Dakota’s in July. I wanted to do my final shoeing of the horses at week ahead of the trip. I needed to call Dr. Bill Hazen, a truly excellent vet who had looked after Prince and Chief for many years, to do a final health check and then apply for the Veterinary Inspection Certificate (VIC) without which there was no way to get the horses across the border. Bill came out to the barn on a Wednesday and on Saturday morning of the same week, he walked in with the Certificate with a big smile on his face. ‘How did you do that so quick?’ I asked. “Well…you got to know someone he said’, laughing. He handed me the Certificate, turned, turned to walk back to his van, turned and said, ‘you know I’ve always wanted to go riding out in the Dakotas…have fun! Call me when you get back, I want t hear about the trip.’ “I will I promised”. I did.
Van work was the next thing. One of my other buddies, Dave Wilhem gave me a hand with the brakes. Dave had the right attitude about vehicles. His viewpoint was that it didn’t matter how slowly you went up the steep hills or mountains. ‘At worse you will annoy the guy behind you, but who cares? You don’t know him, will never see him again and he’ll just be glad to get past you. It’s the comin’down those hills you’ve got to worry about. If the brakes aren’t strong enough you’ll jack-knief the van and trailer and maybe kill the horses.” It was Dave’s idea to put an entire new set of brakes on. He did…I watched. He figured he could get it done faster without my interference. He was right.
A week later, Saturday morning, I started the trip.
I pulled out of the lane at around 4.30am, turned left, headed west to the Port Huron border crossing. I figured crossing at the smaller border crossing would be easier. When I got to the border a few hours later, I wasn’t sure where to park the van and trailer. I decided to pull right in front of the glass double glass entrance door. There were parking spots there, but for cars as it turned out. I walked into the office. I was second to the family at the counter. I waited patiently listening to the US Border Patrol Official tell the family they couldn’t get into the US without a passport. They would have to head back to Toronto to pick up the ones they forgot to bring with them. Next it was my turn.
The US Official looked at me with one big frown on his face. Already in trouble and I hadn’t said a word yet. ‘Is that your vehicle parked out front there?’ he asked. “Yes sir” I replied sheepishly. ‘It’s not suppose to be there. Is that a trailer you are pulling there?”.
‘Yes, sir.”
What type of trailer is that I’ve never seen one like that.’
It’s a two horse Texas in-line trailer’.
“You’ve got horses in there.”
“Yes Sir.” “Lets go and have a look.” I followed him out the door.
“Have you got he VIC?”
“Yes Sir.” I handed them to him.
‘That is an interesting looking rig’, he commented. ‘What’s the advantage of it?’
‘The major advantage is that with the front and back axels, there isn’t any weight on the van other than the pulling. Usually they are a single horse. Even a four cylinder car can pull one’. We walked around the van and I showed him the 8 foot pouches on both sides of the trailer; one filled with water, the other with hay; the feeding stations. He really liked this idea.
He opened the back and side trailer doors, checked the markings on the horses, had me shut them and we headed back into the office.
‘Where are you headed?’
“I’m heading to the Dakotas” to ride the trails of Crazy Horse.”
“Are you really? I’ve always wanted to ride in the Dakotas. I use to ride a lot, but you know how life settles in on you…marriage, kids, job. So I never did make it. How long are you going for?’
“Somewhere between four to six weeks. Unless I get called back into work, in which case, not that long.’
“Well…I’d suggest you tell me you’re going for 28 days or less”, he said with a very curious look in his eye.
‘Okkkkaaayyyyy…. I’m going for twenty-eight days,” I said slowly.
“Is there any reason I’m going for 28 days.”
“If you tell me you are going for more than 28 days I will have to quarantine your horses here for a couple of days, but if you’re only going for a maximum of 28 days, given you VIC you won’t need to be quarantined.’ He had a big smile on his face.
“28 Days it is then. I’ll be returning in 28 days or less.’ I repeated. We both laughed.
‘Stop back here on the way back I’d like to hear about your trip.’
As funny as it sounds, I did stop to see Warren McGary of the US Border Authority on the way back. I made many trips into the States of the next few years, and whenever I drove the trip, I’d make a point of seeing if Warren was on duty. He loved horses, always wanted to go to the Dakotas and was a great guy to know at the border…as long as you kept your nose clean that is.
Next stop. Chicago.
The Screaming Silence…
Earlier…I made it across Chicago without problems…almost. Trailering horses distance is always slow. It doesn’t matter how fast you think you are going to go, you’re always going to end up going slow. The reason is because you have to stop every three hours to take the horses off the trailer to let them stretch out, to graze, to give them water and to listen to them complain about how uncomfortable the trailer is to ride in all while taking a ‘crap’ (think manure). All the above takes about 45 minutes. Add another seven minutes to talk them back into the trailer, plus throw on another seven minutes to clean up their ‘crap’ and before you blink, an hour has passed before you are bouncing along down the highway. No point trying to rush.
First day out I made it to the western side of Chicago as dusk was falling. I found a nice little county side road, pulled a right onto it and in a short distance pulled onto the wide shoulder where a crop field entrance gave me a wider clearance, turned the van off, turned on the trailer lights, lead the horses off the trailer to the edge of a nearby corn field with luscious grass for them to graze on. I grabbed grain along with water buckets for Prince and Chief. I then grabbed a folded up picnic chair and book for me.
I ground-tied the horses so they couldn’t take off, opened the chair, sat down and apparently promptly fell asleep.
I came awake in the darkness of night with Chief nuzzling my cheek as only a thousand pound animal can do while Prince tried to knock me off the chair with a head butt to my chest. I guess they got bored and were ready to go.
The horses walked onto the trailer, I closed the door behind them, jumped into the van, turned the key to hear the scream of silence, followed by the moaning-groaning fading ‘eeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaa’ to the click-click-click as the last gasp of life escaped from the battery. I forgot to turn off the trailer lights sucking the battery dry.
Despite my well thought out plan of drive-rest-drive, I wasn’t going anywhere till morning. Once resigned to that fact I made myself a light supper, laid down on the narrow van bed to instantly fall asleep. I woke up to the dawn, did the horse routine….with them again munching on grass. I made myself a coffee. A magnificent sunrise was raising in the Eastern sky. I sat mezmorized by the heaven’s beauty. The rainbow of colours soon emerged into an early morning sun as I finished sipping my morning coffee…Ashanti coffee of course eh!
I turned the engine’s key to the sound of the ‘click-click-click’ of the starter not firing because of the still dead battery. Now what?, I wondered.
In exasperation I looked up through the windshield to see the headlights of a vehicle in the distance coming towards me. A jump-start I thought!! The cables were in the bed-box under the mattress. I grabbed them, jumped to the front of the van, opened the hood, stood there looking like an idiot in front of the opened hood with the cables in hand.
That very first car stopped. The gentleman rolled down his window; “can I give you a boost” he asked with an ‘we’ve all been there’ sense of humour ring in his voice. I said…’Oh…thank you so very much’ and jumped to it. He popped the hood of his car, which he driven within cable distance of the van, I lifted the hood of his car, connected the two batteries, jumped in to turn the van key which after a few fan whirls, she fired up. What a great sound a dead motor coming to life is, especially so early in the morning on a country side road with a 24 foot horse trailer in tow.
“I see you are from Ontario”, he said. ‘Where are you headed?”
I told him about riding the Crazy Horse trail dreams in the Dakotas.
“I always wanted to do that” he said. That was to become a theme of a lot of people I met on the trip.
“Well I gotta get to work” he said. “That is my farm you see up ahead; this is my field. Me’n’the wife saw you parked here last night. We walked over to see if you wanted to come to the house but when we looked in the window you looked pretty much asleep so we didn’t want to bother you.” His smile was getting wider’n’wider. “Have a safe trip and think of me in the Dakotas.”
I will I assured him. The ‘think of me ‘ list was starting to grow.
You have to love country folk. They are the same all over the world. They’ll take the time to chat’n’help out whenever they can. However the moral to this little story is: always travel with horses. People may not like you, but they’ll always stop to help out a horse or two.
The sound of silence screamed at me….again.
Silence…the loudest sound a vehicle can make is silence. The silence screamed at me. The van’s electrical system shut down; the power steering shut down, the motor shut down. I pressure turned the steering wheel to turn enough to get me off the road and onto the shoulder.
“jeeeeeessssshhhhh”, I thought. (Honestly that isn’t what I really thought, but given this is a family story…Jeeessshhh it is).
In silence the van and horse trailer floated to a stop on the side of route 16, about 25 miles south of Rapid City, South Dakota.
I was 18 hours out of Chicago.
Maybe it overheated, I thought but there was no steam ejecting from under the hood and the temperature gauge read normal. The red oil light on the dash wasn’t on either.
I had no idea what knocked the van out. But knocked out flat she was. It was time to call the American version of the CAA. I will say the CAA and AAA (Triple A) integration of services is truly excellent road side services. Or at least it would have been had my cell phone had reception out here which of course I found out it didn’t. Now What?
A dead van, a dead cell phone, two horses on the trailer, can it get any better than this I wondered.
Exasperated, I stepped out of the van, just to get out of it. As my left foot touched the ground, I looked up to see the end of a driveway exactly in front of me just across the road from where I was standing. It wasn’t just a driveway, it was an entrance way.
Sitting 20 feet back down the entrance driveway, with one on both sides of the driveway were two large columns attached to the top of each was the end of an arched sign which read: ‘The Crazy Horse Memorial Centre’. The signs energy overpowered me.
My exasperation at the shut down of the van was replaced with a sense of complete disbelief. Or rather a complete sense of belief in what was happening. It was obvious, it all made sense, it fit together perfectly.
The Spirit of Crazy Horse had shut down the van.
Crazy Horse wants to meet me. He knew I was coming and must have decided he wanted to intertwine his spirit with that of the little white Canuck who had called his name in his mind so many times over the past few years, who had travelled over 1500 miles and who was here to invade his trails.
Crazy Horse wanted to know if my spirit was that of a warrior, a horseman, an outdoorsman, a naturalist or was I here to desecrate his land. He needed to look into my soul to determine if he was going to grant me a free and safe passage.
For a few seconds my strength was sapped. To stop from falling to the ground, I put my hands on my bent knees with my butt now leaning against the van keeping me up. I managed to stay on my feet. I stayed in this prone position only for a few seconds, but it seemed a lot longer. My tiny short breaths were being replaced by slightly deeper one, until I was able to take one long slow deep breath allowing me to stand up straight, now with my back leaning against the closed van door.
My mind went from complete discombobilation to clarity. Crazy Horse had granted me a pass to enter.
It was with an excitement of anticipation my full strength returned. I walked across the road, started down the driveway entrance, stopped to look at the arched sign again, smiled, and continued to walk along the path into the Land Of Crazy Horse.
I had been walking down the driveway for perhaps ten minutes when a well tanned, leathery faced man, maybe 5’6” in height, with long straggly hair running down both sides of his face, with a big smile was suddenly standing in front of me. He reached out putting his right hand on my left shoulder. In a quiet confident voice he said: “welcome. Bring your horses in to let them graze.
“My van won’t start” I responded.
I took a quick glance over my shoulder. I could not see then van. A dense thicket of trees along the winding path made the road and the van invisible from where we were standing. How this man who had suddenly appeared in front of me knew about the van and the horses is still beyond my belief.
“Go” he said. “Bring in your horses. I will be waiting for you. Walk straight through the trees, it will shorten the distance.
I thanked him, turned, walked to and through the thick of trees, crossed the road to the van, jumped into the driver’s seat, turned the key. The scream of silence was immediately replaced with the roar of the engine, the music on the radio along with the clicking sound of the turn signal.
Looking back I realized I had totally expected the van to start. Why I don’t know. But I did.
I put the gear shift into drive, switched the turn signal from a right to left turn, checked the mirrors, turned the wheel, drove across the road, passed under the arched sign. I had gone about ¼ mile or so when another man waved me to a stop. He too was dark tanned, leathery faced, had a long pony tail and a bandana wrapped around his forehead. I rolled the van to a stop.
“Hello” he said. “Welcome to the Crazy Horse Memorial Centre’. My name is William. William Cloud., can I help you?”
I responded. “Hi William, I am David Maxwell”.
‘Dave, I am sorry but the Centre is closed to the public this week. This is the week of the ceremonial Pow-Wow of the Nations. The ceremonies start Wednesday, but the Chiefs will be start arriving starting tomorrow. Today I am the only one here. I am here to make sure no one enters.
‘Ok William. Thank you. It was a little disappointing, but nothing I could do about it. Is it alright if I circle the van on the grass to turn around?” He nodded his head ‘yes’.
I was about to put the van back into gear when I asked, “William if you are the only person here, who was the gentleman who was here about ½ an hour ago who invited me to bring my horses in to graze?”
William looked at me quizzically. “You met a man on this land who invited you to bring your horses to graze on this land? What did he look like?
I described the gentleman to William as best I could. As I finished my description he took a stop closer to my van window, looked straight into my eyes to ask: “Is this true?”
“Yes” I said. “He said he would be waiting for me but he is obviously gone.”
William stepped back a step, took a couple of steps in front of the van, looked at the front license plate. “Are you Canadian” he asked.
I nodded ‘yes’.
“You have driven many miles to be here?” he said.
Suddenly he broke out laughing, “We have been expecting you” he said.
“You have been expecting me!!?”
He stepped back beside my window, reached up to put his hand on my arm which had been resting on the window frame and said: “You are safe on these lands David.”
I was speechless! In a more formalized tone of voice William added. “You are to stay until the end of the Pow-Wow. Please stay away from the mountain but otherwise you can park, camp, and graze your horses any where you like. When the Chiefs start arriving and throughout the ceremonies you are only to speak when asked a direct question. Do you understand?”
I nodded my head in agreement, although I didn’t truly understand any of it.
“But what about the other gentleman who invited me in? He said he would be waiting for me.”
Again William looked me straight in the eye and said: “He is waiting for you, but it is unlikely you will see him again.
“Enjoy your week with us David.” William turned and walked away. I never did see him o the other gentleman again.
My first five days at the Crazy Horse Memorial Centre were quiet. Prince and Chief were trained, therefore comfortable to be ground tied using the 30 foot line. Ground tying is a lost skill. It takes a lot of time and patience to train your horse to accept a ground tie. But for serious wilderness riding it is essential. Some would say hobbling was a safer way to keep the horses in one place, so I did in fact give that a go before the ground tying training.
I invested the 100 bucks per hobble set and man I just knew my stopping my horses from taking off was solved. Now I didn’t have to tie them to a tree to keep them put in the mountains. All I had to do was put the hobbles on them and then wouldn’t be able to take off….or so I thought.
Our hobble test was on a beautiful sunny warm, perfect early June morning. I remember it well. To make sure the test was realistic, I took Chief and Prince outside the confines of their small apple orchard field, leading them to the luscious grass and the edge of our corn field. Both horses immediately dropped their heads to graze on the grass. I put the hobbles on Chief first then Prince as they ignored me continuing to graze away.
‘AAAAAAhhhhhhhhh…..’ thought I. I finally had solved the ‘flight at night’ issue. I stood back to admire my genius.
When the boys finished munching on the grass immediately below their nostrils, they simultaneously went to take a step only to realize they could only take mini-baby steps. You would expect an outburst of angry frustration from horses realizing they couldn’t move. Not with these two. They looked down to see these strange looking things keeping their front feet tied together.
Instead of kicking out as I had expected, they gingerly tried to move one hoof forward to realize ‘ Nope, that ain’t gonna work’, I could see them thinkin’. After looking at this strange contraption on their own legs, they looked at each other, dropped their heads to sniff the other one’s hobbles, gave a snort of consternation, then turned to give me that “what are you trying to do now idiot” dirty look I had grown accustomed to, after which they stood nose to nose having a chat which I am pretty sure went along the lines of:
“You Full Chief”
Yeah….pretty much Prince”
You wanna go for a jaunt around this great lookin’ field?
Yeah…sounds like fun…lets go!”
After giving me a parting ‘see ya later idiot’ gaze, off they went.
I stood there dumb-struck as I watched these two beautiful white horses loping over the three inch high corn seedling field. After loping around on the fields soft, cushiony field for 20 minutes or so they eventually headed back my way; stopped right in front of me, laugh-snickered at me dropped their heads to start grazing again as tho they had never left.
I meekly removed the now covered in field mud, sweaty hobbles which now could never be returned to the store thinking ‘wow, that’s a 100 bucks down the drain. I sat down on the grass beside them. Both horses touched their foreheads with mine and we all agreed we would never mention hobbles again. We never did.
The days at the Pow-Wow were relatively quiet with the high light being the campfire meals. While there is a serious side which included the chief’s council meetings for the most part, the week was a festive family time. It was a time for play and play they did often with fierce competition. The big game of the day was soccer. The same as it is all over the world with boys and girls in tens of thousands of small villages, towns, and cities from New Delhi, to Bogata to the Crazy Horse Memorial, with millions of children of all ages from the age of post-diapers to post-hair’n’teeth, running as fast as they can to kick a ball to try to score a goal.
The Pow-Wow soccer rules were a bit different than most. Never mind that nonsense of a mere eleven players per side when thirty of forty per side would be more fun. Never mind that nonsense of having boundaries when it was obvious they weren’t needed. Never mind that nonsense of having to play for just one side when it was obvious the other side needed you too. The games started at around 7 in the morning and went till the night camp fires were in full flight.
But the nights were surreal. Dozens of high campfires shot sparks into the dark sky glowing like large fire-flies. AS the night got darker, the flames went higher, all to the beat of a growing crescendo of drum beats. Tom-tom drum circles encircled every fire pit. The darker the night, the higher the flames, the louder the pounding of the drums. Imagine the pounding of 12 large tom-tom drums positioned in a circle around 12 main fires and 28 smaller fires with all 480 drums…give or take…all pounding to the same rhythm with 50 heritage dressed dancers dancing around the perimeter all 40 drum-fires. Hundreds of drums pounding out the rhythm , thousands of dancers chanting out their lungs in their ancient languages all singing to their ancient gods.
For thousands of years this fire-pit celebration was the centre of these nations culture with the serious business of hunting, war and survival their day-light functions. With the backdrop of the monolithic shadow of the Crazy Horse monument being carved out of the mountain it was impossible to not be time-travelled, transfixed to the Badlands and Black Hills of by-gone ancient times.
The Pow Wow ended on the Sunday evening, with the hundreds of vehicles, mostly pickups with various States license plates streaming out. The next morning it was time to ride.
Chief Red Cloud who was a regular visitor with the horses told me about the back trails from the Crazy Horse Center to Mount Rushmore…about a 60 mile jaunt. The horses were anxious to ‘go’ and so off we went. Knowing this to be an original trail of Crazy Horse, there was a spiritual sense I had never experienced before or since. I knew I was meant to be on this trail at this time with these horses. It was meant to be.
To Mount Rushmore…
There is a serene feeling when you stand in a specific sport you know was visited by an ancestral spiritual leader. It is a sense of our insignificance which is magnified many times over when you stand in the shadow of the ancestral chosen leader of many nations who died in the battle to save his people from extinction against the great killing machine of human history…the US army.
Standing on the shoulder of Crazy Horse mountain monument, I could see over thousands of acres and hundreds of miles of trails where the blood of his people had soaked into the ground. I had come to ride the trails of Crazy Horse, so let the adventure begin.
Stepping up onto the saddle at 5am, to the glistening over the pink tinged Badlands of the Dakotas, to leave the Centre grounds to start the quest of riding the actual trails of Crazy Horse was thrilling.
‘I made it’, was all I could think. Four years of disciplined preparation consisting of all aspects of training, studying, terrains, undertaking hundreds of hours of conditioning the horses, practice riding across fast, deep rivers, crawling up mountain steep inclines, soaked to the skin, cold to the bone and learning how to ‘shoe’, had all lead up to this moment.
I was ready.
I was prepared.
I was ecstatic!!!
I could sense the spirit of Crazy Horse smile with me as his spirit-aura surrounded me.
Sitting in the saddle, I looked over my left shoulder to say my thanks and goodbye to the now sleepy Pow Wow camp fires of the night before.
Prince and Chief were calm, but alert and ready to go. I had saddled Prince who turned his head to look at me as tho to say, ‘time to go’. I had short-shanked Chief’s lead line to 15”: he would run free. I touched the reins and we were underway. The thrill of excitement energy was transformed into one calm confidence I always felt sitting in the saddle.
I was surprised at my disappointment in Mount Rushmore. Compared to the Crazy Horse mountain carving, Mount Rushmore looked like four small faces on a postage stamp.
This was the first of my multiple trips to the Dakotas and Crazy Horse Memorial Centre. I met many wonderful people and had life-altering amazing experiences which branded themselves into my brain, as tho they all happened yesterday.
And yup, I did end up going to meet with Horsty in Texas and we rode the Pan Handle and Oklahoma trails. But that is another story.
David