Heritage

flying high Big Horn, Wyoming is a small town nestled at the foot of an isolated mountain chain. The sign located at the end of town reads ‘Population 217’, yet every summer twice Big Horn, Wyoming is home to one of that number of polo ponies are put through their paces every day here. Businessmen, America’s largest high goal summer clubs. kids, ranchers, trainers, breeders and Sam Morton traces the area’s rich polo history professionals converge on two polo clubs joined at the hip, where 80 players enjoy the perfect climate and scenic beauty. Big Horn is a town steeped in polo history. In 1893 a polo team of Englishmen took on a team of cowboys and started a tradition that, over a century later, has culminated in the largest high goal summer club in America. In 2005, Skey and Skeeter Johnston formed the Flying H Polo Club on their ranch in Big Horn – and in three years it has grown to feature a 30-goal game, six teams and 11 polo fields. The Flying H ranch is located on an historic piece of land. Once a battleground for six mounted tribes of Native Americans, the nearby Little Goose Canyon is the site where the US cavalry bivouacked after being

Mountain high Fordyce Field at Big Horn Polo Club, host of last year’s Goose Creek Cup to benefit a stream restoration project

defeated by Sioux horsemen. Outlaws of the frontier used the canyon as a hideout and later, Englishman Oliver Henry Wallop built an estate in the canyon which drew in other English ranchers. Wallop had played polo at Oxford and later owned a herd of 3,000 horses while ranching in Montana.

He was followed by Captain FD Grissell, who had played in England’s inaugural match when polo was brought from India to England. Grissell moved to the area and raised polo ponies for sale back to England. In 1898, Scotsman Malcolm Moncreiffe came to Big Horn and built a polo operation next to Wallop’s at the edge of Little Goose Canyon. Moncreiffe raised thoroughbreds on his ranch in Big Horn, importing them by train and shipping them to England.

At the turn of the century, Wallop and Moncreiffe teamed up with a crew of cowboys and scoured the West to purchase horses for the British in the Boer War. All in all 25,000 horses were sold to British buyers off Moncreiffe’s polo field. Some of the top horses were commandeered by British officers for race and polo horses, and the culls that flunked the British inspection –western horses at the time had distinguished themselves as horrendous buckers –were rejected to become stars in the early days of rodeo.

Locally, Moncreiffe’s Big Horn Polo team was making waves in the western United States. With Englishmen Bob Walsh, Lee Bullington and local cowboy Johnny Cover, Moncreiffe and his Big Horn team defeated several US Army teams and a strong Denver team at the turn of the century.

The Flying H ranch is located on an historic piece of land once a battleground for six mounted tribes of Native Americans

It was at a tournament at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs that 10-goal Foxall Keene watched cowboy Johnny Cover display his booming back shots, even remarking that besides Dev Milburn, Cover was the best number four in the world at the time. Little did Keene realise that as a young man both Milburn and 15-year-old Tommy Hitchcock used to study Cover’s back shots on Moncreiffe’s field to see how he hit such long shots. Cover was offered a spot on a Westchester Cup team but Cover, ever the cowboy, politely declined the offer because, as he put it, ‘I have cattle to tend to.’

Following Moncreiffe, the American couple Goelet and Edith Gallatin settled in the canyon and, after World War I, started the world’s premier polo breeding operation, the Circle V Polo company. Edith Post had been a horse enthusiast in New York and was close friends with the Hitchcocks, Milburns and Von Stades and also a cousin to Fred Post. Goelet Gallatin had played polo at Squadron A in New York and hunted big game in Canada. The Gallatins hosted everyone from

the world of polo at their spacious ranch in Little Goose Canyon.

In the 1920s the Gallatins built a polo barn in Aiken to finish the horses they started in Big Horn. Their polo manager Milt McCoy managed their stable both in Big Horn and Aiken and had a crew of the world’s top polo trainers. By then, the US Remount was in full swing, expanding polo breeders’ operations by providing a market for horses that did not make for polo. Army buyers provided free thoroughbred stallions to anyone with eight brood mares and a facility to keep them, paying $165 for a gelding four years old, green broke and sound. This was how Goelet Gallatin was awarded one of the top stallions, Mentor, adding to the Gallatins’s breeding operation that already had Black Rascal, whose sire had produced two Kentucky Derby winners. Later they acquired Kemano, a champion polo stallion in both England and America.

From 1926 to 1929 the Gallatins hosted one of the world’s great horse festivals on their Circle V ranch in Big Horn. Polo, steeplechasing, roping, jumping and a flatrace card of 15 races a day for two days thrilled horsemen who travelled from 28 states to witness the event at the Gallatin’s private field and race track. It all ended with the 1929 stock market crash.

But as luck would have it, Boston native Cameron Forbes – whose family had owned land in the area since 1898 – decided to back his niece in a polo operation similar to the Circle V ranch. A former 5-goal player, ambassador to Japan and a one-time governor of the Philippines, Forbes founded Neponset Stud Farm in Beckton, Wyoming. Starting with the Gallatin’s stallion Black Rascal, Forbes soon brought in the Argentine stallion Art Nouveau and later traded five polo horses for the Hawaiian stallion Aloha Moon.

By 1931 Forbes had a private field where spirited matches soon sprang up between Neponset Stud Farm and Moncreiffe’s Polo ranch teams. Soon Neponset played host to over six visiting polo teams that spent the summer playing polo in Wyoming. Leading the players at Big Horn was Oliver Wallop, son of Oliver Henry Wallop, who played on the Yale National Championship team with Michael Phipps and Winston Guest.

The crowning glory of Neponset was when the team of Ken Schiffer, Bill Gardner, Mike Long and Merrill Finks won the national 12-goal at the Broadmoor Hotel –beating teams from California, Texas, Massachusetts and Colorado.

With the advent of dude ranches in the 1930s, rivalries sprang up between ranches made up half of cowboys and half of dudes from the east. The crossbreeding of wealthy eastern women and local cowboys at the dude ranches produced offspring that were financially able to play polo. With father’s horsemanship and mother’s purse these youngsters did credit to the area as polo players well into the 1980s.

The Big Horn Polo Club eventually moved from the old Moncreiffe field to the Big Horn Equestrian Center, a flat area that could encompass five overlapping fields. The club now also boasts the Full Moon Polo School that, as the most prolific

In the mid-1920s the Gallatins hosted one of the world’s great horse festivals, thrilling horsemen who travelled from 28 states to attend

1 The 8th Earl of Portsmouth, Oliver Henry Wallop 2 The Big Horn Polo team in the early 1900s, in two-colour waistcoasts, clockwise from top left: Johnny Cover, Guy Wood, Lee Bullingham, Malcolm Moncreiffe (kneeling) 3 Big Horn: small population; big players 4 Founders Skey (left) and Skeeter Johnston 5 Tiger Kneece (dark helmet) and Sugar Erskine race for the play 6 Goal! WYOMING ROOM – SHERIDAN FULMER PUBLIC LIBRARY & THE BIG HORN CITY HISTORICAL SOCIETY

beginners’ polo clinic in the world with 17 future club members, two US Open participants and a club president, fluctuates between four and 40 members on any given week. This has added to the local membership, which has hovered around 45 over the last eight years.

Like Moncreiffe, Gallatin and Forbes, Skey Johnston’s arrival in Big Horn gave a boost to the local polo scene. Shortly after Johnston purchased the Flying H ranch he expanded his polo breeding operation and before long, eight rated players from the Flying H boosted the level of play at Big Horn. Two of Johnston’s children, Skeeter and Gillian, played at Big Horn and, along with Flying H professionals Jeff Atkinson and Boone Stribling, all raised the level of play and soon players from all over the country travelled to the Big Horn Polo Club. In 2005, Skey and Skeeter Johnston founded the Flying H Polo Club, a world-class facility directly across from the Big Horn Polo club with five polo fields and a stick-and-ball area.

Johnston brought in a sand machine, which has given the club some of the best footing in polo. Over the past three years names like Heguy, Astrada, Hall, Rinehart, Arellano, Kneece and dozens of others have graced the fields that sit at the foot of the Big Horn Mountains. Shade trees and raised sidelines give spectators a grandstand view without the steps.

Not only did the Flying H bring high goal polo to the area, it also gave a tremendous boost to the Big Horn Polo Club, which it is part of. Wives, kids and grooms play at the Big Horn Polo Club while the Flying H offers a 30-goal exhibition game for the town of Sheridan. Barbeques, horse trades and the Last Chance Bar in Big Horn provide a blending of the two clubs.

This year the Flying H became the first stop on the North American Polo League, where teams acquire points for winning tournaments in several locations across the country, culminating in the US Open in Florida. Several patrons have already purchased land in an area that has both the fields and the organisation to expand.

Next year there is talk of bringing the Wyoming Cup out of retirement – a trophy that Harry Payne Whitney’s Cheyenne team and the Big Horn team competed for in the 1920s. In an area steeped in so many aspects of horse history, the Flying H has done Big Horn, Wyoming proud.

The Flying H has done Big Horn proud: several patrons have already purchased land in an area that has both the fields and the organisation to expand

Where The Rivers Run North is Sam Morton’s new novel, covering four eras in the history of Absaraka (now southern Montana and northern Wyoming). It is published by Full Moon Press.