ARTHUR, NEBRASKA MY DOLLY DIMPLE

plant all four feet sending me over his head into the next county. Still, I whipped and spurred like crazy until the race was over. The hand beat me by a little bit and Waldo gave me what for, saying I was on the fastest horse and should have won. The cowboy leaped to my defense saying I had literally spurred the spurs off my boots. The same cowboy told me that I was the first woman that had ever gone on roundup with them. They had had journalists, photographers and all sorts of other people, but never a lady. I think I passed the acid test. I did my assigned jobs, rode the miles, cut the cattle and generally held my own without any whining. It was truly an experience of a life time.

Before we left the ranch to start the round-up, I realized that, as the only woman with this group of cowboys, I needed to be particularly careful with my language. No swear words of any kind, no matter what. My word, I decided, for all frustrating events would be “fizzle.” A month or so after we returned to Texas, Waldo called and said, “You have absolutely ruined all my cowboys!” “How?” I asked. He said, “I walk around the ranch and these old grizzled cowboys with tobacco stained beards are getting the mess kicked out of them, among other things, yelling, ‘Oh, fizzle!!’ It’s really embarrassing.”

MY DOLLY DIMPLE

In the winter of 1967, Buster and I went to Ogalalla, Nebraska to the Haythorn Ranch, where we spent New Year’s Eve with Waldo and Bell Haythorn. Oh, boy, what a winter it was! One of those 40 below zero winters. On New Year’s Day, Waldo took us out to look at horses. He was a wild man in an automobile, and while we were flying across a snow covered pasture, he crashed his El Camino through a snow bank into a shallow gully, tearing the transmission out. We were stranded miles from civilization. As far as you could see to the north … SNOW. As far as you could see to the south … SNOW. The same was true when you looked east or west. And it was really cold snow! We had to get out and start walking … When I tell you it was cold, believe it … It had, maybe, warmed up to 10 or 12 below zero. Waldo said that with any luck, we would intercept the hands coming in from feeding cattle. We walked … and we walked … aannnd we walked. When we found them in the fields, we set bales of hay on fire to warm up … and we walked. I kept thinking, ”If I keep walking, I won’t freeze to death.” We did finally find the hands and get a ride back to headquarters. We did not freeze to death. My advice: don’t go look at horses in waist high snow on New Year’s Day in sub-zero weather in Ogallala, Nebraska. At the end of that trip, Waldo sent one of his stallions home with us. His name was “My Beaver,” by Beaver Creek out of a Peter McCue Jr. mare. Standing 16.0+ hands, he was a gorgeous horse. We bred him to a mare I had bought that fall at a sale, Rio Rita, an own daughter of Chubby (the stallion) and out Elmer Hepler’s great broodmare, Panazarita Daughtery. Rio Rita had produced 13 foals when I bought her, 10 had been by Poco Bueno, with one, Poco Sail, being named World’s Champion Halter Mare in 1959 or ‘60. Rita was 20 years old and I hoped we might get one foal from her, and she had a beautiful filly, but she never got up to nurse her. A huge tumor on one of her ovaries had ruptured during contractions and we could not save her. It was certainly doubtful we could save the filly. At that time, I ran the stable at a well-known Houston County Club, and I took the orphaned filly to the stable to try to get her to nurse a bottle. My vet advised me to teach her to drink from a bucket rather than a bottle because of the time and effort it would take to get enough milk down her. I spent those first few hours begging her to drink … splashing milk on her nose and into her mouth. The vet told me not to relent, that she would finally be hungry enough to drink. I cried and begged and begged her to drink. Well, miracles of miracles, she did finally take a sip … and then another … and finally after a couple of days she really started drinking. I lived four or five miles from the stable and I would get up every four hours to go feed her. I can’t remember how many weeks I did that before I got her to sleep through the night. The little devil was a real survivor. She grew, and soon, I was adding bran mash to her milk. As she got bigge, another problem surfaced. She did not know

she was a horse. Her play got a little rough and dangerous. She thought she was a human baby, and all those big horses scared her to death. I remember the first day I tried to lead her out of her stall. NO WAY! It was way too scary out there. I coaxed while someone pushed. I pulled , but Dolly dug her feet in and would not come out of that stall. Finally, I gave up and just started leaving her stall door open all day, hoping she would finally get curious enough to venture out. After about a week, she snuck up to the open door and put one hoof over the threshold and peeked around the door. Some horse banged a bucket, and she jumped straight in the air and zoomed back into her safe stall. This went on for a few days until I looked up from my desk to see her walking through the office door. From that point, She lived around the barn, sticking her nose into everything, but she was remained scared of other horses. When she got tired, she would go back to her stall and lie down with her body in the stall and her head out in the alleyway. At the end of 1969, the same year Dolly Dimple was foaled, Buster and I divorced, and in early 1970, I moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Dolly went with me, along with Peppy’s Betsy and Bo Diamond Dandy. I had a real discipline problem with Dolly, because she never understood she was a horse—a sweet but spoiled brat of a horse. When we got to Wyoming, she lived around the house because she was still afraid of other horses. Dolly chased cars, ate dog food and slept on the porch at the back door. She would see the car when we crossed the first cattleguard onto the ranch and would race down, like a dog, to meet us. The road up to the house was about a quarter of a mile long, and Dolly would lope alongside the driver with her head in the window. It proved quite a surprise for the unsuspecting. She and the dogs argued over the Chuckwagon Dog Food all the time. The end of her white muzzle was always stained red from the red dye in the dog food, and it’s one thing to push a dog out of the way when you walk out the door, but quite another to move a large filly. That spring, we tried to get her to go to the alfalfa field. I would sit on the tailgate of the pickup and she would lope along with her head in my lap. When we got her to the far side of the field, we would turn around and drive like hell to beat her to the gate, but she outran us every time. She became my daughter’s 4-H project, and during the winter, when Dolly had to move to the barn to stay warm, Kim would go down to muck her stall. The two of them had some real adjustments to make due to the cold and snow. Kim discovered that horse manure freezes and sticks to the floor of the stall. She became very diligent about cleaning the stall often. Dolly had to learn to let the snow stay on her back and not shake it off. She stood around shivering from the cold for a while before she learned. When Kim and I left Wyoming a year later, I took my horses down to a friend in Parker, Colorado, and went back to Houston. I had neither place nor money to keep any horses in Texas. When my friends had a horse sale later that year, I had to sell Dolly. I don’t know who bought her or where she went. I have a feeling that she would have been almost impossible to break and not many people would have put up with a lap horse like I did. I loved her very much, but I’m sure I did her no favor by spoiling her.