When Daniel and Carla Crider bought their land on Sunset Mountain Road in 2003, they knew they needed animals in order to qualify for the agricultural tax exemption. “We went down the list,” Daniel said. “We looked at a variety of animals. We knew we didn’t want sheep, and we didn’t have enough land for cattle or quarter horses. We had first seen miniature horses on a trip to Arkansas in 1987, and had been fascinated by them, so Carla thought they would be perfect for us.”

Though a city girl, Carla Crider had grown up around horses. She and her family lived in Bedford during the school and work week, but they owned land near Patillo, so the family spent the weekends riding horses and enjoying the country life. Daniel, on the other hand, had desperately wished for horses as a child, yet the only experiences he had ever had were at youth camps where he could occasionally go on trail rides. Because Carla was the one with equine experience, the couple decided that she would be the bloodline expert. So, the first year they owned the land was spent researching bloodlines and going to horse shows. [More…]

Country music sings his praises. His life inspires an entire genre of books, and his star still rises in various interpretations on the big screen. Women love him and little boys want to be him. He has his own style, an easy, relaxed self-assuredness that says, “I’m here. I’ll take care of it, no matter how bad it is or how long it takes.” He worships his Creator in the cathedral of the open range or perhaps in churches named for his lifestyle and heritage. I see him in Starbucks, black Stetson shoved low on his brow, spurs jingling while he taps his foot and orders a double shot espresso latte. He sat by me a few years ago at my daughter’s choir concert, and I hoped his spur would not poke me in the leg when he propped his foot on his knee. He lives the urban life we all live, but has never cut the umbilical cord to the heritage that birthed him. He is the cowboy, and he, together with his trusty sidekick the working horse, has romanced America for more than 150 years.

But long before he became an icon, the cowboy was just another hard-working dogie-chaser, who gritted out a dollar-a-day-plus-beans-and-coffee subsistence. Sometimes, he didn’t get the dollar-a-day. Take for instance the story of Frank Allee. Born in Denton County, North Texas on December 28, 1872, he was the oldest of several children. When he was 11, his father died, leaving him in the care of his stepmother. With the family farm failing, winter coming on, and his stepmother afraid of watching her children starve, Allee was encouraged to leave home and find work further south where it was warm. The story goes, as told by Allee’s son Bob in his latter years, that the frightened boy struck out, walking south as he had been instructed, and finally ending up on a ranch south and west of San Antonio. The rancher hired him to wrangle the ranch remuda for room-and-board. As Allee matured and showed horsemanship skills, the ranch hands taught him to rope and ride, and by his early teens, the youngster was riding herd on the ranch with the other cowboys. Before long, Allee was asked to help take the herds over The Great Western Trail, the western branch of the Chisholm Trail, to the railheads of Dodge City and Abilene, Kansas. Within a few short years, he had gone from barefoot, destitute Texas farm boy to capable cowhand, riding and roping, traveling the trail, guarding against stampede and rustlers.  That first herd he drove to Kansas numbered 600 head. It took four months of moving at the herd’s pace of about five miles per day, sleeping on the hard ground at night with his saddle for a pillow, eating biscuits and beans, beans and biscuits over and over, but the trip was successful and reportedly not a single head was lost. Laying his head on his saddle at night, surrounded by the lowing of steers and stamping of horse hooves while gazing at the star-studded western plains’ sky was a heady adventure for a young boy. Somewhere between South Texas and the Kansas plains, as the herd slowly snaked its way up The Great Western Trail, a passion snaked its way into Allee’s blood, and he was hooked.

After only a few years of making the drive, Allee decided it was time to establish his own herd. He had grown fond of the area in Roger Mills County, Oklahoma that today is Elk City. It was a place of stirrup-tall grass and plentiful springs back then. The Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, Kiowa-Apache and Comanche had control of much of the land through the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, and Allee had enough money for steers, but not land and steers. So the enterprising cowboy made a deal with the Cheyenne to pasture 600 head on their land. The tribe agreed. That spring, Allee drove his own herd to the Kansas rail yards for the first time. This Cinderella story doesn’t end with a castle, but it does end with Allee purchasing land that he later sold to the Townsite Land Company, which formed the town of Elk City, Oklahoma. He was then able to move his wife and first child from the one-room dugout he had built to a wood-frame house on his new ranch property located on the Washita River, the early site of the still prominent, family-owned A-Cross Ranch, a brand highly regarded in Western Oklahoma.

Allee’s story is only one among hundreds of young men who rode up the trail from Texas to Kansas, following the longhorns to market. Each of them has their own drama, their own lonely spirit, but collectively, they have come to be known as the symbol of the West. Even in their own day, city people, who perhaps longed for a freer, less hectic life, were falling in love with the cowboys. On December 17, 1872, 11 days before Frank Allee was born, Buffalo Bill Cody introduced the forerunner of his Wild West Show to the city of Chicago. He garnered a mixed review, but drew enough of an audience that he was encouraged to take the show on the road. The next year, he and Texas Jack Omohundro invited Wild Bill Hickok to join the show. By the late 19th Century, Buffalo Bill had refined the coarse tobacco-spitting, rough-talking cowboy into the Victorian-mannered, hat-tipping gentleman we recognize today. In 1887, the Wild West Show, featuring talented young cowboys and cowgirls who could ride, rope, shoot and do tricks in the saddle, was invited to England for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebration. At the urging of Mark Twain, Wild Bill crossed the “pond” with 121 steerage and saloon passengers, 97 Indians, 180 horses, 18 buffalo, 10 elk, 5 Texas steers, 4 donkeys, and 2 deer. His camp became a gathering place for the nobility of England, including the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII), and various members of parliament, as well as the prime minister.  The prince was so taken with the performance he viewed, that he asked his mother, Queen Victoria, to attend a show. A command performance was given, and an American cowboy was able to do what no one else had done, draw the queen to make her first public appearance since the death of her husband 25 years before. Critics loved the show, and it was credited with improving British/American relations.

The cowboys and cowgirls of Buffalo Bill’s show were so popular that in 1889 the troupe returned to Europe, this time performing at the Universal Exposition in Paris. Ten thousand people attended the opening performance to witness the cowboys reenact how the West was won. The troupe stayed on tour in Europe for three years, braving oversold arenas, influenza and small pox. When they returned home, the idea of the American cowboy was firmly implanted in the imaginations of thousands of Europeans for generations to come.

By 1910, Buffalo Bill’s show was drawing to a close. His stage manager had died and Annie Oakley, who paved the way for women to enter the rodeo arena, retired due to injuries she sustained in a train accident.  But Broncho Billy Anderson was already holding hands with Americans at the movies. Between 1907 and 1916, he made 146 short, silent western movies. The first cowboy movie star, he pioneered the genre that would next bring Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and eventually John Wayne into the hearts and homes of America. And of course, what is a cowboy without his faithful horse? The Roy Rogers/Dale Evans Museum gets 200,000 visitors a year in Branson, Mo. According to the museum director, Roy Rogers, Jr., most come to see Trigger, Roger’s dead horse. “We close at five and stop selling tickets at 4:30,” he said. “But people come after that and beg to get in for a few minutes. They drove 3,000 miles just to see Trigger. We let them in—and they go away, happy.”

Today, movies like Lonesome Dove, loosely based on the Goodnight/Loving cattle trail, and more recently 3:10 to Yuma prove that in the more than 150 years since he first came on the scene, the love affair between the cowboy and his lifelong sweetheart, America, has not diminished in ardor. The sold out crowds attending the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas, Nev. attest to it. But so do the Sunday afternoon play day crowds and the junior rodeo kids who work out with their mounts every day before and after school. The cowboys in the Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, along with the Cowgirls in their respective Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, call to a new generation of free spirits. Get on your horse. Ride the range. Cowboy up.

Prior to 2003, Drake worked for 23 years as a technical buyer for Delta Airlines. As he sat at his desk locating jet parts from around the world, he told himself someday he would walk away from it and follow his passion.

“I stayed there because I was raising kids,” Drake said. “I needed insurance and a 401k. But all I ever wanted to do was cowboy full time, and I promised myself that when the chance came, I’d take it.”

In 2003, opportunity knocked, and Drake was listening for the door. In the midst of a major Delta restructuring, he chose to take a ranch job rather than put his family through the changes Delta required. He leased a training facility between Decatur and Gainesville, at the Cross N Ranch, where he specialized in training 2-year-old cutting horses. Five years later, Gary and Diane Johnson, co-owners of RCJ Land and Cattle Company with Gary and Debbie Reynolds, called the cowboy to come manage their operation just north of FM 1885 and Garner Road in Parker County, Texas. The deal, however, came with one unusual component. Besides managing a mamma cowherd and training the RCJ cutting horses, Drake would also be teaching horses to swim, in a manner of speaking. [more…]

Photography by Karen Mitchell Smith

I saw his bike as soon as I pulled up to the convenience store. It was dusk, and having spent the day in my hometown, I was ready to make the hour-long drive to my home. Planning for a quick dash into the store to pick up a Coke, I suddenly was confronted with a ramshackle bicycle piled high with a bedroll and other odds and ends and a big sign on the back: Hungry.

He stood at the counter, a bag of Doritos and a cup of coffee beside a crumpled dollar bill and a pile of change. He looked at the corn dogs baking under the heat lamps and, although I couldn’t hear what he said, I assume he asked how much they cost because when the cashier answered, the man just shook his head and let his shoulders drop a little lower. I felt a little stunned. Not at the sight of a homeless man. I’ve lived in big cities and dealt with the homeless one-on-one in ministry on many occasions. No, the shock came from the fact that he was there, in Breckenridge, Texas, population just over 5,000. The Mayberry of my childhood. The place that I could always go home to for safety and security, for familiar faces, for love and acceptance. Not a perfect place by any means, but a place, for me at least, removed from some of the harshest realities life holds. And there he was. The symbol of despair, hopelessness, and worst of all, helplessness — all the things you might find in the big city, but not in your hometown.

He headed to a booth in the back of the store as I walked to the soda fountain. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as he tore into the little bag of chips and devoured them like the starving man he most likely was. I caught his eye and he nodded a greeting. His unkempt, long white beard brushed his chest and the knitted stocking cap on his hair spoke of hard use. He wore a thin army-green coat with the collar turned up. Not much protection against the sharp wind blowing outside. I nodded back to him and smiled.

At the counter, I told the cashier I’d take his last two corn dogs. When I handed them to the surprised homeless man, I mumbled the cursory “God bless you,” wishing I had more to give him. Wishing I could change something for him, but knowing I could not. His surprised eyes met mine again. His were brown. Big and sad and devoid of hope. I prayed for him as I drove away from Mayberry and toward my warm, comfortable custom-built home, where I would soon curl up on my leather sofa with a good movie and a cozy blanket. I prayed for the man who would lie somewhere in a ditch tonight, with a shabby sleeping bag between him and the cold, hard ground. I asked God to give him hope, to give him mercy. To lead him to where someone could help him and show him the love of a Savior who was also a wanderer with no place to lay his head. And the thought that we, as a society, completely miss the point of life plagued me all the way home. We get and get and buy and buy. Consume and pile up things that have to be maintained and dusted and cleaned and organized, then we sell them in our garage sales and donate them to the Goodwill, so we can make room for more.

Change has been the buzz word since the November 2008 elections, and it is the engine that drove the Obama campaign to Pennsylvania Avenue. But corporate change begins with individual transformation. Change cannot be legislated. It can’t be mandated and it can’t be demanded. We each must find our place and do what we know to be the right thing.

I don’t know whether I made a difference in that homeless man’s life beyond this day. Maybe tonight he crawled into his bedroll without an empty gnawing in his stomach, but will he tomorrow night? What about the next? It’s nearly overwhelming to think about the enormity of this issue. Yet,  I’m reminded of the story about the man who found hundreds of living starfish washed onto the shore. He patiently threw them back one at a time and when someone asked what kind of difference he could possibly make, he answered, “I can’t save them all, but it matters to this one. And this one. And this one.”

My actions did matter to that man tonight, of that I’m sure. The real question is, can I matter to someone tomorrow?

Lured to Parker County by the burgeoning performance-horse industry in 1995, Seale came to the “Cutting Horse Capital of the World” just one year after graduating from Texas A & M. Thirteen years later, he’s on the cutting-edge of equine medicine, employing advanced medical diagnostics and treatments to his patients. [More…]

Water Colors

Original photo uploaded by Karen Mitchell Smith

Fall is the season of change, of transcending normal appearances and showing forth with all the richness of reds and golds and the earthiness of browns. It is a last burst of glory bridging the heat of summer busyness to the season of bareness and quiet, snow-covered rest. It is the time of crunchy leaves under foot and spicy wood-fire scents in the air. Of bringing out the sweaters and jackets and boots and discovering old, comforting treasures like hot chocolate and fuzzy blankets for the first time again. It is long walks on frosty mornings and early evenings by the flickering flame. It is a time of remembering blessings past and of looking toward those yet to come. It is the season that beckons us to hold on to those you love and to those who love you. It is the season that reminds us, change comes to us all.

Sounds like a scene from a high-speed chase on the big screen, but it’s not. It’s Competitive Carriage Driving, and it’s the fastest growing equine sport in the world — a sport that requires coordination, driving skill, equine sense, athletic ability and guts.

Sixty-five-year-old Jean Stuard of Burleson should know; she’s been doing it for more than 20 years. [More…]

The sign adjacent to the interstate proclaims it Squaw Creek Downs, but the actual name for the racehorse training facility is Trinity Meadows. [more…]

Saunders, her daughter, Denny Ralls, and 14-year-old granddaughter, Deven Riggins, share something many families share, a love of horses. But it’s what this three generation team does with horses that makes their story unique. All three women barrel race — against each other.

The story begins with Saunders, who by her early childhood was telling anyone who cared to ask she was going to be a jockey. (More….)

Enriching Your Prayer Life through Contemplative Prayer

“Be still and know that I am God,” the Lord tells us. Oh, how I long to follow that directive, but how? Ironically, at a time when we have more conveniences and technological advances than ever, we also have more demands on our time than ever. Do I even know how to be still? Does anyone? Growing up an evangelical protestant, I had a full understanding of  prayer, and I have always gained much peace from my prayer life. But it’s always been  me, talking to God conversationally, as I would to a friend. Is that kind of prayer, called discursive, really being still? God tells us to meditate on his goodness and the psalmist writes, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing unto you, O God.” (more…)