I was visiting with my dad the other day about horse stories from my childhood. I don’t remember some of the earliest things of course, so my dad was filling me in on some history of horses I remembered but didn’t know a lot about. It is so interesting to hear another viewpoint on things that I only remember from a child’s point of view, and I love thinking back on those old days.
We had a big gray Quarter Horse mare named Tasha Jo, and as far as I remembered, she had always been around. But dad told me that he bought her when she was about twelve years old, and she had been advertised as broke and rideable, but he was only planning to use her as a broodmare. He said she was so gentle after he brought her home, that he started thinking about riding her, and wondering if she was trained well.
So one day he went out and saddled her up, led her outside and got on her. He said Tasha just stood there, stock still, and didn’t move at all. While he was sitting there, wondering if she was going to move out nice or go to bucking, he got to thinking that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. And even if she was broke to ride, who would ever want to ride an old fat broodmare? So he got back off of her, and unsaddled her, and never tried to ride her again. He chuckled as he told the story, saying he never knew whether or not she was trained, but he didn’t figure he wanted to find out anyway.
I just thought it was so funny that he went through all the process of saddling her before he realized he really didn’t care to ride her even if she were broke. Knowing my dad, it isn’t too surprising. Dad put the initial training on a couple of his horses, back in the days before we girls started riding. But he doesn’t particularly enjoy riding colts, he would prefer to get on a horse who can actually go out and effortlessly do his job. My dad has a lot of patience, but he doesn’t like to use it on training horses. Once we girls started riding, he left the colt riding to us. If we got a horse going well enough along that Dad would ride it, we knew we had done a good job training it.
But Tasha was always a great horse, very easy to handle and raised sweet babies. We kept her first two daughters as broodmares, and the three of them raised all of our good riding horses. We bought a Two Eyed Jack grandson for a stallion, but Tasha lost the first foal from that breeding. Her second foal from the Jack stallion was my own horse Rudy. After that, Tasha’s health took a townturn and we sold her. She passed on a good disposition to all of her foals and grandbabies, and they are still being used on my dad’s ranch today. For all we know, they are good riding horses because their grandmother was a good one…but we’ll never know for sure!
