Covered wagon at Amarillo

Camp Life & Little Dutch, 1923 Amarillo, Texas
Ansel's brother Baily is sitting on Little Dutch and Papa is holding the horse. You can see a dog poking it's head out from behind the wash basin near the fence post. Ansel said she's a "Scotch Collie" and says her name was Fannie. He can't remember what happened to her, but that she didn't leave Amarillo with them.

In their days after leaving Okemah, Oklahoma, they moved north to the Pawnee, Fairfax, and Ponca City area. Papa had started to train races horses in addition to running his freight wagons. After Ansel finished the third grade the whole family left Pawnee, Oklahoma in the covered wagon. Taking only what they could fit in it. They were a family of five; Papa and Mama, Vivian, Baily, and Ansel.

Ansel says he remembers being in Amarillo, his family living out of the covered wagon on land near the tracks and stockyards. They were squatters and there wasn’t hardly anything to eat. He and his brother Baily were in school. Baily was 12 and Ansel was 9 years old. He remembers many times the only lunch his mom could make for them was biscuits with bacon grease slathered between them like you would peanut butter. Sometimes there wasn't much to eat, but he remembers they were never were hungry. Not long after they got to Amarillo, they were down to nothing, Mama only having flour and water and bacon grease. He remembers that Papa had a big black percheron workhorse and he sold it for $3.00 to the coal company. They had plenty to eat that night. After that Papa went to work in the coal yard as a teamster delivering coal around. So things got better. From the time they left Pawnee, Ok. they lived out of the wagon a total of approximately 2 years.

There weren't any coal mines in the area, it was all shipped in by rail car. The coal was shipped in on the train in open topped bins, it was unloaded in the coal yard and then distributed around the city and ranches by horse and wagon. There weren't any trees or burning material around for cooking. They tried to burn cow chips and buffalo chips... but that didn't work very good. So every time a coal train would come to town, someone from the squatter camps would be delegated to throw the rest coal. When the train left out of Amarillo it had a really steep grade to climb up, and while it was getting up steam it went really slow. There were several squatter camps all along the sections butting up to the tracks. When the train would leave the station, and while it was going slow up the grade, one of the squatters would get on top of a full coal car and throw coal out as fast as he could, all along the tracks where the squatter camps were. Then all of us kids, we would all have to run up and down the tracks with gunny sacks collecting the coal for our family to burn in our camp.

visit with Willy and Toni at Burns

Last week was a busy one. We went over to Burns on Wednesday and stayed with Will and Toni Brown. Will and Toni were married last June 21 in Lehi, UT. They met at a series Mountain Man Rendezvous events, and found that they have many things in common. Toni was ranch raised, a rodeo queen and loves camping and canoeing. Will had moved to Lehi in Feb 2007 to heal up after his heart attack. We had visited them during the summer of 2007 and I immediately bonded with Toni, it was like we had known each other for years. Last September Toni retired from her life long career of hairdressing and they moved to Burns. (Will and former wife Laurie raised their family on the ranch next to Ansel and Martina off of Foley Drive north of Burns. You met Laurie on the Oklahoma trip, when we went to the National Cowboy Hall of Fame Museum)

Toni makes a terrific corned beef and cabbage, and we always get a special homemade cake for dessert. This last time, it was sort of an orange/pineapple pudding thing that was to die for. Ansel especially looks forward to her sour dough pancakes.

They had lots of time for visiting and catching up while I did my presentations at the high school.

Global Warming ???

Lucy racing through the snow in the backyard
April 22, 2008 Bend OR


How fitting here we are on earth day... waking up to snow. Actually it was a little warmer today. The last four days it has been 20 degrees or below every morning, this morning it was 34. Feels like summer. Actually as I'm writing this it's already 10:00 am and up to 42 degrees and the snow is all gone.

Russcenes the 2nd place horse

Boots Durnell won the Kentucky Derby with a maiden horse so he won a ton of money. Charles “Boots” Durnell was the trainer and owner of the horse "Elwood" who won the Kentucky Derby in 1904.

So he was going to do it again, so he looked and several years later he thought he’d found one he thought could do it. and this horse, a 2 year old, was fast and he was sound and so he bought him an he wanted to go up to where he could get a good price when he bet on him. Cause that’s the way he made so much money when he won the first one. He would let this horse be in front and he’d get up to the wire and they would take him back. They’d never let him finish in front at the wire so the horse learned his lesson real well, to stay back and not finish first.

When he was a 5 yr old, I think it was the meet was up at Long Acres. (WA) This old irish groom had got ahold of the horse, and he had a little accident and he got tangled up with a hind leg and the bumper of a car. It didn’t hurt the horse much, it shoulda hurt him real bad, but it didn’t, it barely took the skin off, but it made a couple of big dents in the car, and the guy needed $25.00 to fix his car. And so my Dad bought Racines for $25.00 and we took him to CA, to Tan Foran, and started him 5 times, I rode him and he was second all five times. He could have won all of them, but he was trained real good, trained to not go to the front.

But I did win once on him up in Winnepeg, Canada at Whittier Park in 1934. So the way I got him to win… the track didn’t have much space it had real long stretches and short turns. Going down the back stretch here, I always ran him in a nose band and blinkers, we weren’t close to the wire, I got him out about the middle of the race track where he couldn’t see another horse and so we went to the front, he was in front when he headed into the stretch and he finished in front. Russcenes, won that race but that’s the only race he ever won. His Dad traded Russcenes to a race announcer for a little filly that was out of a Son of Man O War, her name was Opie Field.

Whittier Park, Winnipeg July 4, 1934

E.M. Marshall, owner (Papa holding horse) A. Marshall up (Ansel)

Ranger Pate & The Indian that didn't go to Jail

Ranger Pate and Ansel @ The Saddle Shop

Ranger Pate stopped by for a visit Thursday. Pate works as a DJ at the Mountain radio station here in Bend. He's cowboy at heart... but broadcasting just happens to be his day job now... Pate puts together a pretty neat weekly radio show he calls "Ridin the Rough String". It's a mix of classic western music and a little bit of cowboy poetry.

Pate has helped Ansel start some of their horses over the years and stops by often to share some stories and well as listen to them. And as you can imagine, Ansel enjoys the visits.

In the pic below Ansel is showing off his "Left Lead"... when we were at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City Ansel picked out these slippers and showed them to me, and said thought them might be a good replacement for his others. I scooped them up and paid for them, without letting him see how much they cost... he'd have died if he knew. But he soooooo rarely asks for anything, and when I buy him a new shirt or jeans, he says he has a whole closet full and why would he need more??? ( mmm, maybe because they don't fit, he's gained a few pounds)

I tried to buy him some polyester dress slacks when we went to Salt Lake last summer, and he got upset with me and said he had plenty, I told him I didn't think he could fit into any of the ones he had... he told me I was very mistaken... so when we were packing for the Oklahoma trip, I asked him to try the slacks on and find a pair that fit... After trying on the 6 or 7 pair that he had... he conceded that they needed to go to the Goodwill.

So back to the slippers. He is very proud of them... they're very warm and comfy and they have an imprint of a horse shoe on the bottom of each, and one says Left Lead and the other Right Lead. Very cute.

Ansel's Kowboy Kickers

Ansel gives Pate a left lead

Story for the day: The Osage Indian that didn't go to jail that day

In the Oklahoma days... there was a time when his Dad was training race horses for a wealthy Osage Indian named John Kenworthy outside Fairfax, Oklahoma. Ansel remembers that he was quite wealthy, at least in a relative sense for the times. As a 5 or 6 year old boy, he enjoyed driving to town with John Kenworthy who's Osage Indian name was Hlu-ah-tsa-he. He was a really big/tall man with dark features and a long black braid down his back, for clothes he covered himself with a colorful indian blanket. He drove an auto car. One day he went into town for supplies and took Ansel with him. Ansel remembers coming out of a store and heading to the parked car. I envision it was dusty dirt streets with board walks. They were walking to the car and as Ansel started for the door, the indian gathered him around the shoulders and kept him walking right past the car without stopping... very confused, but assuming that they were going to another store Ansel walked with him... when they got aways from the car, John Kenworthy said to Ansel. Sheriff watch car, bottle of whiskey on floorboard, John Kenworthy no go jail today, tomorrow buy new car.

Ansel can't remember how they got home that day, but he remembers John having a shiny new car the next day. Ansel was thinking it was against the law for Indians to have alcohol, but prohibition started in 1920, and if he was 6 years old, then that might have been part of the story.

Ansel believed that he had gotten his money from oil. He had a big farm, and we lived in an apartment over his garage. He remembered another time they were going to have some kind of big show, and there was a big ornery bull outback. There was a power pole or something big and stout like that with huge horns, they put ropes on his horns and drug him up to the pole and snubbed him to the pole to put a ring in his nose. Pate asked if they roped him horseback... and Ansel said no, that was why he remembered it, cause of the fight the two guys had getting him up to the pole. Once they got him snubbed to the pole, then they stabbed his nose with an ice pick until they had a hole big enough to put the ring through.

Charlie the paint horse:

The Warm Springs Indians were gathering horses on the reservation... when Ansel got there, there was this good looking paint horse tied up, when he figured out who owned him, he asked him if he'd ride him, and said he would. So he put this hackamore rope around his neck, and then saddled him from the offside, circled him around and got on him rode out about a couple of hundred feet, brought him back and Ansel bought the paint for $40.00 dollars. He used him as a pony horse at the tracks and and the horse never offered to buck. Ansel had bought him, cause he had an order from San Luis Rey Stock Farm, at Bonsil, CA to find them a good pony horse that was a good looking paint horse, so he'd stand out from the other pony horses. They'd give up to $500.00 for a good one. So Ansel bought Charlie horse thinking he'd be able to fill his order. But he found out real quick that he was real bad about his feet. So he couldn't sell him to the San Luis Farm. He got along real well with Charlie as long as he didn't mess with his feet.

One time he was ponying a horse off of Charlie at Caliente and came he around the corner of the jocks room, they were making a movie or something and there was this big shiny thing made out of tin foil, a reflector he guessed, it would reflect the light or something, anyway that spooked them both and they whirled and run the other way on the track... the horse he was ponying got away from him. A horse running loose, seldom runs the wrong way of the race track very fast, then the loose horse turned around and was running the right way, he was on the outside rail, and Ansel got on the inside and started running the right way... Ansel cut across the track and got him run down and caught him within a quarter of a mile. He was that really fast, to catch the other horse in that short of distance was really fast.

He ended up selling him to Emery Fisk for $75.00. Emery was a good cowboy, [he was the one with a bull whip in an earlier story] and Emery knew all bout the horse's feet problems. Emery used him for a time and ended up selling him to a cowboy who was a real good calf roper. whose Dad was the Governor of Nevada at the time, an he had a big ranch right out of Las Vegas. The Las Vegas rodeo was coming up, it was a big one, not the finals like they have today, but it was one of the biggest in the west. He decided he'd rope on him at it an so he told his crew to put shoes on him. They got shoes on him but he didn't know how, cause Charlie broke two arms an a leg. But he roped on him and won the roping. But he never roped on him again, cause the next morning, he loaded him up in the trailer and drove him out to a waterhole on the ranch and turned him loose. He told him "Charlie no one is ever going to bother you again" and watched him trot off.

Ansel said he found out later from Louie LaClaire (a warm springs indian that was a stunt man) that Charlie had bucked an indian boy off on the reservation, the boy had gotten hung up, dragged and it killed him... Ansel said he heard that the indians would tie a horse down and beat the bottom of their hooves with rocks to make them so sore that they wouldn't buck. That's probably what had happened to old Charlie to make him so bad to shoe. Ansel said he had trimmed him a time or two while he had him, but it was probably pounding the nails that had upset him when they tried to shoe him. He said he was real broke everybody rode him, his sister rode him and Martina rode him.

Course Charlie had never been in a barn before I took down to Caliente... when winter came he got long hair cause that's what he was used to needing in Oregon. So Ansel decided he would clip him, cause he got so over heated when he ponied horses on him. Every one chided him that they wanted to see him clip him... he was so bad about his feet, they couldn't imagine he'd stand for being clipped. So said you just watch... an Ansel saddled him, an climbed on him, and then used the electric clippers and clipped him every where he could reach. Charlie never moved a muscle and let him do it cause he trusted me and I'd never tried to tie him down or take his feet away.

He said he heard that if the indians couldn't get a horse to stay in the herd. They'd run him in and whip him with a rope and chase him around until he wanted to stay in the herd.

Good for another 3000 miles

Ansel had his monthly check up and visit with Dr. Dan McCleery of McCleery Chiropractic, Bend Oregon. Ansel has been going to Dr. Dan for over 20 years. Ansel signs in with Lagene

He tells that years ago Dr. Dan did a miracle cure on his back that hospitalization, traction, and typical medical practices weren't helping.

Dr. Dan, Ansel, and Anita

Now Ansel goes once a month, more for sort of a "well check" visit. It's been great to have someone tracking and watching his health from the inside out. The staff is like family to us. Lagene, Samantha, (Dr's wife) and Anita are terrific. So our recommendation to you is if you have anything health wise going on that is amiss... from the normal things you'd seek chiropractic care for, to nutritional needs and holistic care - make an appointment with Dr. Dan. ( for those of you coming from Burns, the office is super easy in and out. It's right on Greenwood on the right, just before the Arco station at the jct of 97)

Small world... Anita overheard us talking of San Ysidro, CA... and that Ansel's mother and father had a house there that is now a parking lot for the border crossing, anyway she said her family lived there too and that her father was the grounds keeper for "a" race track named Aqua Caliente... This was probably the track that Ansel raced the most at in his career. Her Dad and Ansel, unbeknownst to each other, were probably there at the same time in the 30's and 40's.

Hmmm, isn't it a small world. Next time I'll take our Caliente book in for her to see pictures of the track.

Lunch with Paul

Paul tries to come most Wednesdays for a visit and to have lunch with Ansel. Paul has been very helpful around the place here. He and friend Pate have hauled many a bale of hay for Ansel since he stopped driving. This week Ansel was telling Paul about Emery Fiske...

Emery Fisk: was a cowboy who was know to always use a bull whip to herd cattle and wrangle horses. He said one time Emery was up in the badlands of North Dakota and when this fellow came to pick him up, he found that the fellow had loaded his saddle and gear into his truck, and had removed Emery's bull whip from his saddle and had thrown it up on the porch... When Emery came out and saw that, he started to get his saddle out of the truck, the fellow said what are you doing??? Emery said, if my whip doesn't go, I don't go... So the fellow hustled around and got Emery's bull whip and put it back on his saddle.

Emery told of moving 300 head of steers and 76 saddle horses by himself in the badlands country. It took him 5 days and 5 nights, to move them the 100 miles and he never saw another soul and did it all by himself with his bull rope and the 76 head of saddle horses. (the horses traveled loose in amongst the herd of cattle) When Emery got to where he was going with those 300 head, he still had three hundred head with just himself, his horse and his bull whip and no dogs. He said he might ride five head of horses each day. He said as he rode along, if he wanted the lead to go to right, he'd just ride up on the left and pop his whip and they'd move right where he wanted them to. He made sure every night when he bedded down, that one horse was hobbled and saddled, so he'd be sure to not be left a foot.

Emery ended up working for Jackie Westrope's father grooming horses at Aqua Caliente. He eventually became a race horse trainer and that was where Ansel met him at the Aqua Caliente race track in Tijuana, Mexico in about 41.

Ansel taught Emery's son Bill to be a race rider (jockey) back in the early 40's. He was a real good rider and got good mounts to ride. The other boy he taught to ride was Doug Dodson from Burns. Doug did pretty good, he won the Preak Stakes, and he was second to Citation in the Derby [Kentucky] and he made the Jockey Hall of Fame. When he'd come home to Burns, he used come down to our Lawen place and hunt geese.

Emery ended up being a very well know deputy sheriff in San Bruno, CA. He solved a very prominent murder case, and was asked to become an agent with the FBI. He eventually retired from the FBI. His son, Bill was a very good jockey and did real well.

Then he told of prominent jockey, Jackie Westrope who is in the Jockey's Hall of Fame. Jackie Westrope was married to Hollywood actress Nan Grey. Nan eventually left him and married Frankie Lane.

2007 NCHA World Champion

CONGRATULATIONS Ron Davis and RD Bud Light

Ansel's long time friend Ron Davis, of Ron Davis Quarter Horses here in Tumalo, Oregon reached a milestone that many of us hope for and few ever achieve. Ron showed his home grown cutting horse, RD Bud Light last year to become the NCHA World Champion 3000 Novice Horse. Ron traveled all over the NW, CA, NV, AZ, NM, TX, OK, and LA (I'm sure there are more that I can't remember) to earn the most winnings in his class to beat out the Reserve Champion, Bobin Hood shown by Dan Hansen by just a few dollars relatively speaking.

Ansel followed Ron's progress all year and was very excited for Ron's win. When they went into the finals only a few hundred dollars separated 1st and 2nd place. Thanks to 2008 technology we were able to watch Ron's go rounds in the finals in Amarillo, TX, LIVE from the comfort of our living room here in Bend on my lap top. There was a production glitch and they didn't announce Ron's score after his work or during the broadcast, so we were in the dark as to whether he won the whole enchilada or not until he called.

Ansel had given Ron valuable advice earlier in the year when he stopped by to visit Ansel and give him an update... Ansel told him that "the most important secret to getting to the winners circle, was to keep the horse sound until the last show". Every time Liz would call with an update, Ansel would just beam. He was very proud of Ron.

Bud Light was out of Ron's great mare Misholena, the palomino in the picture that they are looking at in the picture below. Sadly she had to be put down last spring, and there will only be one more colt out of this great mare. They were able to harvest her eggs, and breed her posthumously via a donor mare.
Sunday afternoon Ron and Liz's daughters put together a congratulations party for Ron to celebrate his Championship. Ansel was determined that we be sure and get home from our road trip so that we could attend the party. He wouldn't have missed it for anything.

Ansel visits with Lisa Urbach at the party. He had lots of opportunities to tell his stories.
This is Bud Light. Daughter Laura brought him over to check out the festivities in his honor.

Not only did the cake tell the story, it was incredibly delicious... I need to find out where they got it !!!
Ron and Ansel above, Liz and Ansel below