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Winner - Teams Pulling

T

the_jersey_lilly_2000

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Feb 16, 2005
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Location
South East Texas
Congrats Soapweed, really neat photo.

rushmorefourframed-cropped-50.jpg
 
Thank you. This is Peach Blossom handling the lines back in 1980. We got married in 1979, and the first two winters all of our hay was fed with this four-horse team. We called them the Rushmore Four, as their names were Tom, Abe, Teddy, and George.
 
Northern Rancher said:
Soapweed did you ever cable your stacks on?
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Yes, that is how the hay was pulled on to the "haysled," which was actually a 14' x 18' platform on an I-beam running gear, with two wheels in front and two in back. The four horses were hooked to a cart, and the sled tongue was hooked to the cart with a drawbar pin. I used a big iron ring between the cart and the haysled tongue, which had just enough slack that "accuracy" in backing up wasn't as important. It also gave a little slack in pulling which served the same function as the slack between railroad cars.

My hay stacks were about four tons each. I would pull the haysled alongside a stack, unhook the cart and drive the horses around to the side of the platform on the sled. A chain was pulled around the middle of the stack, and the horses would just have to pull on half a stack the first time. When the bottom half of the stack was loaded later, two chains were used. The first one was "encouraged" to cut under the hay just a little bit. Then the horses were stopped and the second chain was put up about a foot above the ground. With two parallel chains pulling about a foot apart, the stack butt would pull on just as clean as a whistle (most of the time :wink: ). If you did everything right it saved a lot of hand labor with a pitchfork.

I would like to thank Buck Buckles for showing me some of the tricks of the trade. He is a master horseman, top hand cowboy/rancher, and superb story teller. I just wish I'd have known the "two-chain" secret when I used a tractor on Dad's ranch in earlier years. We would always try to push the bottom part of the stack onto the haysled with the dozer on the 4020 John Deere tractor. It never pushed on as clean as you could pull it on with two chains.
 
Congrates Soapweed,I love that picture!Actually love anything to do with teams and pulling. Greg fed square bales for years with a team.

We had a nieghbor,great cowboy and story teller,he was a master at the 18 horse hitch. Anytime he drove that hitch greg and I were there watching in total awe.Lost him a few years ago in a bad accident not far from our place....Rusty's missed and talked about all the time.They just don't make cowboys like that anymore
 
Soapweed some of the ranches up along the river went straight from loose hay to round bales-they skipped idiot cubes all together lol. It sounds like you could of fit right in-there were several thousand cattle fed every day up there with cabled on hay. Maybe with $6 diesel it will get back to that. The funniest team and wagon story I ever heard was told to me by old Jim White-the saddle maker in Belle Fourche-it seems Jim was driving a six up of Clydes in a Nevada parade. They ran away with him all the way through town-till the wheeled in a driveway and stopped. The driveway of the local bordello-Jim said people thought my team had been there before lol. I can drive a team good enough to et by but I'm thinking you probably forgot more than I'll ever know. Our next project here is starting a pair of red roans next fall-they're bred to buck but if they don't they're going to become a chore team lol.
 
Mrs.Greg said:
Congrates Soapweed,I love that picture!Actually love anything to do with teams and pulling. Greg fed square bales for years with a team.

We had a nieghbor,great cowboy and story teller,he was a master at the 18 horse hitch. Anytime he drove that hitch greg and I were there watching in total awe.Lost him a few years ago in a bad accident not far from our place....Rusty's missed and talked about all the time.They just don't make cowboys like that anymore
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Thank you, Mrs. Greg. Here are a few more pictures from that era of my life.

paintrushmorefour8x10.jpg

The Paint was one of the best cow horses I have ever owned. I bought him when he was four years old, in 1974. When he was 18 yars old, I traded him to a girl for a 4-H horse. Her dad traded me a two-seated completely restored buggy straight across for the horse. I still think of Ol' Paint every time I hook up the buggy. In the background is Peach handling the lines of the Rushmore Four.

SixhorsefeedteamonGreenValleyRan-1.jpg

I took this picture of my six-horse feed team in 1978 at my dad's Green Valley Hereford Ranch. Mike Paulick is up on top with a pitchfork. He worked there at the time.

rushmorefour.jpg

Christmas card pictures from 1981. The top one was from Peach and me. She is standing by the haysled.

The next Christmas card was the one my folks' sent that year. Dad's paint horse is on the left and mine is on the right. They were two top horses, and we had a lot of friendly competition vying for who had the best horse. :-)

The bottom picture is the Christmas card my cousin and his bride sent in 1981, of a pack trip they were on the previous summer. It was in the Teton Wilderness Area in Wyoming. I worked for that outfitter in 1971, and my cousin worked for them in 1975 and 1976. He and his family went back a few times through the years to take in an occasional pack trip.
 
Northern Rancher said:
By the way I really like your horse on the far right side-was he any good. He just has a nice drafty look to him.
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That was Tom, and he was a pretty good horse. All four of them were a bit broncy. I bought all four horses together, as three-year-olds. They had run away with the previous owner, and I got them cheap considering draft horse prices at the time ($700 apiece). Poor Peach and I had our share of runaways. Some cold windy mornings, my poor bride was almost too nervous to eat breakfast, knowing we had to go feed hay with those broncs. :wink: :-) At all times, one of us had to be holding the lines. I'd usually drive first when they were fresh, and she would pitch. When things were going good, we'd switch. Had they been more reliable, we might have stayed with the draft horse deal longer. If I were to do it over again, I would start out with good broke older horses.
 
I started out with a pair of fillies I bought from a PMU sale for $300 a piece-we probably have sold $10,000 worth of teams and odds and ends off those two mares over the years. My buddy started them for me and after that I kind of muddled through it as best I could. A friend of mine had a pretty good run away with a young pair of Percherons and a rubber tired wagon last week.
 
Thx for sharing those extra pics Soap,love that stuff!!

Its funny,feeding like that seemed to be tough,but we loved it and miss it. I bet you kinda miss it too{I don't think greg misses it enough to go back though}
 
Soapweed, you got any more pictures like those? I sure would love to see them, I really like looking at the heavy horses hooked up to something.
 

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