The Bag Lady - Part I of III

Tassie, "The Bag Lady" and Far Rider

Strands of rusted and broken barbed wire sagged in tangled confusion from rotting mesquite posts staggering like so many drunks across the rocky soil. Abandoned vehicles and dead appliances decorated the beaten ground around the hard worn dwellings scattered among the greasewood and palo verde trees. The area reminded me of some of the country I had seen in the mountains of West Virginia during military training. It was hard to believe that white folks would live like that. An occasional neatly kept cottage or mobile home stood in stark contrast to the harshness of the rough country lying hard against the southern flanks of the New River Mountains.

Fig Springs Road is a rough, rutted and potholed track following an old wagon road lazing eastward away from the usually dry course of the Agua Fria River. I drove slowly to ease the ride on my horse standing spraddle legged in the trailer behind my rig. I had become interested in the area near Fig Springs after reading a privately published monograph by Pauline Grimes (1987), A Land of Our Own. The work is a biographical account of the first permanent Anglo settlers in the Fig Springs area after the turn of the century. Fig Springs lies roughly five miles, as a hawk flies, northeast of the old New River Stage Station along the banks of the Agua Fria River north of Phoenix, Arizona.

I am an avid historian of the Southwest, circa 1873-1911. I also raise and train horses, specializing in working trail horses. As soon as the young horses I am starting under saddle or those that I am re-schooling quit trying to stick my head in the dirt, I get them out into rough country. It works out all around. I have found that horses learn a whole lot quicker when they have a reason to do something on demand and I use the opportunity to explore the out of the way sites of yesteryear in the same manner as those who came before. That is how I happened to be rattling along the old wagon road to Fig Springs. About a half a mile east of Soda Springs across a very beat up and narrow cattle guard, I off-loaded a spirited Morgan mare and saddled up. Tassie is a horseman’s horse. You cannot just sit on her. You have to ride her. She is quick, agile and intelligent with an extraordinary presence about her.

The cool February air was clear with an intermittent breeze blowing from the west. A gray, broken weather front stretched from the Bradshaws eastward across the New River Mountains. The clouds thickened to the north and rain appeared to be falling where they collided with Red Mountain. The dampness and scattered clouds occasionally drifting across an anemic winter sun gave the breeze enough of a bite to be grateful for my split-leather riding jacket.
To the northeast, New River Mesa rises some 1700 feet above the surrounding desert. Local Old Timers have told me that there is a hidden trail that negotiates its massive, lava strewn slopes from the New River side. I've ridden most of this country and glassed the mesa looking for some sign of a trail, but without any luck. There are a couple of places near West Point that look like a working cowboy on a rock-wise horse might make it. Riding other folks' horses for a living, I don't take the kind of chances I used to have to take as a working cowboy pushing range cattle. I didn't like it much then, and I sure don't like it now. I have never seen a cow or a trail worth crippling a horse for.

In addition to working horses, I guide folks into the remote and not so remote areas of Arizona and the Southwest where evidence of the Old West is still to be seen. I call these excursions Ghost Rides. Along the old wagon roads and outlaw trails lie the relics of yesteryear -- mining camps, stage stops, ghost towns and the long dried bloody ground of gun fights, robberies, massacres and other events that we call "adventure.” Life-threatening trouble is a more accurate description of such events. Seeing these places in the often harsh and beautiful country in which they occurred from the back of a horse, just as the participants did over a hundred years ago, brings history alive and makes for a great ride. Today's pre-ride was in search of the first Anglo homestead in the New River area.

Zulu, my big Rhodesian Ridgeback and trail companion, trotted ahead of as we headed east towards Skunk Creek. We crossed a dry wash and turned north paralleling the creek bed along a worn cattle trail. A mile later we swung east skirting a small hill and turned off the trail easing down into an arroyo where several clear, shallow pools fed by a seep reflected the branches of the mesquite trees along the banks.

Training horses is a conditioning process and every ride or handling session with a horse is a training session - good or bad. Horses are creatures of habit if they are anything and consistency is central to the training process. Horses are most secure when their lives are filled with constants. In my experience, horses, like kids, don't learn anything by having it defined to them. They learn by trial and error. Whatever produces not so much the greatest pleasure, but the least amount of discomfort is how a horse prioritizes it's responses to the environment and the events within it. During the training process, horses must learn that when they do the things we ask of them they will not be hurt.

There are a number of fundamental activities a horse must learn in order to have a safe and successful partnership with humans. Among the first things a horse must learn to accept is being tied to something. As a young man back in the sixties, I was privileged to have apprenticed under three of the finest horsemen to ever fork a horse; Ed Connell, the last of the old time Reindores, Del Combs, a 1900's era cowboy, stunt man and head horse trainer for Universal Studios, and Ramon Banuelos, a true Mexican vaquero with hands “as fine as a dealer in Reno.” All of these extraordinary horsemen agreed that three things modern, back yard horses don't get enough of is "walkin', rough country and standin' tied." After forty-five years of riding I couldn't agree more. How many times have you seen horses digging a hole deep enough to bury themselves in when left tied? Horses that paw when tied to a trailer or on hard surfaces run the risk of injury from this annoying habit.

Horses do what they know. If they don't know patience, they will, as often as not, paw the ground when tied. Even with a rider up they will often paw and be foolish. Rather like a kid in church. Most problems with a horse are not the fault of the horse, but rather the ignorance and incompetence of the people handling the animal.

Tassi knows how to stand tied at the rail or to a horse trailer because she has been taught to do so, but that does not mean that she will also quietly stand tied out in the middle of nowhere, on uneven ground with leaves and branches scraping against her and her rigging. Whenever possible, I use any opportunity to help a horse learn something. After first making sure that all sharp projections upon which she might hurt herself were broken off, I tied her to a mesquite branch above the height of her withers in such a fashion to insure that if she moved small limbs and leaves would touch her.

The perfect horse has never been foaled. Emory Henderson, an old-time local horseman once remarked to me "every horse has a hole in it." This little mare's problem is a violent pathological response to certain sounds, most notably the rustle of plastic bags and such. In her early training, I had tied bags and bits of plastic all over her. She had resisted mightily and I had taken to affectionately calling her The Bag Lady. She would strike and kick at the plastic no matter where it might be. This made for a very dangerous situation and we had worked long and hard to change her behavior.

I carefully eased my Winchester model 1873 lever action rifle out of the saddle scabbard and walked off. The sound of steel brushing against leather, while perhaps pleasing to anachronistic ears such as mine, could, if I were not careful, cause this powerful little mare to blow up. She humped up a bit and I gingerly stepped away. She fiddled and fidgeted, as young horses do, and every time a branch would scrape against the saddle, she'd clamp her tail, scoot her hind legs up under herself and stand poised to launch herself into the branches of the mesquite.

She is a sensible little horse and soon realized that there just wasn't any place to go. This good sense cannot be taken for granted. It must first be a genetic characteristic of a particular horse and then it must be developed through training. Horses, dogs, men. I have found there is not much difference when it comes to genetics and conditioning. Her reactions were a study in competing inclinations. Her instinctive reaction, which I will define as reflexive, was to flee from the unusual touching and rustling of the leaves and branches in this unfamiliar place. Her trained reaction, which I will define as a controlled, specific response to a stimulus, and predicated upon her previously reinforced learning experiences, was restraint. She has learned to respect a lead rope, in this case the hackamore’s mecate tied to the tree limb.

Unfortunately, in today’s modern world, most people are far removed from the natural order more commonly found in pre-WWII America. The only interaction with non-human species for most urban and city dwellers is with a domestic pet dog or cat. Horses do not learn like dogs, nor do they possess the same degree of reasoning ability. Reason, as we use it in everyday discourse, means the ability to draw inferences. However, noted California horse trainer Frank Evans says that after fifty years of training, he is convinced that a horse does not possess any ability to reason. In my experience, horses learn through association and pattern development as evidenced by Tassi's reflexive reaction to the strange circumstances but overridden by her respect of the mecate'. For our purposes here, we will take that as evidence of a primitive reasoning ability, at least in the colloquial sense.

Horses worry, and with good reason given their evolutionary history, about being eaten. After a several minutes of trembling, snorting and general wild eyed looking about, she figured out that standing absolutely still was the best way to keep whatever it was that was scraping and rattling from devouring her. Such has been her previous learning experience conducted in the controlled environment of a training arena. She firmly set her ears at a forty-five degree angle, tucked her tail and waited for what she was sure was her impending doom. I chuckled at her interpretation of her state of affairs and reflected on how much pleasure horses and their antics provide for me. I wandered off where I could survey the country and still keep an eye on her.