Post
by OilyBill » Mon Mar 15, 2021 12:18 am
One of the old members of the Tucson Touring T's that I knew, always hated horses.
I once asked him why, and he said it was because a horse tried to kill him once.
He was somewhere remote, like North Dakota, in the middle of the depression. He was trying to get home from somewhere, riding his horse, and it had been a long trip. he hadn't eaten for a couple of days.
At one point, about 2-3 miles from home, he had to get off the horse and open a gate. He did that, but then the horse wouldn't let him get back on. It was the middle of a blizzard, with heavy blowing wind and snow. He couldn't afford to argue any longer with the horse, and he was too cold to be able to wrassle the horse into submission and get back on. He said he was half-frozen and could hardly move. He walked and led the horse the last couple of miles to home. He was pretty certain he was going to die out there, but he finally made it home. His father got him in the house, and took the horse to the barn and put him away.
He said the next morning, he was going to shoot the horse, but his father talked him out of it, as they had no money to replace it, and a horse was too valuable to just kill.
He said he never cared much for horses anyway, and after that he had as little to do with them as possible.
For him, there was no romance in horses. He liked his Model T's much better, once he finally got one. Model T's never let him down.
I went on a site called "GenDisasters" and found out that it was VERY common for people to die during blizzards or hard winters, before automobiles. I saw one entry that had 12 people killed in one area during a single un-anticipated blizzard. One parent lost 3 kids just coming home from school. Men on horses, and sheepherders working out on the prairie, were reported as missing, and later, bodies found frozen to death. Up to when I started looking into it, I had no idea how dangerous it was just to be caught in bad weather without an automobile to get you home.
Life before the Model T was not only hard, it was dangerous.