Author: Dick Courteau

My earliest memories, from infancy, are seeing teams of horses at work. I have been riding and working horses—and then mules and donkeys—since age eleven, when my foster father gave me my first pony, the stone-blind but spirited twelve-hand pinto mare Toots.

I am an elderly cowboy/farmer/teacher/trainer-of-equines. I grew up in the Minnesota farm country and, later, on ranches further west. By my late teens, I was breaking horses for a living in Montana. In 1956, I was hired as winter teamster for a mid-sized ranch on the Crow Indian reservation, where I furthered my skills with harness horses. Throughout, my mentors were Anglos, Polish immigrants, and a gentle old crippled-up French-and-Crow teamster. I have always read widely on horsemanship.

Later that same year (1956, age 23), I was seriously injured in a ranch accident and disabled. With hopes for a full recovery dim I decided to “get educated,” and spent the next fifteen years intensely involved in academic life. While teaching at the University of Arkansas, I bought a large old farm in the Ozarks and the country just reached out and reclaimed me. Bridges burnt, I began to make a living in “the rurals” by any means possible—raising cattle, breaking and training horses, shoeing horses, riding lessons, selective logging with horses, and market gardening (with horse tillage of course!). 

I have never been attracted to showing, but for a professional horseperson showing is almost a must. In 1974, my trainees (both horses and people) won several ribbons under saddle and in harness in the large-Welsh-pony classes at the Tulsa State Fair. In 1979, Jason Allen, whom I had owned and trained and but recently sold, became national champion Morgan Working Hunter. Pretty hoity-toity stuff. His admirers could not have known that the splash of yellow hairs in his mane, that “bouquet,” was a collar mark from his work before the wagon and plow. So it has always been practical down-to-earth work with equines that has most enthralled me.

In 1980, with a new wife and three young children, I decided that this patchwork life was too financially precarious, so I left the hills to seek a steady job. In what I now see as a gesture of defiance toward the tyranny of the automobile, we left Arkansas in a covered wagon drawn by three horses and arrived in North Platte, Nebraska, 43 days and 850 miles later. There I worked as a laborer and horse breaker. Four years later we returned and took up life pretty much as we had left it. It was then that I got into donkeys, a smaller, less volatile animal, training for myself and others, so for the past thirty years I’ve been accumulating more of the same experience with a different slant.