Homestead Memories: Working with Horses

     When we first moved to our land we decided we'd like to use horses for our farm work, logging, firewood and gardening. As with nearly everything else we did, we were winging it - no prior knowledge, no one to teach us with the exception of a few sporadic lessons from some old timers. But, other than a few catastrophes, we did pretty well. (Note: "We" is what I call the royal WE, meaning my husband, Dick, with me providing back-up support.)

     The first thing we did was go to a local horse trader to buy a team. He saw us coming about 40 miles away. So Tim, our gelding, who appeared sound at first was actually lame. The trader claimed it was because his hooves were trimmed a might short, but hoof growth never corrected the problem. Mom, our mare, "may have been pregnant", he said, but in reality was fairly old with a slung belly. We acquired a set of harness, hitched up the team and proceeded to plant a half acre of potatoes. The half acre eventually became a quarter acre of weeds and a quarter acre of potatoes due to the fact that we just couldn't manage to care for that large a crop with our knowledge level and everything else we had to do. I remember that we built a page wire play pen for my son down by the potato patch. I suspect that wouldn't hold up well alongside today's safe baby products, but, like the cardboard box I used for a car seat, we did what we could and somehow my son survived.

     As time went on we purchased a beautiful pair of Percheron mare colts, a fine set of harness from Sackville, New Brunswick, and a few more implements - eventually owning a plough, mower, seeder, disk, dump rake, garden cultivator, manure spreader, dump wagon, and sleigh - all of which we made use of. Using horses my husband logged an area across our lake and sold the logs. He also got Tamarac fence posts from the lake in the winter. We fenced our leased quarter (carrying the wire through the inaccessible parts between us on a pole), got our firewood, used a walking plough to prepare what we call the "L shaped field" to plant a crop, tilled the garden - all using horses. Once the Percherons were trained as a team we sold Mom and Tim.

     Working with a team of horses is both rewarding and frightening. They are huge animals which you must care for, feed well, and respect. Things do not always go as planned. One winter one of the nearly grown colts fell on the lake ice and couldn't get up. She was wild-eyed, panicked, sweating. There was no way she could right herself. We tied a rope to Tim and, after much worry and encouragement, he finally pulled her to the shore and firm ground. I remember once Dick had the team standing outside the barn while he forked it clean. A huge dump of snow avalanched its way off the barn roof onto the sleigh and off they went; would have kept going, going, going but they wedged themselves between two sheds and came to an abrupt halt. Another time they slipped on an icy hill with a sleigh behind them and down they went into a tangle of harness. We had to remove the harness to free them, take them to the top of the hill, attach a rope to the sleigh and pull it up, re-harness and reattach the sleigh. From this we learned that shoeing them in winter was wise. While training the Percherons, Ruthie and Honey, to work as a team out in our North field, several fighter jets zoomed low overhead causing absolute terror for the team and quite a control issue for Dick. But over time Ruthie and Honey and Dick became tuned to one another and worked well together in a long standing partnership of mutual respect. After a couple of disheartening tries and sad seasons both mares had fine stud colts, Sonny and Jim.

    Horses are very well suited for logging. Dick got a berth across the highway from us. He would fall and buck the trees and the horses pulled them to a landing. On our own land he would roll them onto the sleigh and take them home. The second winter here we took our horses, goats, chickens, just walking baby boy and ourselves up to a chipboard bush shack we built near Swan Hills where we, along with our neighbours, logged fence posts for a local mill.  That was quite a winter, living in our tiny shack with only room for a crib, a bed, a table and a tin airtight heater. The snow was deep, used to sift through the seams of our shack when windy but was almost refreshing at times because we had to keep our heater running at full capacity in order to melt enough snow for the horses to drink. Mom even pulled a dead moose - hit by a truck, killed by the RCMP and donated to us - (yes there's more to that story) across the highway and through waist deep snow to our shack where we hung and butchered it, froze it outdoors, and had many good meals.

     Though we used the horses for many years, we did end up getting a tractor. The first one was a John Deere A, tricycle wheeled tractor, very old, tippy, a challenge to drive. The second tractor was a propane powered giant 930 Case with a cab in which you'd nearly melt on a hot day. Finally we got a 265 Massey, which we still have. We continued to use the horses for quite some time but as they got older, and we got older, and the colts were sold, we finally retired them. They lived out their final days, well over 30 years, on the pastures they worked when they, and we, were young.