GLIMPSES

Lifetime Learner

A student of the cowboy calling, Craig Carr keeps an open mind about his trade, even if he has an opinion or two about where it’s headed.
—BY DAN ABERNATHY

They didn’t know what all the dust was from. It was everywhere. It kept falling from the sky, covering everything. Craig Carr and his cohorts were gathering cattle in Montana, in the National Forest, as the stuff kept settling around them, accumulating on everything, even on the cast—yes, a broken-leg plaster cast—that Carr had on his leg. Because Carr was not someone to let a broken leg keep him out of the saddle.

The guys started making jokes about how the Russians must’ve dropped the bomb. It was ash fallout, all right. But not from a bomb. It was from the eruption of Mount St. Helens, which none of these guys had heard about. You know you’re a cowboy when your memories of big events are all tied up in some souvenir of your cowboy life. Carr’s high school graduation, for instance, also found him in a leg cast. This leg cast, like the other, came from a wreck he had while starting a colt. Carr, now a Colorado cowboy, can measure his milestones by the cattle or horse stories that accompany them. But that’s fine with him.

“Cowboying is about all I’m good at,” Carr humbly says. If that’s so, it’s probably because it’s all he has ever done. These from-the-cradle cowpokes are getting rarer all the time. From the time Carr was big enough to fork a cayuse he was running loose on one. Given this much on-the-job training, he has earned a proficiency in his profession and wears the handle “top hand” well. Carr’s rep was built on more than just the labor he’s done for various ranches.

He’s made a name making cowhorses out of those cayuses—and demonstrating their abilities at shows, as well as in ranching circles. These days Carr is ranch manager for the Wildcat Ranch, near Weldona, Colo., but he has followed a long and varied road to this place. He has been a feedlot cowboy, that least prideful—to put it graciously—of cowboy occupations. His stints at ranches have taken him from Montana to Wyoming to Colorado to Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle and back to Colorado.

Carr worked on the Highland Ranch, south of Denver, and watched it get all but swallowed up by the everexpanding city of Denver. There is still a “Highland Ranch” there, but the name applies only to a subdivision, and the land is nothing but houses. He watched it all, and waxed philosophic. And moved on. Cowboys are an independent breed, always ready to flout convention and follow their own convictions and idiosyncracies. Carr is independent-minded, even for a cowboy. Take for instance his position on dogs, a matter of strong opinions among cowboys. “A good dog can take the place of three people and a bad one, it takes three people to fix the dog,” says Carr, who freely admits to using dogs. “It’s kind of like handling cattle ahorseback—when you’ve got cattle that respect a dog, and the guy’s ahorseback, there’s kind of a harmony there. Things can go real smooth.

” But it is horses, more than dogs, that interest Carr. He started showing his horses in Reined Cowhorse events about five years ago, but it was just a couple of years ago that he found a show he could truly be at home in. “I went to a ranch rodeo finals [Working Ranch Cowboys Association Finals] in Amarillo, Texas,” Carr says. “I came in third in the ranch horse contest and it qualified me to go to the ranch horse finals in Abilene.” At the Abilene show that year (1998), Carr made the top 15, though he was the only one who dallied or who was outfitted in ‘California bridle’ style.

Everyone else, he says, was from Texas, and was tied on (with catch rope tied hard and fast to the saddle horn). He took third the following year. And last year, his third year at the Abilene show, Carr again placed third. “Them Texans aren’t going to let me win anything,” Carr says. “I kind of stuck out like a sore thumb, packing 45 foot of rope, [using] rawhide reins with bridle chains, and riding an ‘A’ fork saddle,” Carr says of the experience. Western heritage is forever broadening and there is a wide variety of horse shows, but a ranch horse show is one in which a cowboy can truly show his, or her, skills.

It’s where the public can see what skills it takes to be out doctoring cattle day after day. It’s a show that was born out of horse sales, where the horse is shown doing different tasks. It’s nothing like team penning, Carr says. He says that if team penning were a judged event, it would be “pretty neat,” but it is not. “Somebody said once if you are going to team pen, take everything you learned on a ranch and forget it.” Carr says. “Team penning is just running, screaming, hollering, and cattle scattering. I don’t care how you’re mounted, you can’t drive a cow somewhere she ain’t looking if she don’t want to go.”

A ranch horse competition, by contrast, requires cowboy and horse to demonstrate their skills in three events: reining, working cowhorse, and roping. Carr believes one can learn a lot by going to these shows. He admits that he does. “There was an article in America’s Horse magazine, who are big sponsors of ranch horse competitions,” Carr says. “They called it ‘Reinventing the Horse Show,’ and it kinda is. Every time you go to a show, you learn so much by just watching, and about the time you think you’ve got it figured out, you find more you need to learn.”

Delivering himself of yet another of his opinions, Carr states that anyone can go out and show a horse that they have bought, but when you can go and beat somebody on something you’ve raised—there is a lot more pride in that. Knowing what a cow is thinking and what a horse is capable of is nothing foreign to Carr. He was reared on a ranch near White Sulfur Springs, Mont., a country valley where cattle and horses outnumber the people. Carr’s father, Nick Carr, was the cowboss for Cammas Creek Cattle and Sheep, although in those days there were no sheep there. From the time Carr was old enough to ride he was following his father and helping him. By the time he was 12 he was on the payroll for $10 per day and thought he was “getting rich.”

“They had a lot of forest permits and my dad and I pretty much did all the riding,” Carr says. After high school Carr stayed close to home and worked, but after a couple of years, wanting to stretch his wings, he ventured to Texas. He moved back and forth from ranches to feedlots. But during this time it was hard to make a living working on a ranch, he says. At the feedlots the pay was much higher and at a feedlot you can practice the cowboy code: you never have to get off your horse. “I think everybody ought to work in a feedlot,” Carr said, airing an opinion that would have to be a hard sell among, well, 99 percent of earth. But he bores right ahead.

“It teaches you a lot more about sick cattle, a lot more than you ever see on a ranch. The other thing you learn is getting a horse to handle and operate a lot better. You have to because you’re doing it all day long.” Carr admits that working in a feedlot is hard on the horses. He would ride a horse or colt in a feedlot for only about two months. “It’s either dry and dusty or wet and muddy. Extremes,” Carr added. “They get bored and tired of it. You take one of them outside and it’ll brighten their eyes up. A feedlot is kind of a factory job for a horse.” It was about three years ago that Carr met Larry Snider, owner of the Wildcat, and threw in with that outfit. It was just the kind of place he was looking for. Here he runs some of his own cattle, and all the horses he uses are his own, plus he has a few brood mares.

Snider has nothing but good to say about Carr. “He has been a great manager,” says Snider, whose own competitive outlet is to show cutting horses. “I met him when he was working on the Highland Ranch and was glad he came here. He is a good horseman and cattleman and a great student of the old way of doing things.” Carr, whose father made a practice of furnishing his own horses at the jobs he worked, has himself made the most of his opportunity to keep and ride his own horses. Besides the competitions, he has made a sideline of horse trading.

Not horse trading in the usual sense. Carr will buy a halter-broke horse and sell it after he has put a good finish on it. You can bet it’ll have some cow savvy. Right now, the market for these horses is as good as he has ever seen it, he says. “It’s getting where people, instead of golf or boating or something, they get a real nice gelding,” Carr says. “It’s the western heritage deal—everybody wants a piece of it.” The Wildcat is predominantly a yearling outfit, but in years when they find themselves with sufficient winter feed they will winter some cattle. One reason for doing so is to give their horses some work in winter. “Our personal cows, we’ve worked them so much that when they’re calving and one of them is in trouble, you can go out there on a two-year-old colt and bring them to the house,” Carr says. “They’re pretty well behaved.”

Carr believes cattle are like anything else: they need to be trained. “We will go and help people branding, and they’re moaning about how wild their cattle are,” Carr says. “But they don’t have any horses that are broke. It’s no mystery to me. If cattle see a horse even once a week, when you ride out [through them] they don’t throw their tails and leave.” Last spring Carr helped his neighbors brand more than 2,500 calves. “There’s a group of us and we’ve converted a lot of people from using calf tables to dragging their calves,” Carr says. “We’ve got a neighbor who runs about 450 calves. Last year we drug about 200 and they did the rest of them on a table. This year we drug every one of them. I imagine they’ll take his calf tables to an auction sale.” Carr adds, “I take a lot of three- and four-year-old colts and drag maybe 15 or 20 calves at each branding, and pretty soon it’s no big deal to them.

It’s a good place to take them because it gets them used to a lot of stuff. “In my opinion, they perfected handling cattle about 100 years ago, and that was with a horse. When people use a calf table, I’m busy that day. I’ve got other things to do.” In 1992, Carr married Kaye McCartney, a cowgirl who grew up in the area. She works part-time in town, but her passion is the ranch and her horse. When she is home she is training, as well as showing, her own horses. Carr says he finds it sad that corporate companies are buying ranches. But, on the other side of it, the benefits in ranch jobs are getting better all the time. “As an incentive, a lot of the good ranches will let you run some cows of your own,” Carr said.

“It is a good deal for them, because you’re going to stay put more. If you’ve got 50 head of cattle, you’re not going to get mad and quit, because you’ve got nowhere to go.” As with any man who spends the majority of his time in the saddle, there are usually a few broken bones that go with it. Carr has had his share and most of them came before he saw his 24th birthday. He has broken his arm three times riding saddle broncs and he has nine screws and three plates in one arm. He thought he’d wised up about his leg-breaks, but that was before he had his worst wreck.

One March, up in Montana, he was riding a colt in the round pen when the colt blew up, hit a slick spot, and fell down. Then the horse got up and continued to buck around the pen. Carr says it scared the horse worse than it scared him, but the horse eventually ran over Carr. “I was hollering and hoping someone would hear me, but nobody was around,” Carr remembers. “For some reason I took my chinks off and threw them up on the fence. I laid there for over 45 minutes and finally drug myself backwards about 400 yards to the house with my leg [bone] sticking out.”

He was lucky. There was a young girl who had stopped by their house. Carr hollered at her to get his mom. He was laid up for about three months. Carr has no plans to hang his hat anywhere but at the Wildcat Cattle Company. They are trying to build up their cowherd and always improve on the horses. Carr says he hopes to someday hear someone say, “That guy’s a horseman.” No doubt it’s been said plenty already, if only while the guy was in action and out of earshot. But here’s saying it plain: the guy is a horseman. Even if he does think he still has a lot to learn.

Back to this issue cover
Back to Back Issues Home