He's got the right kind of language

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.” 

― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

Send in the cavalry, if it is not too late

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

As I am prone to do, today I  think of times past from my newspaper days and of Oscar Lindholm, and his conservative ways. It has been years since Oscar's death, but still I have an overwhelming desire to recycle some of his blacksmith/ferrier wisdom from time to time. 

For example: "The stable cleaning was seven days a week. In fact you got so 'stabilized' that when I went on leave the first time, I couldn't get used to not cleaning a stable every morning," wrote in his 1984 book "Horseman's Territory."

Oscar, born on April 12, 1916 in Holmquist, South Dakota, passed away at the age of 93, on February 7, 2010. Having joined the US Army in 1936, he was awarded the Bronze Star and retired as a CW03 in 1957. While in the Army, Oscar married his wife Elsie Alexander in October of 1940, and they had four wonderful children. He spent many years perfecting the craft of "horse shoeing" in which he became very well known as the area's "Horse Shoer." 

He is buried in Woodland Park Cemetery.

"Oh, we all griped in the horse cavalry just like any other outfits, but the old saying I believe is true. 'If they ain't griping, they ain't happy.' Another saying I remember: 'Everything is funny, as long as it happens to someone else.'"

It has been a long time since the U.S. horse cavalry of Oscar's day existed, which makes his wonderful stories so precious.

The last horse cavalry charge by a U.S. Army cavalry unit took place against Japanese forces during the fighting in the Bataan Peninsula, Philippines, in the village of Morong on 16 January 1942, by the 26th Cavalry Regiment of the Philippine Scouts. Shortly thereafter, the besieged combined United States-Philippine forces were forced to slaughter their horses for food and the 26th Regiment fought on foot or in whatever scarce vehicles were available until their surrender.
The 10th Mountain Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop of the 10th Mountain Division, with its roots in Colorado, while not designated as U.S. Cavalry, conducted the last horse-mounted charge of any Army organization while engaged in Austria in 1945. An impromptu pistol charge by the Third Platoon was carried out when the Troop encountered a machine gun nest in an Italian village/town sometime between April 14, and April 23, 1945.

"Actually I served with Machine Gun Troop of the 4th Cavalry Regiment in Ft. Meade, South Dakota, from February 1936 till the spring of 1940 when half of the regiment mechanized. A & B Troops retained their horses till approximately May or June, 1942. In the spring of 1940 when the unit half mechanized, Machine Gun Troop became Service Troop of the mechanized part of the regiment," wrote Oscar.

"I think I saw three generals while in army from1936 to 1942. One of these, I believe was Chief of Cavalry in approximately 1936. Whoever he was, he came to Ft. Meade, South Dakota, on an inspection tour. After the general and his inspection team had walked through the stables, the general said to our sergeant, 'You maybe won't believe this, Sergeant, but I have seen mess halls that were cleaner than that stables.' That is the kind of good stuff we lived on for days back then."

“When you first start, the more you hammer, the worse it gets.” According to what Oscar told me years ago about his initial solo horse shoeing at Fort Mead, South Dakota for the Fourth Calvary in 1936. “I was sweating and swearing pretty good in both Swede and English,” he said and as Sergeant Sears, his superior at the time noted, “I guess he’ll make a pretty good blacksmith, he's got the language right already.”

Mules, and troops of the 10th Mountain at Camp Hale, near Aspen.

Some of the last Cavalry unit in Italy during W.W.II.

37 mm pack gun, on W.W. II cavalry troops in Italy.

10th Mountain mules, and troops in Italy during W.W.II.

Horse sense not what it once was

Miners relied a lot on animal power

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

It is hard to think of it now, but maybe a person needed more acquired knowledge, more horse sense if you will, to get stuff back and forth from the mines a hundred years ago. Miners created such fascinating technology as a jig-back tram where a loaded bucket pulls the empty bucket back up the hill. But of course, they relied a lot on animal power.
“When I first came here in 1927, everything was handled with horses and mules,” says muleskinner Adolph Jordan in “The Way It Was, A Historical Narrative of Ouray County,” interviews compiled by David Bachman and Tod Bacigalupi. “Everything was freighted out of the mountains with wagons, two-horse, four horse, and six horse teams, hauling ore off the hills and supplies up to the mines. The small outfits packed the ore out and the supplies in on burros and mules. In the mornings there were quite a few horses and mules going up the street at six o’clock. You could hear the bell ringing, the muleskinners cussing, and the chains jangling. In the evening it would be the same when they came back in.”
Jordan said that a six-horse team had a line for each horse that stopped and started them and turned them right or left. Using that method, a driver could make each horse do different things, a necessary requirement when hauling load up the steep grades.
“When you are going up those switchbacks, the outside wheelhorse has to pull the whole load, sometimes as much as 30 feet. If all the horses pull at the same time, the back wheels of the wagon will go over the side. The horses that worked those big wagons weighed over a ton, maybe 2,300 or 2,400 pounds. You put a little horse in there and he can’t do it. He ain’t got the weight. And you don’t work the wheeler; only when you need them. The wheelers were the horse next to the wagon. The pointers were the middle two horses, and the leaders were the two front horses.”
It was very dangerous as well, if you didn’t know how to control your horses.
“They used to buy a lot of those big, old draft studs — stallions from the east. They were cranky. When you were driving them up the mountain and stopped to water them, you had to unhook the outside tugs on the wheelers so they could turn and get a drink from the trough. Sometimes one of those studs would grab the other one by the neck, and they would take the whole wagon over the hill. Kill them all. You could still see the wheels down in the creek a couple of years ago.”
And then there was the possibility of getting caught in a snow slide.
“I’ve had mules knocked down by the slides many times, but they usually get up on their own. They are stronger you know.” Jordan said.
“One time I was bringing some machinery down from the old U. S. Mill with a string of four mules. A slide about three or four feet thick and a hundred yards wide came down, and that thing knocked three of those mules’ feet out from under them. They rode on top of that slide down about a hundred yards. They was abouncing up and down; it looked like they were going up ten feet sometimes. It had skinned up their legs a little bit, but if they had gotten under it, the slide would have ground them up and killed them. But it threw them up in the air, and they lit on top of the snow. The lead rope was broken free. We always kept rotten pigtails on the packsaddles so if something did happen, they would break pretty easily. I went down, got the mules on their feet, straightened up the packsaddles, and led them up. They didn’t make hardly a dent in the snow where the slide had run. It was packed that hard. Yeah, them snow slides, they will do some freakish things.”
Horsepower and four-wheel drive is clearly not what it once was.
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