Bio: Kid Dude 1953-60; Wrangler, 1961-62. Descriptor: Wrangling horses often before daylight was a lesson in personal solitude, oneness with a horse and a magical adventure for a 19 year old from the east.
Bernie’s Story: Wrangling by Bernie Huebner, younger son of John and Betty Huebner, who vacationed at WG through the 50s and 60s until they built a small cabin just north of the airport. I was a dude from around 1952 until I began wrangling, around 1960 or 61. More than anything else, wrangling horses was for me the essential ranch experience. Whether this was because no dudes were involved—as they were in the case of trail rides or pack trips or barbecues or all the time for the kitchen help and cabin girls—I don’t know. I suspect it may have had something to do with the fact that you wrangled alone, except for the horse, who really had no say in the matter. There was no social chatter, no need to strike the right pose for the guests, or be deferential and patient. The only one to impress was yourself, and this could be done only with the exercise of your knowledge of the horses and the terrain over which they were so widely spread. Typically, two or three of us would go out each morning in different directions. My alarm clock would go off at 4 am, I’d throw on my clothes, which couldn’t have been very clean, and wash my face in the irrigation ditch that crossed the road down to BQ, or Bachelor Quarters. Vanity being at its height at that age (19 or 20), I would also put in my contact lenses with ditch water, suggesting that there is an inverse relationship between vanity and one’s sense of hygiene, that the former easily trumps the latter. The cold water was more effective than a cup of coffee, which wasn’t yet available anyhow. Our wrangling horses had been kept in the corral the evening before after driving the herd up toward the mountains to find good grass during the night. It never occurred to me then that the horses, like the ranch help, rarely got much time off. They were being ridden during the day, or waiting in the corral. Then they spent most of the night traveling up to several miles as they grazed, for by morning they were spread all over Creation. That we each rode alone for the next hour or two undoubtedly enhanced the experience of wrangling. Like a hunter, one became all eyes—looking for movement or the telltale spot of black or brown or white fur—and ears—listening for the distant dint and clink and dong of horse bells. They hung out in small social groups, like cliques, so that one need bell but one horse in each group. Only Coon, a massive black work horse maybe 17 hands high, kept to himself. Coon was the smartest horse on the ranch, without peer, and had learned how to get the day off and thus be spared carrying a small child (since he was so gentle), who would kick his upper flanks with his tiny boots and cry “Go, Coon, go Horsie,” enough to drive him to silent despair. Around 4 am, as we were saddling up and dawn was approaching, Coon would simply find a large tree to stand under—if he didn’t move, we were unlikely to see him—and then pull his giant head in against the bell on his neck and hold perfectly still, so we couldn’t hear him. Coon escaped work more than once this way, to the disappointment of more than one child. But as if to establish his problem-solving credentials beyond question, Coon had learned to open wooden gates with his muzzle. And upon occasion he would make his way across the cattle guard leading in behind the main cabin. To do this, he had to place his hooves very carefully upon the logs, one at a time, swinging his head first to one side and then the other to see to do so. But the mark, not just of the power of his mind, but of its truly intellectual cast, was how, upon crossing the guard, he would pause only long enough to see if anyone had observed him, and then cross back over again toward the corral. As with hunting—for surely we were hunting horses—most of the time was spent trotting silently through the woods and across the open places where avalanches kept the trees in check. You would stop every several minutes to listen and watch, and each time be made aware of the richness of the environment around you. First light was always flat, coming through the trees sideways, making each trunk look double, one half bright and the other dark. The air was cool—we ranged as high as 8,000’—and crisp and dry, though even when it rained we had to wrangle or give the horses two days’ lead and risk losing them. While moving there were the sounds of your horse’s hooves, muffled in the dust, sharp on rock. When you stopped and turned this way and that to listen, the saddle creaked and you could hear your horse’s breathing recovering from the effort of making good time over rough country. And again and again, yet so subtly as befits background, there was the visual charm of Nature’s palette. Not the red of paintbrush or yellow of black-eyed Susans, but the whole canvas of tree and rock and snow and sky, that balance of green and grey and black and white and blue that are everywhere in the Tetons, so much so that we mostly fail to see them for what they are, this complement of muted colors without which the flowers could as well be in a vase. To think that we got to work there every day from sunup to sundown. But more than the delight of nature in wrangling, there was the psychological or—perhaps paradoxically—human quality to the experience. Paradoxical because much of this depended of course on your mount, this animal which carried you across country you could otherwise barely traverse, and certainly not at such a pace. It was this swift, relentless covering of ground that was so empowering. You had only to cluck your tongue and watch your horse’s ears click back as if propelling him forward faster. You turned simply by laying a rein on one side of his neck. As if you were the horse’s eyes and ears, his brain finally, telling his body where to go, you moved as one, and this one-with-the-horse feeling brought you closer to the natural world while you still worked in the human one. And then as you found first one group and then another—black and white sway-backed Tilly and her colt, or Peanuts and Blaze and Paint and some of the boys of the ‘hood—and drove them together back toward the ranch, their bells clanging and the dust rising behind them, breaking off small sticks from passing trees to throw at the slackers, yipping and whistling at them, getting hit by the occasional pebble thrown up by their hooves as they broke into a lope, smiling when they nipped or kicked at each other like school kids in the lunch line, you found yourself riding not only a horse, but a mounting sense of achievement, that you had first found and then harnessed all this equine energy and could focus it finally on the gate of the corral. Being 19 or 20, you hoped—a little like Coon—that some dude was there by the fence to take it all in, your grand entrance like The Virginian, tall, dark and handsome, but more than that, faintly mysterious, arriving out of the dust and noise of a herd of nearly wild animals. Of course the truth, the reality of your performance, was often in some conflict with this imagined cinematic triumph. There was the time one of us arrived at the corral with such a grand collection of horseflesh that only then did we discover a yearling moose among them, looking for all the world as confused as his cousins who make the papers back east after getting confused trying to cross through a New England village. And there was the morning—perhaps a Sunday after a late night in Jackson—when I was nearly asleep on my horse wrangling up from the JY Ranch toward the Phelps Overlook. We were trotting right along, the horse no more awake than I, when we came around a sharp turn in the woods and nearly stepped on a bear sleeping in the trail. Both horse and bear levitated, turned 180 degrees in the air and came down running the other way. I was mere baggage. So much for hunting acumen. And unseen by the dudes were the contortions one had to make sometimes when riding too fast on game trails, where the trees grew much closer to the trail and your horse, urged to make good time, leaned into the turns and would thus amputate your leg if you didn’t pull it up like a jockey. There is nothing quite like knowing a full two seconds in advance that your knee is not going to clear a tree, the only question being whether it will remain attached to you. Or you could simply come back empty-handed, as I did once. Another wrangler went out and came back with the horses I hadn’t found. They were hiding in The Pockets, which in turn were hiding from me high up above the Big Slide behind the ranch; I’d never been sure where they were, and like a Marlboro Man, been too embarrassed to ask. Perhaps the greatest wrangling failure I recall was when I was still a dude kid on a pack trip to Marion Lake. Between pack and saddle horses, we had around sixteen. We turned them out in hobbles to graze in the pasture next to the lake, keeping only one staked overnight. The next morning all but the one were gone, all the way back to the ranch in hobbles, it turned out. They’d had to forgo eating to hop such a great distance. Freddie Matthews, I think, was wrangling for the trip and had to fetch the whole string back tied head to tail. His return taught me several new curses. We lost a whole day, but spent it well looking for fossils up above Marion. We had to stake the entire string out the next two nights. Since you were mounted, other than falling off or being cleaned off by a low branch, wrangling posed no real danger, as from a nervous moose mother. The only grizzlies were reported to be holed up in trail-less Avalanche Canyon. But one summer an osprey took up nesting down near the JY. Word got around that you were safe as long as you could hear it keening up above the spruce trees. It was when it fell silent that it was also falling out of the sky with you as its target. It took off my brother Steve’s hat, leaving two neat talon holes in the crown. It was there again another summer when I was wrangling, and we took to leaving four-foot tree branches handy as clubs where you entered its territory. Someone wanted to dispatch it with a gun, though the ranger at the White Grass Station was too nearby to risk it. And I’m not exactly sure how one would have drawn a bead on an osprey plummeting silently down through a spruce forest, probably from behind. Finally a dude was attacked by another osprey up by the Balderston Ranch to the north. She ended up at the Jackson hospital with several stitches where it hit the back of her head. That still nothing could be done about the osprey problem was probably an indication of how things would go between the ranch and the national park in years to come. Bernie Huebner.