January 30, 2024
Jan Swan Wood
When my two oldest grandboys were little, around six and five years old, they spent hours on end riding the two mares I had for them. Josie, the sorrel, was Carson’s, and was a roly poly old type Quarter Horse mare with a lack of burning ambition but enough patience to make up for it. […]
January 25, 2024
Jan Swan Wood
Years ago, we had some neighbors that were hard working people that struggled daily to get ahead. Their four kids were working from the time they were walking well. The kids were all in grade school with the oldest maybe in the 5th grade. The county road we took to town went by their place, […]
January 16, 2024
Jan Swan Wood
Back in my day working years, there was a guy who would wait until the coldest day of winter, or so it seemed, to gather his cows off of several big pastures, hayfields and breaks, and trail them home several miles for the winter. We always joked, sort of, that once we had his cows […]
January 3, 2024
Jan Swan Wood
We had spent the summer and fall occasionally day working for a woman who had some registered Angus cows. The cows were spoiled, no-handling wretches that weighed about 1700-1800 lbs and weaned 400 lb calves. They aggravated us every time we had to handle them, but she paid well and her check was always good, […]
December 20, 2023
Jan Swan Wood
It was about 1997 when this little deal occurred. I was part of a group of women who gathered together every year to camp, ride and visit. My sisters and sister-in-law were part of the group too. I had taken our good old ranch gelding, Chigger, to ride. He was a rock solid ranch horse […]
December 13, 2023
Jan Swan Wood
We had gotten the call to come and help sort out a bunch of cattle about 40 miles from home. A big summer thunderstorm had dropped hail and rain in copious amounts and had washed out watergaps for miles and had cattle mixed up all over the region. This particular bunch we had to get […]
December 7, 2023
Jan Swan Wood
It was a nasty, cold, snowy, windy winter day and seeing as how it was too awful outside to do anything, that’s the day the boss decided we needed to put the brisket tags in the heifers. The working chute was set up in a barn, which would have helped the wind situation, except that […]
November 20, 2023
Jan Swan Wood
It was October and fall day work was going steady. We’d shipped all of the steers we’d ridden on all summer by September, but there hadn’t been a letup in the riding. We’d been called to gather the D cows out of the oak thickets and gumbo breaks and knew it would be a tough […]
November 10, 2023
Jan Swan Wood
The cows were needing moved to a fresh pasture on the place I was leasing grass from. Our cows handled really well and were very broke, so I knew that my seven year old and I could handle it, but, there was a problem on the route we needed to move them. There were two […]
November 8, 2023
Jan Swan Wood
It had been a wet fall with rain, cool temps and even an October snow storm that melted and soaked in. The end of October had the ground saturated with moisture. We were hired to go and gather a bunch of cows and ship the calves off of some genuine gumbo country. We’d ridden this […]