Outlaw Horse and a Sharpshooter

Posted in: Featured, Ranch Life

Uncle Henry was my paternal grandmother’s oldest brother. He was a tall, broad shouldered, slim man
who was a hard working farmer. I was privileged to know him when I was a child and he was a fine man.
He had raised a family in the dust bowl years in eastern Colorado. With hungry mouths to feed, he had
hunted for meat when time allowed. He had an old .22 rifle that had brought home many a meal without
any ridiculous waste of ammunition. Henry was pretty much of the mind that if you used a round, you’d
better have something to show for it. Consequently, Henry was a fine shot with that rifle.
In the area where Henry lived, there were a few fenced fields and pastures and lots of open country. It
was sandhills with big clumps of sagebrush. If a horse got away, it was sometimes pretty hard to recapture it, especially if it was of the mind to not be captured. This story is about such a horse.
The horse was a proud cut gray gelding. No one knew who owned him or where he came from. He was an outlaw and would steal mares from the farms around the country and made it really difficult to get them back. Any horse that got out of the corrals or little pastures was likely to end up with this gray horse.

He became a despised animal in the neighborhood. Everyone knew something needed to be done, but no one had a horse fast enough to get him penned up, or the skills to rope him out in the open, as most of the wild young cowboy types were gone to the war.
Even if he could have been captured, there was still no way to get him transported to where he could
be sent to market by train in Denver, as there were no trucks or trailers at that time.
Finally, it was decided that someone needed to just shoot the horse where he was out on the range, but
that was also tricky, since he was so wild. The neighbors knew Henry was a fine marksman with a rifle, so, a guy with a car said he’d get Henry and they’d go find that horse.
Henry agreed to go, so they loaded up in the old flivver and went in search of the horse in the area he was last seen. When the horse was finally spotted, they built to him to try to catch him before he ran off
and left them on the rough ground. Henry had told the driver that when he yelled stop he needed to hit the brakes, turn left and let Henry out for his shot.
They were within about 150 yards of the horse and he was running hard and starting to gain ground.
Henry yelled “stop” and the driver locked up the brakes and slid it to a stop as Henry stepped out, rifle in hand, running to keep his footing at that speed. He suddenly stopped, threw up his rifle and shot, all in one motion.
The horse went down, rolling end over end. When the dust settled, he never moved a muscle. Henry
got back in the car and they drove over to the horse. The driver was amazed to see a neat little hole at the base of the horse’s ear. One shot was all it took.
The man never forgot it, as he told Dad about it years later. A brain shot, one round, at a running horse
at a long distance for a .22, with Henry barely stopped when he fired. The horse’s outlaw days were over and Henry was the local hero.

outlaw

Posted in: Featured, Ranch Life


About Jan Swan Wood

Jan was raised on a ranch in far western South Dakota. She grew up horseback working all descriptions of cattle, plus sheep and horses. After leaving home she pursued a post-graduate study of cowboying and dayworking in Nebraska, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota....

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