PEA RIDGE — I have known a few people in my life of whom I wanted to say, “He was born 50 years too late.” Their lives spanned the transition from horsedrawn buggies, wagons and stage coaches as the prevailing mode of transportation into our era of motorized vehicles. But they always seemed to belong more to the old-time era. They were always more comfortable in handling horses and mules than they were in handling a car or truck.
One of them was my grandfather, Burton Clement, my mother’s father. The Clements lived on a small farm north of Bentonville. In the early days, in addition to farming and milking cows, my Grandpa supplemented his income by operating a sorghum mill and by doing custom sawing of firewood for people all around the Bentonville community. His horses were very much a part of both these enterprises.
To operate the sorghum mill, a horse walked round and round, turning a pole attached to the gears and rollers which squeezed the liquid from the stalks of sorghum cane. Grandpa had a buzz saw rig mounted on a wagon.
It had its own motor, one of those old-fashioned “hit and miss” engines with a large flywheel and a pulley which turned a belt and drove the buzz saw at the rear, but the wagon that carried the whole apparatus was drawn by the horses.
My Grandpa never owned a tractor or a tiller or any kind of motorized garden implement. He plowed with horses, mowed hay and hauled it to the barn with horses, worked his garden with horses. Grandpa knew horses, he was familiar with their personalities and habits, and their occasional crankiness and stubbornness. Grandpa eventually learned to drive a car, a Model-T Ford, but for the longest he was very uncomfortable with it. For example, if he needed to stop, he was more likely to first tell the car “Whoa,” and then to remember that he needed to push the brake pedal to stop.
The other man that stands out in my mind as having been born 50 years too late was Clete Marsh, of Atkins, Ark. Maybe in Clete’s case I should say 75 years too late or even 100 years too late. Clete lived and breathed horses.
Back in 1976, when the country was celebrating our nation’s bi-centennial, Clete joined a band of like-minded people who formed a covered wagon train traveling across the country to Washington, D.C., for the great celebration. It was a high-point in his life, an unforgettable experience. Of course, in the old days, such as from 1830 to 1870 when our Pea Ridge area was being settled by white settlers, the covered wagons were coming from the eastern states, headed west. In the 1870s and 1880s, many would head on out to the far west, settling areas all the way to California. So Clete’s 1976 trip by wagon train to Washington, D.C., was sort of a reverse commemoration of the settlement of our country’s mid-western and western states, as well as a celebration of our 200th year as an independent nation.
Cars and trucks certainly made travel quicker and somewhat more comfortable. A day trip by car could cover as much territory as would require several days of travel by horse and buggy, or even by stage coach. But I think one of the things the men from the era of horses missed as they adapted to motor vehicles was that withhorses you can talk to them and they respond to you.
Horses are not just brutes, they are intelligent creatures.
They can communicate with you and you with them. They are not human, but they have feelings, they get scared or nervous, at times they are jubilant and happy and energetic, and they get tired and weary like we humans do. Of course we men sometimes still talk to our cars or trucks today, but it isn’t the same.
Interestingly, horses can be therapeutic. In the Pea Ridge area one of the helps offered for children who have difficulty adapting to and relating to others is a program that allows them to ride and to care for horses. I don’t own horses myself, and I have never been a rider. My experience was with farm horses, or as we used to call them, plow horses or work horses.
But as a person who feels that we need to give attention to our roots, including the great creatures that have helped us shape our civilization through thousands of years, we ought not to forget the horses, even if we were born 50 years too late.
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621. The opinions of the writer are his own, and are not necessarily those of The Times.
News, Pages 5 on 09/05/2012