Motherless, four brothers grew up knowing no life but that of a cowboy. Their father was a self-educated, board certified veterinarian. He was the foremost horse vet of the region. Doc Applegarth was rarely home. After their mother’s death, the boys basically cared for themselves and the small Nebraska sandhill ranch.
Barney Applegarth, 95, was one of these boys. For 94 years he lived everyday with a horse or two… or sixty. Barney sold his last two horses in 2004. Slightly gnarled with arthritis but still spry, he said, “When the snow is a blowin’, it’s tough to chore.” The horses are gone, but the memories remain.
From his birth in 1909, Barney’s every memory includes a horse. Doc Applegarth raised, bought and sold horses for the U.S. Army. In 1915 Barney was five years old and he was about to acquire the first horse of his own. He remembers like it was yesterday; his dad told him, ‘Geleta will foal tonight, if it’s a filly, she’s yours.’ Barney barely slept that night, waking early and running to the barn, the other boys behind him. The mares came galloping in from the pasture, all but Geleta. Four boys ran to the top of the hill to see Geleta and her new filly sedately following. The love affair of boy and horse had begun.
By the time Barney was eight, he had broken his first horse. He rode his filly, Beauty, to school. The Applegarth boys spent their lives horseback; seldom riding a broke horse, they went back and forth more than five miles to school. In the 1920’s it was rare that young cowboys finished high school. Bill and Joe, held out through the tenth grade and then went to work on nearby ranches.
Barney and Hank finished high school. “If we had quit, that would have left only four boys in the high school. Mr. Anderson, the basketball coach, worked extra with us, keeping our studies up when we had to miss school.” With a wink, he adds, “He needed us to fill the basketball team.” Barney and Hank were all of 5’6” and 5’2” but the Bingham High School basketball team went to the Nebraska state tournament nearly every year in the 1920’s.
The two boys rode 5½ miles to school in the morning, rode home in the evening, did chores and ate supper. Most of the time Doc was gone and the boys were alone. They saddled fresh horses and went back to town for 7pm practice. Twenty-two miles a day. They broke more than 40 horses each school year.
In 1925, their father began a contract haying business to keep the boys employed and to break horses for the army. They also broke horses for area ranches. Besides the four Applegarth boys who were 18, 17, 15, and 13, Doc employed three or four other boys.
They mowed, raked, swept, and stacked hay. Most days they teamed broke horses with broncs; some days they hooked up all broncs. Barney recalls, “We went to get the stacker over at Ballinger’s, about four miles away. Rusty Hunzicker and I hooked up four broncs to the cart. Hank rode ahead to open gates. We had a wild trip, the horses never did settle down. When we got to the stacker, Rusty jumped off, I circled the team around. Rusty was ready to hook-up on the go; we did it all the time. Rusty got the chains hooked but he missed when he jumped on to the cart. The stacker ran right over him. It was a drag stacker that only cleared the ground about 8 inches. He was pretty skinned up. Lucky we had some of ol’ man Ballinger’s bootleg whiskey, a couple of swigs and he was fine.”
After working the horses six days, the boys got a day off; the horses did not. Sundays were for rest, relaxation and bucking out the workhorses. There was no arena, the horses were kept in a rope corral. A bronc was chosen, saddled, flanked, mounted and bucked out into the meadow.
The Applegarth hay crew had nearly 60 horses in their remuda; they ended their season in the U-Cross Valley, where they met another crew and another 60 horses. The bucking practice grew to include cowboys from area ranches. With the lessons learned on Sunday afternoons the boys were strong contenders at rodeos.
Barney’s first rodeo bronc ride was at Hyannis, Nebraska in 1925. He was 15. “I rode to the whistle but didn’t get in the money… but I won the match race on Beauty.” Barney began racing in elementary school, discovering that Beauty could not be beaten in schoolyard races. Beauty, herself a quarter Thoroughbred, produced many foals, most of them three-quarters Thoroughbred. “The best horse I ever raised was old Croppy, he was born in a blizzard and froze his ears off. He was natural racehorse, he didn’t like to be beat.”
Partner, also out of Beauty, was another all-around horse. Barney also owned a good horse named Drunk. “Drunk was really Hank’s horse, he had won the horse in a card game but I had staked him for quite a while and he owed me.”
Barney was a saddle bronc rider, a calf roper, and a steer wrestler. But at only 5’8”, when his heels didn’t touch the ground, he had to let the bigger steers go.
Driving a 1935 pickup truck with Drunk or Croppy or Partner loaded in the back and their saddles thrown up on the stock rack, Barney, Hank and Shady James went on the rodeo ‘circuit’ in the late 30’s. The circuit included Nebraska towns of Alliance, Bingham, Ogallala, Sutherland, Grant, Elmwood Kansas, Brush and Deer Trail in Colorado, Cheyenne and Wheatland Wyoming and an Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
Life on the road sure beat putting up hay. They were in the money enough to keep going all summer. In 1938 Barney and Shady teamed with George House and won the wild horse race two days in a row at Cheyenne. He grins as he remembers, “Not sure it was quite right, there were a few nasty, mean, sons of B’s that were near impossible to saddle but once you was on, they was like they was broke to ride. We drew one each day.”
Barney met his wife of 65 years, when she was a pretty young schoolteacher, walking four miles each way to school. He offered her his young mare, Babe, to ride. Eyes twinkling he says, “The only way I could get Babe back was to marry her.” In 1940 June Grouns became his bride.
Barney rodeoed a few more years, but with a wife and little Helen Laine, life on the road was not so appealing. Besides, as Hank once said, Barney had caught the ‘racing fever’. Match racers came from miles to try to beat Barney and old Croppy.
June, at 88, is still a tiny woman and strong. “Built just like a jockey.” And an expert horsewoman. Barney would put her up on Croppy and he would set the pace with Partner or Babe. Barney tells of a good race, “We were in a tight bunch of about five horses; June was on old Croppy and I was on the outside of her, riding Babe. Croppy had his little stubs-of-ears flattened back on his head; a horse came up on the inside, challenging Croppy. Croppy was concentrating on Babe, and didn’t see the challenge. I hollered to June, ‘Shout in his ears!’. She didn’t understand. So I gave Babe all I had and we got up next to Croppy, I shouted right in his ear hole. Old Croppy took off like he’d been shot. ‘Pert near left June sitting in the air.” Barney laughs, “That was the closest Croppy ever came to getting beat.”
As his rodeo career waned, Barney continued raising and breaking horses and threw his efforts into building a ranch for his growing family. Once he had established a small holding south of Alliance, Nebraska, the racing fever came back full force. He began breeding, raising and training Thoroughbreds in the early 1950’s.
For over 50 years Barney Applegarth has been a figure in Nebraska, Colorado, and Arizona Thoroughbred racing. The blue and white silks with the ‘slash A’ insignia, have been atop hundreds of winners. Most of the time Barney stayed at the ranch letting seasoned trainers take his horses. Jasper Hitchcock, Ray Robinson, Buster Carroll, Harlan Norman and Loyal Beavers, trained his horses through the years at the major tracks. Open Range was his first stakes horse, winning the Governor’s Handicap at Fonner Park. Barney rode high through the 1970’s and early ‘80‘s, the glory years of racing in Nebraska. Aksarben in Omaha was at it’s peak; purses were good and expenses were reasonable. Key To the Castle, This Is Annie, Orange Juicer, Dancing Deer, Candi’s Castle were among Barney’s allowance/stakes horses. Dare County won the Bachman and the Baxter Handicaps.
Two-year-olds left the ranch each spring broke to race and ready to run. Many horses won their first starts, proving that the foundation training was at it’s best. Barney put his heart and soul into his racehorses; the bloodlines were studied to produce Barney’s idea of the perfect racer. Barney started the horses at the ranch with an improvised track, a sandy mile of abandoned county road. Training and breaking methods were still being perfected on the last two horses who started in 2004. At 94, Barney had done the ground work before sending the horses out.
Old and weathered, leaning on his cane, Barney Applegarth seems a long way from the little boy who ran to the top of the hill to claim his first horse. To him, however, everyday of the past 90-some years, seems just like yesterday. Memories alive with horses, running and bucking.
