A rusty draft shoe serves as reminder of the long-ago horses on our place.

My latest find is at bottom left. The other old shoes were found by my dad, on other farms. The shoes on the right are oblong, and I'm guessing they came off mules. The toes of both those shoes have been worn down so much that they're sharp.

We’ve been fortunate enough to get some rain lately, and it was sorely needed — the pastures were starting to crunch when you walked across them. A week or so ago, I was delivering grain to the geldings’ pasture, walking across a newly softened sandy area, when I saw a glimpse of rusty metal. Of course, you don’t leave rusty metal laying around a horse pasture, so I reached down to retrieve it.

Amazingly, it was a piece of an enormous draft-horse shoe, just one branch, bigger than my hand. This Oklahoma land, in our family since the late 1950s, had been cultivated long before that, long before the days of tractors. Horse power, plain and simple, was what had tilled this soil.

That rusty shoe set my mind flying. It has a good-sized heel calk, which as I understand it, aids in braking traction. I wondered why, exactly, a draft horse pulling a heavy implement needed help with his brakes. And I wondered if the calks made his feet sore. Who forged the shoe? Was it the self-reliant farmer, who then nailed it on before hitching the horse up to a plow? The imagination flies … and I can envision the frustration of the farmer — who had a lot of sweat equity in this horse’s feet — after realizing that a shoe had been lost somewhere in his tilled ground.

I sure wish that shoe could talk. Where did they keep those long-ago horses? Was there an old barn? Did they, like my horses, get breakfast delivered each morning? Were there saddle horses, too?

If the spirits of those old gents are still roaming the fields here, I’m sure they scoff at my pampered ponies, who have certainly never stuck their heads through a sweaty harness collar. Did those drafties get anything in the way of veterinary care? Did they die of natural causes, an accident, or did they simply outlive their usefulness — something that would likely have been fatal when living with a poor farm family. Are they buried here??

As my imagination soared, my fingers, once back in the house, Googled. I wondered how old the shoe might be — or how new. When did tractors send the drafties back to the barn for good?

Here’s what I learned from the Rural Heritage Web site: “Even after the introduction of gas tractors, automobiles, and trucks during the first decade of the 20th century, the horse and mule population in the United States continued to grow until it reached an all-time high of 26.4 million animals in 1918.

“Agricultural colleges, county agents and tractor manufacturers spent the next 20 years urging farmers to buy tractors and get rid of their draft animals. Millions of farmers complied. By 1950, the use of horses and mules for farming had all but disappeared, except in a few localized areas.”

The year 1918 — when the horse and mule population was at its highest — has significance for me. My maternal grandfather, Frank Williams, made detailed notes on his daily life. He noted what price he and his wife, Mae, sold butter and eggs for ($.40 a pound and an average of $.30 a dozen in 1926). And he also recorded the ins and outs of his daily life. His journal from 1918 has found its way into my hands, and I love trying to make out his penciled cursive. Horses were a common thread in his entries, although I wish he’d written more.

An entry from July 1918: “We helped about three days in the hay (field), and we used one of my teams.”

The month before, he wrote: I went to town in the morning, and I took Maud to town to breed her, and she refused.”

That, of course, was the 1918 equivalent of an ultrasound test. Maud, who had been previously bred, was in foal.

My grandfather has other breeding records for Ribbon, Nell and Dutch. There are also mentions of Daisy May and Dolly May, who I believe were his draft mares. He bred them at least once, too. As with the mystery draft horse on this farm, I wonder what kinds of shoes they wore, how my grandfather cared for his horses — if he got the same pleasure from their company that I do, or if they were more like livestock to him — and what came of them.

My grandfather died shortly after I was born, so unfortunately I can’t ask those questions. It’s simply left to my imagination to paint a picture of the blood and sweat — horses’ and humans’ co-mingled — that watered the red dirt in western Oklahoma in the first half of the last century.

Holly Clanahan
Editor, America’s Horse magazine

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