Saddle A Thunderbolt

Saddle A Thunderbolt

Jo Sykes, il. Jo Sykes (cover)

1967, Funk & Wagnalls

"I guess everybody's tried to catch him at one time or another... He's running with a wild sorrel mare, though, and I do mean wild. She's got a brand, but I bet she hasn't seen the inside of a corral in twenty years. Trying to trap her is about like trying to catch rainwater with a sieve. And Rival's become just like her."

A year after his rancher father broke his back, 17-year-old Bruce Hubbard is alone on the failing family spread. His dad's having another operation, his mother is keeping him company and his brothers are tending their own families. It's up to Bruce to keep the place going in the meantime, but he has a string of bad luck. First he loses the family's prized racehorse, Buttermilk, whose reliable winning of the annual Cowboy Race each summer helped the ranch stay alive despite pressure from the neighboring Heart Seven Ranch to sell out. Then he has a fight witht he Heart Seven's owner, Ross Adams, and his spoiled son Wesley, over their attempts to capture the wild Arabian stallion Rival.

Rival lay less than fifty feet beyond the spring. The ground beneath the stallion was worn bare and looked as hard and smooth as a concrete sidewalk. The deadly lariat still encircled the once sleek neck. The hulk of Wesley's saddle lay in a clump of brush, lodged between two boulders.

Events bring Bruce into ownership of Rival, but he soon has cause to say "If things ever break right for me, I won't know how to act." Twists and turns put Bruce ever in hopes of having a mount for the race - but the mount keeps changing.

Very much a western, but more horse-oriented than many westerns. Injun and Old Sorrel, a cagey wild mare, are particularly vivid. Bruce makes a nice, stoic fledgling cowboy who, with the help of the slight but powerful cowboy Dandy, stands up to the truly unpleasant Adams clan and works to rescue the ranch.

Interesting training methods are used to break Geronimo of lashing out with his hind legs; I don't know how realistic or humane they are, but they're convincing. As is the need for some training.

The farmer took off his shapeless western hat and sailed it at the gelding's rump. Quick as lightning, the horse lashed out with both hind feet, stopped the hat in mid-air and slammed it back across the corral. "He doesn't just kick; he aims," Tucker said. "I believe he'd kill a man if he could."

Of course, it all comes down to a most unusual race.

Although relatively flat, it was not the kind of race course that would appeal to breeders of Thoroughbreds. Here and there the gravel of an old river bed came through the thin soil cover. Dry washes and scattered patches of brush created hazards known only to the range-bred horses.

Horses

Injun - black mare

Buttermilk - dun gelding

Pluto - bay gelding, pack horse

Bedouin Chief's Rival - 12-year-old bay Arabian stallion

Old Sorrel - sorrel mustang mare

Carousel - palomino gelding

Geronomio - 4-year-old buckskin gelding

Sundowner - 5-year-old

Sinner - sorrel gelding

Ben Blue - grey stallion

Little Bee - mare

Scamp - yellow shepherd dog

Other Books - horses

The Stubborn Mare 1957

Chip On His Shoulder 1961

Trouble Creek 1963

Other Books - dogs

Wolf Dog Of Ambush Canyon 1959

Leashed Lightning 1969

About the Author

Jo Sykes was born in American Falls, Idaho, and bought her first horse as a teenager. She worked as a cattle hand for ten years. She settled down near Livingston, Montana, where she was a a founding member of the Gallatin Dog Club and breeder of Smooth Fox Terriers.

The Blue Runner
Barlow Meyers, il. Bill Wickham (cover)
1960, The Westminster Press

Outside on the platform, some greeted friends, others went immediately to cars or walked away up the street. Suddenly Mike was desperately lonely. A hard lump knotted in his throat. He had known the feeling frequently since his grandmother's death three months ago, but this was like a blow. He almost turned toward the station to buy a ticket back to that small town in New York.

Mike has been taking care of his ailing grandmother and working part-time at a riding stable through his years in high school. Now that he's graduated and his guardian has died, Mike is in Wyoming to find his father, Matt Illif, who came West years earlier to start the Pigeon Track ranch. But Mike's too stubborn and too wary to simply show up at his dad's ranch. Using his middle name as a last name, he gets himself hired on at the Pigeon Track as Mike Worth, determined to prove himself to his unsuspecting father.

Small flaw with the plan; other people. Matt has remarried and has another child, a slightly younger son named Kelly, and there are unspoken tensions in the ranch that quickly becomes Mike's problem. As the dude struggles to become a cowboy and survive the mysterious problems of the family he debates joining, he's also drawn into the dilemma of the wild horse herd that roams the area. A battle between the reigning stallion and his son, two identical blue roans...

With a whistle that resounded off the mesa sides, he cut in behind the mare, and the young stallion slid to a stop and faced his adversary. He was not going to run this time. He held his stance, rear feet separated and braced a little, so that they pushed him forward like a boxer waiting to have the fight brought to him, one forefoot raised in readiness to leap, strike or sidestep. His flat ears were hidden in his mane, his neck outstretched until the great cords showed like ropes deep in his shoulders.

... leads to the younger, less experienced and more daring horse leading his band of mares deeper into Illif's land. The angry rancher hires a mustang killer to eliminate the problem. Mike, younger and more romantic, hates to see the end of the horse, and is faced with defying his father almost as soon as he's met him or letting the horse die.

A cowboy book more than a horse book, although the last chapters do put Mike and the roan together in a partnership that ought to satisfy even the most ardent Pony Clubber. The writing is good, the plotting excellent and the characters are believable.

Other books by Author
Last Of The Wild Stallions (1949)
Tumbleweed (1952)
Fireball (1956)

About the Author
1902-?
Gertrude Barlow Meyers wrote several westerns for children, and several books that were related to popular television programs of the era - The Lawrence Welk Show, The Mickey Mouse Club, and Have Gun, Will Travel. A graduate of Illinois Wesleyan University and Illinois State Normal University, with an M.A. from the University of Chicago, Meyers was a reporter in Detroit before becoming a teacher.

Websites
A website tracking people named Barlow lists her with some book jackets of her other work.

Smarty
Katharine Newlin Burt, il. Vic Donahue
1965, Funk & Wagnalls Company, Inc.

In a flash, Stormy was in Trinket's saddle and had her out in the middle of the field. Watching, they saw him touch her lightly with his heel high up close to her cinch. With that, she leapt forward, seemed to "swallow" her neck, and started to buck. Stormy gave a shout, stretched out a balancing arm, and rode the rough, stiff-legged, hump-backed horse halfway to the edge of the pine wood, his hair flapping with the motion but his head held steady on his own neck.

On the Two-Bar Ranch, three kids tangle over one buckskin colt. Stormy Mapes, son of an aloof and mysterious local horse trader, had the horse first and named him Smarty. When his dad included him in a sale to ranch owner Alfred Keene, the ranch's head wrangler passed him along to his daughter Jenny, who renames the colt Taffy. And when Keene's son Roger, a talented but hard-natured Easterner, needs a new mount, he naturally takes over Smarty/Taffy's training.

A standard Western adventure story with a somewhat buried romantic angle in that the girl is aware of chosing between the two boys in a way that's never really explicit. The girl, of course, makes most of the concessions, and her big heroic moments are ones of sacrifice and nursing, while the boys get to race and compete directly. The characters are predictable but strong - Stormy's sudden temper, Roger's panic, Mr. Mapes the 'outsider,' etc. Engrossing action scenes and natural, impressive setting.

Horses
Tarbaby - black horse
Smarty/Taffy - buckskin colt
Trinket - bay mare

Dogs
Shag - sheepdog

Author Information
1882-1977
Burt was a Wyoming author who lived in Jackson Hole and on the Bar BC Ranch. She was the wife of writer Maxwell Struthers Burt, and the mother of writer Nathaniel Burt. She also used the pen name Rebecca Scarlett, and it appears that most of the following books are romance/thrillers, best-selling popular fiction.

Other Books
Lost Isobel
One Silver Spur
Girl on a Broomstick
Escape from Paradise
Strong Citadel
Still Water
Close Pursuit
Lady in the Tower
Captain Millett's Island
Fatal Gift
No Surrender
If Love I Must
Men of Moon Mountain
Safe Road
When Beggars Choose
Rapture Beyond
Monkey's Tail
This Woman and This Man
Beggars All
The Tall Ladder
A Man's Own Country
Cock's Feather
The Grey Parrot
Quest: A novel
"Q"
Snow-blind (available on Project Gutenberg )
Hidden Creek (available on Project Gutenberg)
The Red Lady
The Branding Iron (available on Project Gutenberg)
Penelope Intrudes

Several early films were based on her writing
The Silent Rider (1928)
The Way of a Girl (1925)
The Eagle's Feather (1923)
The Leopardess (1923)
Singed Wings (1922)
The Man from Lost River (1921)
Snowblind (1921)
The Branding Iron (1920)