Faraway Horses by Buck Brannaman, William Reynolds Page A

broken windows because it was cheaper. It had a few carpet remnants on the floor, but it wasn’t much beyond that. The bunkhouse at Madison River seemed like the Taj Mahal by comparison. The bar still had a liquor license, so a few of the local winos would come in and have a drink or two in the evenings. Otherwise, the building was vacant.
    After renting the apartment and the arena, I was down to a roll of dimes, which I used to start making phone calls from the pay phone outside the bar. I called everybody I knew with a horse who might know somebody who had colts I could ride. I scored a couple, but I wasn’t going to get paid until I’d ridden them and their owners were satisfied. That meant I was at least a month away from getting a paycheck.
    All I had in my cupboard were a box of Krusteaz Pancake Mix and a big tub of margarine. That’s pretty much what I lived on for a few weeks. And even after I was paid, there were still bills to be paid, so I continued to live on Krusteaz Pancake Mix and canned chili.
    The arena at Spanish Creek was about five miles up the canyon from the inn. Times were so tough I didn’t even have the money to put gas in my truck, so getting there and back meant riding a horse along the side of a fairly busy highway. In the evenings I’d trot down in the dark with the logging trucks that roared by on their way out of the mountains. I’d hobble my horse in the tall grass behind the inn and let him graze there all night. The next morning I’d get up beforedaylight and trot him back up to the arena. Of course, the inn’s owners would have run me off if they had found out I had a horse in the backyard, but they never found out.
    It was another month before I was able to put a little gas in my truck and drive back and forth.
    Spanish Creek was right next door to The Flying D. I got paid to ride some of their colts, which is how I met my “partner in crime,” Jeff Griffith. Jeff’s dad, Bud, was the manager of The Flying D. Jeff was still living at home with his folks, and we spent quite a bit of time at Spanish Creek riding horses. During the week I helped him with some of his dad’s colts, and we cowboyed together. On the weekends we’d head out to the local cowboy bars. We spent most of our money on girls and booze, and the rest of it we wasted.
    In those days I was charging $125 a month to train a colt. At that rate, it worked out to close to a dollar a ride. I was still trying to get a business of my own going, and I was still practicing my rope tricks to see if I could score some TV commercials. I didn’t have an agent at the time, but I was acquainted with a commercial director from Bozeman named Marcus Stevens. Marcus and I met in Gallatin Gateway and got to be friends, and he gave me quite a bit of work over the years. I also got calls from a few producers who learned about my rope tricks through the PRCA. I made commercials for, among others, Visa, Best Western Hotels, and Busch beer. The commercials took a while in coming, but once they started, they helped pay the bills.
    I lived at the Gallatin Gateway Inn for a year or so; then in 1983 I moved into a trailer house on The Flying D. It wasn’t much better than the room at the inn, but it was closer to my horses and saved me the drive to the arena.
    After I had moved out of Forrest and Betsy’s house, their son-in-law Roland, who was married to their daughter Elaine, took over the ranch. Forrest retired to Arizona, but Betsy didn’t—she couldn’t leave her kids and the ranch. Roland, Elaine, and Betsy stayed on the ranch many years.
    Forrest died during the winter of 1984. I didn’t get to go to the funeral. It was the dead of winter, and I couldn’t get away; luckily I had seen him about two weeks before. I had taken a trip to Mexico with my foster brother Stuart Shirley and his wife, Annie, and we stopped over and saw Forrest for a couple of days. Forrest had just come back from the VA hospital with a clean bill of