Sweden: Team Roping, Cow Horses, and the Diary of Hernán Cortés

Hello everybody,

I am fresh home from my latest adventure, which was nine or ten days in Sweden. I had two three-day clinics there, all targeted towards training the cow horse. They only took ten horses for each clinic so that kept the numbers down. The people were thirsty for knowledge, and they learned a lot. It’s especially fun to go to a country that has really no experience with the working cow horse, or at least very little, and explain traditions and customs, the different styles of creating a working cow horse, and to set standards that they will hopefully uphold forever. They actually save many, many years of mistakes by learning about the refinement of standards while the cow horse sport is young! As always, it was fun to visit with lots of old friends, as I was there last year too!

Of course, many thanks to my wonderful friend, Hakan Bergh and Per Larsson, that put on the clinic. It was at Per Larsson’s ranch, where we had the clinic. We had a beautiful indoor arena, good dirt, and Holstein cattle – actually, they worked pretty well for this bunch of riders! They learned an awful lot about positioning, balancing a cow, position on a cow, rate with a cow, and how to succeed in putting a cow horse on a cow properly.

There were two or three people in the clinic actually riding their horse with a two rein bosal along with their regular bit, in order to help to bridle their horse better. It’s really nice to see people interested and maintaining the traditional standards of perfection and durability that approach can help to create.

The horses there were really nice and the horsemanship is always good. In every foreign country that I’ve been to it’s at least as good as the U.S., and some places I think overall it could be possibly better. They had a lot of really nice horses with a lot of cow – a lot of U.S. bloodlines, of course; and a lot of horses that stopped really pretty and so on. Mind you, we didn’t do anything really big and really hard because I’m always emphasizing the form that creates the function – more than just trying to go fast and stop hard. We like pretty. Pretty’s first!

Surprisingly enough there’s a lot of pretty good ropers there too, so I contacted my friend and roping instructor Dusty Watkins, from Bakersfield, and helped him make arrangements to go over and give roping clinics. Even though they don’t really rope cattle because it’s against the law! If you get caught, it’s a pretty serious deal. They have mechanical cows that they rope and tie the legs on. They are avid ropers, but they just can’t rope live cattle. They rope well though! The horses were real cowy, and the people were especially excited about that. They had a great time, and I had a great time teaching them. Huge enthusiasm. It was just a wonderful success.

One of the highlights of the trip was when I went back to revisit the old church, built in the year 1031. It was the first Christian church in Scandinavia. It was really beautiful. The church had a crypt underneath it and it was pretty cool to go down under the church, into an area which was even older! I’m also posting a bit that was found down there. It was a knight’s bit and pretty darn exciting stuff.

Here we go with some more excitement… another highlight – across the street from the church, there’s a library. Even the locals don’t know it, but underneath the library, in what looks like a bomb shelter, is storage for precious, rare, and expensive old, old books, that are treasures of the country. Some of those books go back many, many years. I think some go back 1000 years or more. Some of them were about the origination of mathematics, some of them were about the solar system, and how it appeared to the astronomers in the 1500’s. There was a diary that they claim was Cortés’s diary. It had drawings in it and the pages were made of parchment paper.

Most of the books were parchment. There were just lots and lots of old books, some of them worth half a million or more. It was in a locked vault that was locked within another vault. There were actually two fire-proof, bombproof, people-proof vaults. There were electronically controlled doors, it was like 007, where they punched all the buttons and the wall opens up. Anyways, quite exciting to see and actually touch some of these old, old books. I look forward to going back again, hopefully next year. There’s still a lot I haven’t seen, and a lot I don’t know about.

That’s my latest. So, here I am at home under a pile of papers and trying to stack them in a way so I can crawl out and have a holiday like the rest of you. Good luck to everybody. It’s show season, I hope you’re all having fun!

Thanks for reading.