My Favorite
Horses Photographs
Bob Jensen at
Trinity University
My cousin Don and his lifelong bride LaDonna raised horses for most of their
adult lives near Armstrong, Iowa
My son Marshal took the picture below of Don's two Percherons (Bill and Barney)
and a couple of saddle horses
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My mother's father raised champion draft horses near Swea City, Iowa
But after losing 15 prized horses in his livery stable barn fire
my grandfather went out of the horse business before I was born
This was one of his prized Percheron stallions (before my mother was even born)
My earliest recollection of horses is hearing them snort and swish flies with
their tails when they were beneath me in the hay mow of the Seneca Farm. There
were several teams of heavy horses plus some saddle horses that awaited the hay
that I pushed down from the hay mow into there mangers. They were often soaked
in sweat from hard days pulling the plows, cultivators, manure spreaders, etc.
When we took wagons of corn or oats into the Ringsted elevator, we could slap
these teams on the butt and they would make their way back to our Seneca barn by
themselves while we took the faster way home in cars. Today there are probably
laws against sending a team of horses back home on county roads without a
driver. I first learned about birds and bees by watching Uncle Millen's grand
albino stallion (named Cap) mate with a mare in the Seneca farm barn. My older
Cousins Bill and Blaine explained what would happen after the mating.
From my story about growing up in Iowa ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/max01.htm
Before I was old enough for school, my Uncle
Millen asked my father to return to the �home place� and help with the dairy
farm. In the 19th Century, their father named Julius Jensen
(pronounced Yuleous Yehnson)
and his wife donated a corner of the Jensen farm for a church and cemetery.
The first
Blakjer
Church was a sod hut.
Later, the neighboring Norwegian immigrants built a wood-framed white church
that now stands vacant amidst fields of corn and soybeans. During the war
years, however, horses and buggies were tied to the front fence every Sunday
morning. Cars could have been driven to church, but gasoline was very
precious during the war.
A preacher traveled in from Bancroft after
delivering his first sermon of the day to a much larger Bancroft Lutheran
congregation. Because the Blakjer parsonage was
vacant, my father, mother, and I moved into that parsonage so Dad could help
on the farm. Since I was not yet old enough for school, I cannot remember
most things from those years in great detail. However, I vividly recall the
days of threshing. At the crack of dawn while the men pulled the communal
threshing machine toward our farm, my Grandmother Jensen and my Aunt Blanch
would ring off heads of chickens with quick, whirling snaps of their
wrists. My job was to scurry after the bloodied fowl that convulsed and
flopped about in search of their missing heads. One of the things I liked
least about my years on the Jensen country farm and the
Dourte town farm was having to clean the
pin feathers off headless fowl in buckets of scalding water.
What I liked best in threshing season
came later in the day when I stood proud and tall driving a team of horses
in the field while the men pitched bundles up to �my� wagon. I drove the
heaped wagon to that chugging and clanging threshing machine where golden
oats streamed, as if by magic, from out of a pipe.
Threshing days resembled a festive
celebration in a Broadway musical. While men and their sons labored in the
fields, women and their daughters set up long tables outdoors. They
prepared enormous bowls of kumla, mashed
potatoes, sweet corn, lefsa, meats, bread, pies,
and cakes. When the threshing was finished on one farm, the men moved the
threshing machine on to the next farm and the next farm until the granaries
around Seneca were brimmed in oats needed to carry all the livestock through
the long winters where winds off the Dakotas whipped up giant blizzards
around farm houses that only had iron stoves for heat --- stoves fired with
corn cobs and chunks of wood.
On quiet days I often rode a retired
racehorse named Pride. My Uncle Millen always kept several teams and a
string of saddle horses on the farm. Pride was a long-legged,
smooth-mouthed relic about thirty years in age (ancient in horse years).
This gentle old giant would hold his head still while a five-year old cowboy
stood in the manger to fasten on his bridle. Then I leaned a ladder against
the stolid beast so I could mount his bare back without a lift up.
The first time I rode off alone on Pride I
came close to getting the second spanking of my life. I drove Pride about
half mile down the road, put him in a barn, and went inside the house to
play with a neighbor girl. My mistake was not in telling anyone where I
went off to on Pride. But my rear end was spared that day, and I kept my
Pride.
I've lived in a lot of places in Iowa, Colorado, California, Maine, Florida,
Texas, and New Hampshire. As a student, I did quite a lot of trail riding in
Colorado on horses of the Old Singing River Ranch in Bear Creek Canyon:
Rather that going to Woodstock in the 1960s
I hiked and rode horseback in the Rocky Mountains
It's sad too think that Bear Creek Canyon later became one of Denver's suburban
housing developments
Showing off for a coed girl friend who took this picture
I'm glad she snapped this picture before I fell off
The only place I raised my own horses was on an acreage on the outskirts (Ox
Bottom Road) of Tallahassee when I was on the faculty at Florida State
University. I bought an American Saddlebred-Quarter Horse mare for my daughter
Lisl and a Morgan gelding from my son Marshall. However, Marshall never cared
for horses, and Lisl's interest waned as she got more and more into cheerleading
and high school drama productions. Thus our north Florida horses became mine to
love and care for daily before we moved to Texas in 1982. Across the road a
wealthy man and his wife owned over thousands of acres that extended clear into
Georgia. I could ride for miles and miles, but I was always wary of shy
rattlesnakes and the especially aggressive water moccasins in the pine woods and
swamps of Florida. I hate poisonous snakes. I'm glad there are no poison snakes
in New Hampshire (the extremely rare Vermont rattlesnakes stay mainly near the
shore of Lake Champlain.
The pictures of Lisl on her mare below were not taken on Florida snow or sand
They are just old and overexposed 35mm slides
I trembled every time Lisl went over the jumps in our pasture
But the mare was an excellent jumper
Lisl took jumping lessons at a stable down Ox Bottom Road
Up here in New Hampshire, the owners of the Sunset Hill House Hotel had an Arab
mare for several years
She had one foul that broke its leg and had to be put down
Every now and then a moose would trample her electric fence
She would always headed for our yard where the clover seemed more succulent or
so she claimed
Nancy's electric fence must've been turned off when I snapped this picture of
her mare
My father's favorite horses were Belgian heavy horses with Palomino coloring
On the road toward Lisbon, NH about three miles from our cottage,
a crusty old guy named Schmidt raises and trains valuable Belgian teams
and he takes them to regional fairs for pulling contests
For some reason he had some Percherons beside his barn this winter
Closer to our cottage just down from our Sugar Hill Community Church are three
Percherons
Behind the Sunset Hill Golf Course is a mountain road (no trucks allowed)
Just down the hill closer to Sugar Hill a man has two very friendly saddle
horses
Polly's Pancake Parlor is a National Treasure of New Hampshire
It's about a mile down the road from our cottage
Across from Polly's Pancake Parlor is a field where a leopard Appaloosa mare
feeds all by herself every day
This time of year she wanders all alone among the wild flowers with the
mountains in the background
The road below leads from Polly's down to the Iris Farm
The Scottish Cows and Sheep on the Iris Farm are gone this summer, but horses
still graze in the fields
Here's a picture that I did not take, but I love it
In closing this is a nice little ass picture that I did not take
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
On May 14,
2006 I retired from
Trinity University after a long and
wonderful career as an accounting professor in four universities. I was
generously granted "Emeritus" status by the Trustees of Trinity University. My
wife and I now live in a cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm
Bob
Jensen's Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations
Our
address is 190 Sunset Hill Road, Sugar Hill, New Hampshire
Our cottage was known as the Brayton Cottage in the early 1900s
Sunset Hill is a ridge overlooking with
New Hampshire's White Mountains to the East
and Vermont's
Green Mountains to the West
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Bob Jensen's Home Page ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/