Long Mountain Ride of Youth
Oregon’s most youthful vaqueros, Donald Yancey 10, and Robert Yancey 13, arrived in Halsey, with 33 horses from the Bunchgrass range country near Prineville. The two brothers and their father Orville drove the herd from the family’s 17,000-acre ranch near Prineville. Cold mornings, hard riding, swarms of mosquitoes and a stampede are the memories Bob and Don Yancey have of driving a herd of wild horses across the Cascade Mountain range in 1934.
The trip occupied a full week and began on their father’s ranch near Prineville. They delivered the stock to be used at round-up shows during the summer. “It was not like a fun thing,” Don says. “Hard work, far as I was concerned. Dad said we are going and then we went.” Bob said.
The Yancey family was in the business of rounding up wild horses and taming them at that time. During the 1930s, the Bureau of Land Management wanted many of Central Oregon’s wild horses rounded up and shipped out of the area. Their mother Audrey and sister June drove the family car with the chuck wagon hitched to the back, for the 130-mile trip that began on June 20, 1934.
The two brothers did their share of riding, roping, and breaking. They trained the ponies they rode on the trip themselves. Don’s horse was named Nugget and Bob’s was named Big Boy. “They were good horses,” Bob says. “They had to be.”
The weeklong trip was hard on both man and beast. The boys and their father rode from sunup to sundown, with stops only to eat and sleep. Swarms of mosquitoes buzzing around the herd added extra misery to the long days.
“It always seemed with our dad we could have stopped a few hours earlier,” Bob says, smiling.
The first two days went by without incident. The boys had hobbled the wildest of the horses so they couldn’t break and run at the start of the journey. By the time they made camp the second night at Swamp Ranch, the site of Black Butte Ranch today, the horses were tame enough to herd without the hobbles.
As the group headed closer to the mountains, Don says he remembers some awfully cold mornings. The hardest thing to do was get up when he was supposed to. Camp was made any place they could find to corral the horses where grass was found and water was available. One night they drove the horses into a natural corral near Fish Lake they had heard about. Lava formed a three-sided enclosure near the lake and all they had to do was close the opening that night. On other days they had to improvise pens for the horses.
The family was about twenty miles east of Sweet Home and it was nearly dark before they finally corralled the horses between a river and rock wall one night. One of the brothers - they’re not sure which one - had to sleep on the bridge to make sure the horses stayed put.
The saddle horses were let loose to graze. Late that night Don and Bob’s ponies managed to get away and head for home reducing the boys to riding some saddle horses they had brought along.
Not one wild animal molested their stock. Little else happened the rest of the way until the party entered the Willamette Valley. There just outside of Halsey the horses stampeded at their first sight of a freight train. The horses broke through the fence of a farmer’s field before the boys and their father could get them slowed down.
“By the time they stopped running it was our pasture,” Bob says, chuckling. Their father paid the farmer for the damage and the family camped there until they went home. It took a couple of weeks to sell 15 or 20 of the horses to local farmers. A representative from a rodeo supplier bought the remaining horses.
The Yancey brothers retired to Central Oregon, Bob retired on a few acres near Tumalo with his wife, Jeanne; Don managed the LaPine branch of the Prineville Bank. Both have raised families and now have grandchildren who are learning to ride ponies, although they will probably never get to ride the range like their grandfathers did.
“We lived in a good time,” Bob says.
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