One of my favorite pics of my mom.

And it got me to thinking about horses in western stories.

Mom wasn’t a horsey girl.  She rode ‘em on the farm, but she didn’t have equestrian rugs, embroidered colt wall hangings or cross-stitched pony throw pillows.

For those of you who remember ‘70s AM radio: on a cold Nebraska night, she was not one to run calling “Wildfire.”

Again, that’s not to say she didn’t care for them or know how to brush one down.

She just wasn’t all that into them.

Some western writers cast their characters with extreme horse sense or the exact bumbling opposite. Men can either nurse an animal back from the gates of horse heaven or drive them there through ignorance and mean indifference.

I’ll bet most folks in the old west were somewhere in between, more like Americans today with their cars. They can put gas in ‘em, know when to get them serviced, but very few are under the hood on a Sunday afternoon.