Fast Facts The Haythorn Family is still a working ranch and use a team of horses to help feed the cattle daily.

Transcription

1 Fast Facts The Haythorn Family is still a working ranch and use a team of horses to help feed the cattle daily. This family is no stranger to cattle drives throughout the midwest. Harry Haythorn, who started the ranch, was a wagon boss and his wife Emma cooked for the cow hands on the cattle drives. Haythorn Ranch

2 Harry Haythornthwaite first got a taste of the grit of the Sandhills when he came north from Texas on a cattle drive. As a 16-year-old boy, Harry stowed away on a ship in He was discovered after the ship had already set sail for America and forced to pay for his passage by taking care of some bulls headed for Texas. Harry babysat the bulls all the way to Galveston and was hired by the man who imported the bulls. For the next eight years, Harry learned the ropes of a new industry. He made four trips up the Texas trail, two to Kansas and two to Nebraska. The second time he arrived in Ogallala, he found the Great Plains to his liking and decided to stay. Harry opened a livery barn, shortened up his name to Haythorn, and married a veterinarian's daughter, Emma Gilpin.

3 After selling the livery stable, Harry took a job as a wagon boss. He took his wages in cattle, and Emma cooked for the cow hands. Nearly every penny was put aside to buy land. In 1884, Harry and Emma filed on a land grant section four miles east of Arthur, Nebraska; and an American ranching dynasty was born. Haythorn Land and Cattle today is spread over two ranches in two Nebraska counties. In this, the largest grass stabilized dune region in the world, gramma, blue stem and buffalo grass holds down the sand and keeps the dunes in place. The late Waldo Haythorn, accomplished the same thing. Through blizzards, low prices, and high taxes, he had managed to keep his family firmly established in its proper place, the Nebraska Sandhills. Today, Craig, the great-grandson of Harry Haythornthwaite, his wife Jody and sons Sage, his wife Kelley, and Cord are partners.

4 Emma Haythorn was a cook on a Cattle Drive, what was it like working on the Chuck Wagon? In the American West, Charles Goodnight is given credit for the development of the classic chuck wagon in Chuck wagons were used to carry supplies that are typically found in a kitchen. Those things included various foods and spices, pots and pans, cooking utensils, water barrels, and other necessary items for feeding military troops, families of settlers, or livestock workers as they moved herds across the land. One of the most useful and prized articles carried on the chuck wagon was the sourdough keg. These kegs were usually made from white oak wood and held around two gallons of product. The sourdough starter would be made and added upon each time Cookie needed to make more biscuits.

5 Craig got his first taste of ranching when he went on a trail drive at the age of four. He got soaked to the bone, split his lip when he fell off the chuck wagon, and then proceeded to get sick. Naturally, he loved it. In this century, every single male member of the Haythorn family has been an honest-to-goodness cowboy, and Craig and Jody's two sons are carrying on the cowboy tradition. Horses have played a pivotal role in the ranch's survival ever since Harry loaded his saddle on a train and headed for Baker, Oregon, where he gathered in 500 head of horses and railed them back to Nebraska. Ever since then, the Haythorn name has been synonymous with good working horses. The Haythorn Ranch was the first Nebraska ranch to register American Quarter Horses.

6 Beginning in 1979, every four years through 2010, the Haythorns held a production sale of American Quarter Horses; and more than 4,000 people from all over the world attended each sale. One reason for such demand is that these are true ranch horses, raised outside and trained in a cow camp, not in a barn or an arena. Each Haythorn cowboy is responsible for putting the finishing touches on 10 to 15 horses, and when their mounts are sold, the cowboy receives 10% of the selling price

7 For the cowboys who call the Haythorn their home, the spring is their favorite time of the year. After two and a half months of calving in the cold, fixing windmills and mending fence, the cowboys look forward to tossing their bed roll in and taking their horses back to the remuda. The Haythorns still do some things the way they were done back in Harry's day. Calves are still roped and dragged to the fires for two weeks each spring.