An Endurance Horse Race Gone Awry

By John M. Larsen

My mother stood with her arms crossed, staring in vain up the mountain behind us. Dad and I sat by the crackling campfire but all eyes searched the empty trail that curved down into the camp from the mountainside. Where was Kay? She should have arrived on her mount three hours ago.

My elder sister Katherine, who went by Kay, was competing in a hundred-mile horse race held in 1945 when I was ten years old. It had been organized by the board of the Snake River Stampede Rodeo, an event that had been canceled from 1942–‘44 because of the restrictions and sacrifices made during World War II. The hundred-mile race was part of the freedom all citizens were feeling at the end of the war.

To understand how a hundred-mile horse race could feel like freedom, consider that from the mid-1930s up and until the 1960s, the Hollywood cowboy was king.  Roy Rogers and Gene Autry were only two of almost a dozen cowboy heroes who starred in movie theaters all over the land. These films had a lot of good points and some bad ones. A particular overall problem was that none of them was very realistic. 

For example, in one film, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans pull up to the edge of the western plains driving their 1955 Ford. They unload their horses from the trailer and once they mount up and ride, the time zone suddenly seems to shift from 1955 to 1882. For the rest of the movie, it’s all horses and wagons and mounted cowboys and Indians.

The movies gave a subtly false impression that the steeds of cowboys and Indians could run forever. A horseman was rarely shown dismounting to give the animal a chance to drink water and catch its breath. The impression given by these movies was that a horse was like your Ford or Chevy, which you could run and then park for a week.

In those days a lot of people bought horses, boots, and cowboy hats and thought they were cowboys. Anything cowboy was cool. In my hometown of Marsing, most families had a horse or two. I got my first pony when I was eight, and at one time our family of four had a dozen horses.

Kay Larsen and her horse Tap. 1945. Courtesy John M. Larsen.

The race map. Courtesy John M. Larsen.

Owyhee Mountains in Idaho. Google Maps.

Rugged landscape in the Owyhees. BLM.

The first-prize saddle. John M. Larsen .

The finishers and their times. Courtesy John M. Larsen.

The town’s population back then was about 490 but the Marsing Saddle Club had more than sixty riders. Most of our friends owned horses. As teenagers, my friends and I went riding on weekends, although we rarely galloped. We trotted or walked, usually up to about thirty miles in a day. It’s safe to say we were part of the Hollywood-driven riding obsession in the West at that time, but we also had an advantage over other enthusiasts who owned and rode horses but didn’t really understand them.

It seems like a mystique about the horse and the cowboy hat lives on today when all other forms of that reality have passed away. A small portion of Yellowstone National Park is in Idaho so we can look over the fence and make certain observations about the current TV show Yellowstone, which is an example of this trip back in time. These days, range cowboys travel on mounts that almost universally are powered by gasoline rather than oats.

My mother was a horse lover through and through. She trusted the horse more than the automobile because, as she put it, “The horse never let me down.” As soon as the hundred-mile race was announced, six months before it was to be held, my mother began training for it with Kay, who was then fifteen years old and would be the rider.

“My mother and I did research and followed the training guidelines to condition a horse for such a demanding task,” Kay wrote in a 2014 recollection of the event published in the Owyhee Outpost. “We trained two horses and chose my mother’s horse, Tap.”

Tap was a blue roan, a lively and tough horse. It was descended from Thoroughbred stallions brought to the region many years earlier to breed with mustang mares. My mother and sister realized the key to winning this kind of race would be to pace the horse and preserve its strength. (Just imagine a human trying to run an entire marathon at top speed.) The two also taught Tap to drink out of a drinking bag, as a lot of the course would be very dry.

The race was to be held over two days, each with a fifty-mile segment. On the sunny and hot first day, sixty-two riders lined up at the start on the flats outside Nampa. The course would go through the rough and challenging terrain of the Owyhee Mountains. Kay later wrote, “When the starting gun went off, I was surprised to see the riders break into a run. I had to haul on the reins to control Tap, as he wanted to run with the rest. We had a long way to go, and the horses could not keep up this pace.”

The riders would go up to the crest of the 7,500-foot-high Slack Mountain and then ride down a winding trail to arrive at the Y1 Ranch on Reynolds Creek. After forty miles of riding through the desert and up razorbacked mountains, Kay was in last place, just as she and our mother had planned. The other riders were in a loose group ahead of her as she reached the final checking station and realized with “a wave of fear and anger” that the checker was not to be seen.

“The shadows were starting to reach out across the lonely trail, and I felt ice in the pit of my stomach,” she wrote, “for I recognized that the trouble was not only that this person not there to validate my arrival, but was not there to point me in the right direction to find the finish line for this first day’s ride.”

She thought perhaps the checker had not expected that a lone rider would be bringing up the rear—but she and her mother knew what Tap could do and just how far they could push him.

“A horse is like no other animal, as it is fairly easy to literally ride a horse to death. A good horse will keep putting all he has into meeting your demands. You must not ask too much or force him too soon,” Kay wrote. “Luckily, I had ridden in this area before, so I was able to figure out where I was and get to the finish line.”

It was dusk by the time Kay got back to her worried family in camp, and she was angry at having to navigate her own way. Many of the horses that had arrived ahead of her and Tap were in bad shape. At least six horses died and numerous others were in very poor condition.  As a result, the judges cut the return trip to thirty-five miles.

Fifteen riders started the second day, but only eleven finished.

“I was one of them, and the only woman to finish the race,” Kay recounted. “I was riding with Frank Maher and other cowboys I knew. We were certain the condition of our horses would be a crucial factor after what had happened to many of them the day before. On the return ride, one man riding near us had to get off his horse and push it from behind to get it uphill. Often, he would get off and walk, as the horse was struggling.

“We all finished fairly close together in Nampa. Imagine our surprise when the rider who had to push his horse was named the winner. He had forced his horse across the finish for first place. He had made good time the first day and that was taken into account the second day.”

Kay was very happy about one thing when the riders entered the rodeo arena that evening: Tap was the only horse in the race who pranced and held his head high. “To me,” Kay wrote, “Tap and I had been the real winners.”

My sister got a bonus prize from the event, in that Frank Maher and other ranchers asked her to be part of their two-week cattle roundup, which she did for the following two years. It was tough work that demanded two horses for each person, because one horse couldn’t handle the hard riding on a daily basis. “I felt like a true cowgirl after working with them on the roundups.”

As for us back at the ranch campsite, what a relief it was to see Kay return after the long first day of the race. My parents never forgot an incident that day when two drunken men argued over a horse that had fallen after drinking from the creek. One fellow wanted to jab the horse’s belly to let the water out because he thought it had drunk too much, but fortunately that did not happen.

In reality, many of the troubled horses suffered from a “wind-broke” condition, in which their lungs had been damaged. Even those that didn’t die were unlikely to make a full recovery.

The mood was somber around the campfire that night. Life magazine had sent a crew to report on the event but as it turned out, they chose not to run a feature.

The board of the Snake River Stampede never sponsored another hundred-mile race although they did consent to staging a fifty-mile endurance event in 1977.

As for my sister, the fifteen-year-old girl eventually went to college and married her lifelong boyfriend, Harry Goebel. They raised five children, after which Kay went back to college and earned a PhD in psychology. She’s had a lot of impressive successes in her lifetime. At one point she was even the star of the TV show called Ask Dr. Kay.

I don’t think Kay has ever been afraid of anything. Seventy years after finishing that hundred-mile horserace, she rappelled down the face of a fifteen-story building in Oklahoma City as a promotional stunt to promote the Girl Scouts of the USA. When her ninety-fifth birthday was coming around, I reminded her of that stunt and she admitted, “When I was ready to jump I asked myself, ‘What the hell are you doing up here?’”

My guess is someone said the wrong thing: “No eighty-five-year-old woman is going to jump off a fifteen-story building.”

You just don’t say that to a real winner.