The 2008 Spring Roundup and Drive is fully booked and staffed!    Click here for a general overview of information on our Annual Spring Roundup & Drive.  A complete list of riders and crew can be found on the website: click here to check out the participant list to see who is returning and who the new guys will be!  Also, comment here to let your friends know your plans, ask questions of returning guests, and post your favorite stories or photos.  This year's event is April 25-27, 2008 and the horses will be coming through town on April 26th.  See you there!

The very best horse wrecks and lies.
Hello, this is Kail Mantle from Montana Horses with the best wreck I've heard all year. First, let me start this segment by stating for the record that I am always disappointed when natural selection is interrupted. The times that I have interrupted it however, have been strictly for insurance premium reasons as I have no intention of dumbing down the gene pool by stepping in the way of evolution. Business is business and I don’t want blasted by a bunch of purists that think I don’t practice what I preach.

I mix a lot of horses and people each year and I’ve selected the best of the best, or worst of the best, or best of the worst…..or at least something that needed repeated for this slot.

Today’s untruth is entitled “The picket pin”.

Before I go any further I want to mention that I really did think the horse had been picketed before I sent him. Our story begins last summer when Cliff and Clay were going on a Mountain Man Rendezvous and needed some horses. The old white horse was a pretty good walker and Cliff decided to lead on him. Everything went pretty good until that evening when they erroneously did what I told them to do. “Pickett the old white horse and hobble the other because the white horse will sell out and leave if not tied up.” They blindly complied. They screwed the “Mountain Man” approved picket pin into the ground, tied the "well picket broke" white horse’s lead to 30 foot of rope, and then tied this to the picket pin, and then headed to camp for some Mountain Man Fluid and some grub. They never quite made it. It’s twilight. The horses are grazing peacefully. The crickets are chirping. Somewhere an owl hoots. Then something else. A snort, and then something that sounds like a snort, thundering hooves and then a loud tink. There is something very unmistakable about the sound a panicked horses running wide open through a meadow…..in the dark and in your direction. This in itself will cause a pulse increase but add 35 ft of rope and a 2 ft. sharpened dagger sparking and whipping in the night and you probably can’t talk……and they didn’t. Ole whitey blurs by Cliff and turns left. Cliff feels something on his leg and turns white. It not only wraps around his leg, but successfully half hitches itself around said appendage and then just sits there…….. waiting. Now, Cliff is 6’5 weighs 250 and is just standing there doing the math. Ole whitey is 16 hands 1100 lbs and doing somewhere around 23 mph. Things come tight and Cliff becomes a glider. Clay later told me he stepped it off at 15 yards from where Cliffs boot tracks end and his butt print begins. He said the gravel kind of looked like someone graded it into a 15’ long windrow. Long story short, Whitey stopped, snorted and instantly recalled that he was picket broke, Cliff rode on his left buttock the rest of the ride, and Clay hasn’t quit laughing since. Anyway thanks for your time and remember don’t listen to a damn thing I say.