Fay and The Pulling Contest

By Florence Grinsted Richardson

In this piece, real names were replaced by the author with fictitious ones, even for the horses. "John," is Fay Watson Richardson.

John was young and had started farming when times were good. With a little money saved up by hard work and what he could borrow, and by careful breeding, he had raised one of the finest dairy herds in the community. Hard work and good luck earned him as reputation as one of the best farmers in the county. But in the Fall of '30 he received an ultimatum from his banker giving him one year to restore his equity in his farm equipment. The implement company had sold his note and chattel mortgage to the bank; it was impossible to renew any collateral, and John could not raise a dollar.  

To tell the truth, it looked like the end. John was determined that every acre had to produce all it was possible to get out of it. Every cow had to produce to her limit.  If a cow could not come up to his standard, out she went. His horses the same; if they could not put in the longest hours at the hardest work and stand up to the strain, someone else could own them.

The only exception to this rule was a team of 1800-pound Belgians that he had raised, two blue roans, colts well-bred to start with, from a big mare he had owned when he started farming. A year apart, they had grown as much alike as two peas in a pod.  

These, Queen and Blue, were his weakness; if John could not work them himself, they did not work.  He would trust no one else to handle them. 

Among our other horses was a bay gelding he had purchased from a wood contractor's outfit.  "Old Charlie" was not outstanding in looks at all. He weighed 1750 pounds and he was the meanest devil of a horse a man ever owned. He knocked out more walls than we could keep in place. He would kick standing alone in a stall, kick all the time he was eating. The only thing he enjoyed was work, the tougher the load the better. To see him pull it looked as if he was made of iron. 

John worked him carefully with other horses as team mates; unless held down on a pull, Charlie would throw a slow-starting horse under the wagon. He was an old horse; he worked with most of the other horses at different times, and they made extra-good pulling horses if they had the heart in them to start with. Old Charlie had outlasted several good team mates. He wasn't lovable, but John kept him for the work he could do.

The County Fair was to be on Labor Day, and there was a special attraction: a pulling match for horses.  This feature aroused much enthusiasm, especially since the Fair Board was offering $500 for first prize and $200 for second. John got to thinking maybe we could cash in on some of his efforts with the team of Belgians.

Our hired men, Nat and Runnigan, heard that a big team from the coal yard was being entered by Jack Sharp. We knew that team of blacks, we had watched them in town pulling a load of coal on a sleigh over bare ground through the lumber shed. As big as they were, they would not weigh much more than Blue or Queen, maybe 100 or 200 pounds more at the most. John filed his entry for the contest.

John did not say much, but he did considerable thinking. In a day or so he had rigged up a stone boat.  Dumped in a ravine back of the barn was a big pile of cement in sacks that had gotten wet and had been thrown away. John had Runnigan carry some of this out and load about a ton or so of it on the stone boat. He put their best harness on the roans and hitched them to the stone boat. The team was used to pulling, but needed practice to get down to a steady pull. As John spoke to them, he would crouch down and tighten the reins - the harder they pulled, the steadier he pulled, as though he held them back. He worked awhile with them every evening and kept adding more weight until he had them pulling as much as Sharp's team had pulled on bare ground, shod with sharp shoes. Runnigan said to put sharp shoes on Blue and Queen, and we'd have a chance. We kept this practice a secret, as we knew it was part of the battle to win.

On the last day before the fair, Runnigan was busy shoeing the team with shoes having good long calks. John got a new, heavy leather harness; when he brought it home from town, he had it in his trailer, covered up. He was as tickled as a boy with his first pair of long pants, and when Runnigan fitted it on the team I saw on the housing over the collar that our name was in large bold letters in nickel.

By then we had so entered into the spirit of the thing we could hardly keep it a secret. As we watched the team pull that night, we knew we had something that champions are made of. By now the two horses pulled as one. John would let them tighten up on the tugs, and as he leaned back on the lines he spoke again, the horses crouched and then straightened, not taking a step until the load started to move, and they hauled it the required 30-foot distance.

Sunday evening John loaded the pair of horses into a truck and drove to the fair grounds. By then he was getting a little nervous as he realized what he was asking this team to do and what was at stake. If he lost, we were done. Horses and everything would go.

Early Monday morning just after it got light, I went with Runnigan to look at the rest of the horses that were entered to pull that day. Publicity and the large amount of prize money had attracted some good teams from the city - one from the stock yards, and a couple of big teams from the packers, eight-horse teams that made ours look pretty small, especially as they were outfitted with expensive harnesses. But we weren't so much afraid of them as we were of the stock yard team, and Sharp's team from down home.

Runnigan went back to harness up and wipe the horses off. Blue hadn't eaten her grain, she just stood there. As soon as John came in from home, about eight o'clock, he knew right away she was sick. As soon as he could, he got a vet to get some stuff into her and after a while she seemed easier. But the vet said under no circumstances to move the horse or it would kill her. The look on John's face told us he knew right then that it was all over if he could not pull. We couldn't win the prize, the team would be lost on that damned mortgage. It had been our last chance. We were done before we  started.

Runnigan went out to eat and had a couple of good snorts out of a bottle while he was at it. Kind of made him feel better. Still, the fact remained something had to be done at once, and (after another drink) he was the man to do it. He found a telephone booth, called Nat at home and told him to go get old Charlie and lose no time in getting him up as a substitute. Runnigan then had another drink to keep up his courage, because John raised hell when you tried to help him.

Nat arrived just before the hour of the contest and I shall pass over the scene when he led Charlie from the loading chute. Runnigan got the worst of it, but John couldn't resist when he saw he still had a chance with a team. Maybe they weren't a team, as he said, just two horses (and one of them the meanest devil that ever lived), but if anyone could drive those horses and make them pull, it was John.  No matter that it had been several years since the horses had even worked together, that the roan was carefully trained to pull slow and steady, that Charlie was too quick - he could pull.

Out in front of the grandstand they drew numbers from the judge's hat to determine their turn. John was sixth, with Sharp just ahead of him.  

Each team started with a weight the equivalent of moving a two-ton load on a paved street. They were hitched to a cable, and the pull was registered by a dynamometer on a truck operated by men from the state university engineering department. Runnigan had a ringside seat on the truck, where he took the place of ballast. The truck moved along as the team pulled, until a judge rang a bell at 29 feet.

The first pull was an easy one for all the teams. Increasing the weight, the next pull gave some of the teams all they could start. The third try with the load at five tons was too much for the show horses from the packing house, the eight-horse teams, so that thinned the competition down to the stockyard team, Sharp's, and ours. Young Sharp took the notion to drive their team himself; he was sure of winning. He did better than we expected, holding that big team of blacks down to a steady pull, amid cheers from the grandstand.

John was doing his best to hold Queen and Charlie together on a dead pull, but the horses had different ways of pulling. Experienced horsemen who knew the circumstances shook their heads as John hooked on for the six-ton pull. The stockyard team had failed to move it, but Sharp's team had made a beautiful pull of the six-ton load. With his patched-up team, how could John expect to pull as much as this beautiful pair of blacks pulling like one horse, and that like a machine?

Still John had a chance, just a chance. He had hard work steadying his team into the collar. He was practically dragged along by the lines as they tightened into the load; for a minute they hung motionless, then they stretched out and reached for another footing, scratching the dirt and making the gravel fly. A front shoe flew through the air, and Charlie slipped and hesitated, just for a second but enough for Queen, who was even now. As Charlie got sure footing again, they strained and pulled and marched down the 30 feet to the applause from the stands.

Still, it was a tie. Did we have a chance to win? The judges went into a huddle, then called a short intermission. A minute later, the announcement came out over the loud speaker:

"Ladies and gentlemen, you have witnessed a sight this afternoon never before equalled - two teams have pulled, on a fair pull, 500 pounds more than the record of any team on this or any other fair ground. We feel that both teams are equal in power and hesitate to ask them to pull again; therefore we are giving duplicate prizes to each contestant."

Amid the cheering, Runnigan held the team and John came running up into the grandstand to take me in his arms. He had accomplished all he had started out to do. The money would pay off the mortgage. We would work to bring the farm into productivity, to provide for us as we had always dreamed. And the horses would belong to their rightful owner.

Queen and Charlie, the pulling team

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