Re: Easier with horses?

Posted by JDseller on December 11, 2010 at 16:30:32 from (208.126.196.144):

In Reply to: Easier with horses? posted by Fullthrottle on December 11, 2010 at 07:40:27:

Until my grand father passed away in 1991 we always had a team each of horses and mules. I did not care for them. So I sold them several years after he died. I still have all of the harness.

He used the horses to cultivate. He always went through the corn one last time when it was waist high. Single row cultivator and one horse. He also mowed all of the pastures with a sickle bar mower that he pulled with the horses.

The mules he used to pull logs out of the woods. They where good at that. All you had to do was walk the mules one time on the path that you wanted them to go on and they would follow it. He would fall trees and top them. He would hook the chain and send the mules to me. I would unhook them and send them back to him. While they where gone I would saw and trim the logs to length. He and I logged quite a lot of woods around here. The Federal park guys called for years after he died to trying to get us to thin some of the trees in several of the federal parks around here. They liked that we did not tear up as many trees and the slopes as you would with a skidder.

I remember that last team of big black mules pulling thirty foot long, three foot diameter oak logs up out of a river bottom. I only remember one time that we had to shorten the logs to get them to pull them. They would tighten up the harness and lunge that log up an off they went. I know that they would out pull most of the smaller tractors built in the 40s and 50s.

My youngest brother kept them until they both died. They where almost thirty years old. They still would pull together as a team right up until the last two years of their lives. They both got sore knees and he kept them stabled in deep saw dust to cushion their knees.
The first year he had them he took them to an antique show down in Missouri. It rained almost six inches the first day. They had cars stuck every where. The old tractors where not the best in all of that mud. So he hitched up that team of mules. He just put a lead rope on the left ones halter. He would hook up a chain to a car. and then tell those mules to GO. He had to run to keep up after they got it going. He laughed about how those mules would yank so hard on some of the smaller cars they would get the wheels to jump off the ground at the start.

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