Yesterday I was searching through old threads for photos of my 1950 Schwinn straight bar when I found it at the landfill around this time a year ago. In reading through the posts I ran across something I had scribbled down and thought I'd share it here.
"It occurred to me recently that the way we here on this board talk about our bikes and have our preferences for this kind and that and some wanting as much speed as possible and others just wanting to ride and not fall off... how in another time we'd be admiring each others' ponies and betting whose is the fastest, whose is best as a war pony, whose is best looking, decorating the tack and making hand prints of ownership in war paint and how the old people don't want to go fast, but want a gentle and reliable mount. The spirit of the thing seems pretty much the same.
Silverbear"
And I do think the spirit of the thing is much the same. A number of years back I had the pleasure of helping to save a rare breed of Indian pony which had never been interbred with the cavalry horses, so these were true mustangs, the animals of the Pony Express, the ponies the Indian people of northern Minnesota had acquired from plains Indian tribes in earlier times. These were the same animals the Spanish Conquistadors brought with them from Spain. The Ojibwa name for them is beebeeshig googanshii which literally means "he has one toe" a reference to an early time when Indians first saw this wonderful creature with un-split hooves, with "one toe". At one time there were Indian ponies all over the country, but as time went by they were interbred with horses from northern Europe,and more or less disappeared. What are called mustangs in the west now are wild horses of mixed heritage. In northern Minnesota, once the Indians were on reservations (the word for which in Ojibwa means "leftovers") the wild herds were rounded up a and sold off to dog food companies. By the 1950's they were virtually gone, like the buffalo before them. With one exception. The local band of Ojibwa Indians, the Boise Fort Band (meaning "big trees") have three small reservations with three villages. Two are on the U.S. side of the border and one at Lac LaCroix in Canada. In the 1920's the missionaries had the ponies destroyed at one village since the children could see them breeding and this was not a good thing for their moral upbringing to know how things get born. At the second village the same was done in the 1950's by the churchmen for the same reason. In the 1960's the Canadian authorities decided to destroy the last few living in the forest since they sometimes ran through the village where children gave them wild rice and tried to ride them bareback. Once snow mobiles came into use, the ponies were no longer used with tobaggins behind to run the trap lines in the winter, so they went wild, subsisting on bark and twigs and wild grasses along the shores. The authorities felt the horse droppings were a health hazard and they were scheduled to be terminated. The elders from all three villages got together and with help from some white friends in northern Minnesota the last ones were roped and snuck out of Canada across frozen lakes to waiting trucks on the U.S, side of the border. They were taken to my now deceased friend Walter Sattela's farm on Pelican Lake and were saved by all of these good people. It was some years later that I met Walter, an old man then, and I wanted to see the ponies which I had heard about through another friend, a horse logger. Walter and I walked out into a field next to the lake and he banged on a bucket of oats, calling out in his Finnish immigrant sounding English, "Come boys, come girls." He always called them his boys and girls, never mares and stallions, colts and fillies. I heard what sounded like thunder and out of the forest burst the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen with long manes and tales, a dark feral stripe along the spine... all of them running like the wind, the glory of Creation. It raised the hair on the back of my neck and somewhere deep inside me I knew these animals from another time, another round of life. My heart raced and I almost felt like weeping for joy, for coming home to something I somehow knew intimately. Before the day was done I bought two mares ( anoong meaning star and muckadeewaazin meaning "black one" and a year later a wonderful black stallion named Keokuk. I had the great privilege of helping save a breed through the following years and saw many young ones on shaky legs come into the world. I made my own saddles back then and a sleigh I took my kids on for rides. I still sometimes dream of following a forest trail through deep snow on a moonlit night, my son and I not speaking, just being. In my dream I can feel Keokuk under me, warm body heat rising through me and ear his breath through those huge mustang lungs, his ears twitching and listening to sounds in the forest. And I awaken, sad to know that I no longer have my ponies, can no longer ride them bareback. When I became crippled I gave Keokuk to a friend who saw to it that he went back to Canada and lived out his years on a Mohawk reservation. He was a big hit and made the cover of some magazine up there, the poster boy of an effort to save the last remants of what had been the Canadian Pony. I gave away the last of my ponies to people who agreed to never sell them and who would give them good lives. I had also been privileged to give them what is now their official name, the Lac LaCroix Indian Pony, now a recognized breed in Canada where many efforts have been made to keep this breed alive. Their numbers are growing. You can google them as they now have their own website where you can even find reference to old Silverbear. I loved those horses and they gave me a gimpse into another time, another way of life when there was no United States and Canada border, but it was all Turtle Island, all Indian Country.
And so it is that I sometimes think of them and horses in general when I read the posts here on the forum... people sharing the joy of riding their bikes, maintaining them, making them look nice. I think it is not so very different when we would have been polishing our carriages or admiring a friend's chariot in ancient Egypt, and betting "my horse is faster than yours... wanna race?" Ha!
Miiew (that's all)
SB
"It occurred to me recently that the way we here on this board talk about our bikes and have our preferences for this kind and that and some wanting as much speed as possible and others just wanting to ride and not fall off... how in another time we'd be admiring each others' ponies and betting whose is the fastest, whose is best as a war pony, whose is best looking, decorating the tack and making hand prints of ownership in war paint and how the old people don't want to go fast, but want a gentle and reliable mount. The spirit of the thing seems pretty much the same.
Silverbear"
And I do think the spirit of the thing is much the same. A number of years back I had the pleasure of helping to save a rare breed of Indian pony which had never been interbred with the cavalry horses, so these were true mustangs, the animals of the Pony Express, the ponies the Indian people of northern Minnesota had acquired from plains Indian tribes in earlier times. These were the same animals the Spanish Conquistadors brought with them from Spain. The Ojibwa name for them is beebeeshig googanshii which literally means "he has one toe" a reference to an early time when Indians first saw this wonderful creature with un-split hooves, with "one toe". At one time there were Indian ponies all over the country, but as time went by they were interbred with horses from northern Europe,and more or less disappeared. What are called mustangs in the west now are wild horses of mixed heritage. In northern Minnesota, once the Indians were on reservations (the word for which in Ojibwa means "leftovers") the wild herds were rounded up a and sold off to dog food companies. By the 1950's they were virtually gone, like the buffalo before them. With one exception. The local band of Ojibwa Indians, the Boise Fort Band (meaning "big trees") have three small reservations with three villages. Two are on the U.S. side of the border and one at Lac LaCroix in Canada. In the 1920's the missionaries had the ponies destroyed at one village since the children could see them breeding and this was not a good thing for their moral upbringing to know how things get born. At the second village the same was done in the 1950's by the churchmen for the same reason. In the 1960's the Canadian authorities decided to destroy the last few living in the forest since they sometimes ran through the village where children gave them wild rice and tried to ride them bareback. Once snow mobiles came into use, the ponies were no longer used with tobaggins behind to run the trap lines in the winter, so they went wild, subsisting on bark and twigs and wild grasses along the shores. The authorities felt the horse droppings were a health hazard and they were scheduled to be terminated. The elders from all three villages got together and with help from some white friends in northern Minnesota the last ones were roped and snuck out of Canada across frozen lakes to waiting trucks on the U.S, side of the border. They were taken to my now deceased friend Walter Sattela's farm on Pelican Lake and were saved by all of these good people. It was some years later that I met Walter, an old man then, and I wanted to see the ponies which I had heard about through another friend, a horse logger. Walter and I walked out into a field next to the lake and he banged on a bucket of oats, calling out in his Finnish immigrant sounding English, "Come boys, come girls." He always called them his boys and girls, never mares and stallions, colts and fillies. I heard what sounded like thunder and out of the forest burst the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen with long manes and tales, a dark feral stripe along the spine... all of them running like the wind, the glory of Creation. It raised the hair on the back of my neck and somewhere deep inside me I knew these animals from another time, another round of life. My heart raced and I almost felt like weeping for joy, for coming home to something I somehow knew intimately. Before the day was done I bought two mares ( anoong meaning star and muckadeewaazin meaning "black one" and a year later a wonderful black stallion named Keokuk. I had the great privilege of helping save a breed through the following years and saw many young ones on shaky legs come into the world. I made my own saddles back then and a sleigh I took my kids on for rides. I still sometimes dream of following a forest trail through deep snow on a moonlit night, my son and I not speaking, just being. In my dream I can feel Keokuk under me, warm body heat rising through me and ear his breath through those huge mustang lungs, his ears twitching and listening to sounds in the forest. And I awaken, sad to know that I no longer have my ponies, can no longer ride them bareback. When I became crippled I gave Keokuk to a friend who saw to it that he went back to Canada and lived out his years on a Mohawk reservation. He was a big hit and made the cover of some magazine up there, the poster boy of an effort to save the last remants of what had been the Canadian Pony. I gave away the last of my ponies to people who agreed to never sell them and who would give them good lives. I had also been privileged to give them what is now their official name, the Lac LaCroix Indian Pony, now a recognized breed in Canada where many efforts have been made to keep this breed alive. Their numbers are growing. You can google them as they now have their own website where you can even find reference to old Silverbear. I loved those horses and they gave me a gimpse into another time, another way of life when there was no United States and Canada border, but it was all Turtle Island, all Indian Country.
And so it is that I sometimes think of them and horses in general when I read the posts here on the forum... people sharing the joy of riding their bikes, maintaining them, making them look nice. I think it is not so very different when we would have been polishing our carriages or admiring a friend's chariot in ancient Egypt, and betting "my horse is faster than yours... wanna race?" Ha!
Miiew (that's all)
SB
ful thing to be with them while they munched their hay. They smell good to me, too. I had a friend who was a horse logger by trade with big Belgian work horses that had hooves the size of a dinner plate. Too big for me to push around.
