"With regard to saddles,here it is a moot question which is the better,yours or ours,for buck-jumpers.Carver's boys rode in their own saddles against our Victorians in theirs,all on Australian buckers,and honors seemed easy.Each was good in his own style,but the horses were not what I should call really good buckers,such as you might get on a back station,and so there was nothing in the show that could unseat the cowboys.It is only back in the bush that you can get a really good bucker.I have often seen one of them put both man and saddle off."This last is a feat I have myself seen performed in the West.Isuppose the amount of it is that both the American and the Australian rough riders are,for their own work,just as good as men possibly can be.
One spring I had to leave the East in the midst of the hunting season,to join a roundup in the cattle country of western Dakota,and it was curious to compare the totally different styles of riding of the cowboys and the cross-country men.A stock-saddle weighs thirty or forty pounds instead of ten or fifteen and needs an utterly different seat from that adopted in the East.A cowboy rides with very long stirrups,sitting forked well down between his high pommel and cantle,and depends upon balance as well as on the grip of his thighs.In cutting out a steer from a herd,in breaking a vicious wild horse,in sitting a bucking bronco,in stopping a night stampede of many hundred maddened animals,or in the performance of a hundred other feats of reckless and daring horsemanship,the cowboy is absolutely unequalled;and when he has his own horse gear he sits his animal with the ease of a centaur.Yet he is quite helpless the first time he gets astride one of the small eastern saddles.One summer,while purchasing cattle in Iowa,one of my ranch foremen had to get on an ordinary saddle to ride out of town and see a bunch of steers.He is perhaps the best rider on the ranch,and will without hesitation mount and master beasts that Idoubt if the boldest rider in one of our eastern hunts would care to tackle;yet his uneasiness on the new saddle was fairly comical.At first he did not dare to trot and the least plunge of the horse bid fair to unseat him,nor did he begin to get accustomed to the situation until the very end of the journey.In fact,the two kinds of riding are so very different that a man only accustomed to one,feels almost as ill at ease when he first tries the other as if he had never sat on a horse's back before.It is rather funny to see a man who only knows one kind,and is conceited enough to think that that is really the only kind worth knowing,when first he is brought into contact with the other.Two or three times I have known men try to follow hounds on stock-saddles,which are about as ill-suited for the purpose as they well can be;while it is even more laughable to see some young fellow from the East or from England who thinks he knows entirely too much about horses to be taught by barbarians,attempt in his turn to do cow-work with his ordinary riding or hunting rig.It must be said,however,that in all probability cowboys would learn to ride well across country much sooner than the average cross-country rider would master the dashing and peculiar style of horsemanship shown by those whose life business is to guard the wandering herds of the great western plains.
Of course,riding to hounds,like all sports in long settled,thickly peopled countries,fails to develop in its followers some of the hardy qualities necessarily incident to the wilder pursuits of the mountain and the forest.While I was on the frontier I was struck by the fact that of the men from the eastern States or from England who had shown themselves at home to be good riders to hounds or had made their records as college athletes,a larger proportion failed in the life of the wilderness than was the case among those who had gained their experience in such rough pastimes as mountaineering in the high Alps,winter caribou-hunting in Canada,or deer-stalking--not deer-driving--in Scotland.
Nevertheless,of all sports possible in civilized countries,riding to hounds is perhaps the best if followed as it should be,for the sake of the strong excitement,with as much simplicity as possible,and not merely as a fashionable amusement.It tends to develop moral no less than physical qualities;the rider needs nerve and head;he must possess daring and resolution,as well as a good deal of bodily skill and a certain amount of wiry toughness and endurance.
