Cutting is the skill of taking one or two specific cows out of a herd by placing your horse in the right position to get it to move in the right direction. Cowboys do this routinely to isolate a cow for branding, doctoring or to move it to a different area. The trick is to [...]
William Harvey Beal (1866-1958), my great grandfather, had tried farming but was going broke. He became a traveling bible salesman and went around with a barbed wire salesman and soon added that to his line. William came up with an idea for a tool to tighten the wire easily and with his cousin Robert McKibben [...]
Sad story about how a major ranching operation in California is slipping away. You can see the full story by clicking HERE.
Kathy and I attended the Ty Murray Invitational Professional Bull Riders event yesterday in Albuquerque. The PBR is the top of the bull riding world and we’ve gone to several events over the years, including the finals in Las Vegas. If you’ve never been they are a lot of fun and the energy level is [...]
Welcome to my new blog about the cowboy lifestyle. As you know I have a business selling cowboy buckles (www.bealscowboybuckles.com) so will periodically talk about buckles and feature special ones. And I’ll tell stories about horses and cows – the two main things that cowboys do – plus western tack and events and people. The [...]
In the western United States there is a growing interest is using a leather reata rope (it’s actually La Riata in Spanish). These were the types of ropes used by the Spanish Vaqueros (cowboys) when they first brought cows into the southwest because obviously nylon hadn’t been invented! Reatas are hand woven from individual thin [...]
Many people think cowboy buckles started in the 1860s when Texas ranchers began gathering wild cattle and moving herds north to railroad yards where they could be sold for beef. But the reality is cowboy buckles were invented in the 1920s by Hollywood. As western movies began popular, there was a standard “garb” that was [...]
The beef industry in America is big business.There are about 100 million cows in the US but we aren’t the only people raising cows.China for example has about 130 million cows and South America is a major source of beef. Cattle, generically known as cows, came from two basic breeds: European cattle like you typically [...]
Horse News