lessons learned from cow ponies, jagged land, and wide-open sky.
In 1921 the cattle ranch on the Unaweep was sold, leaving Smith unemployed. He drifted into a Wyoming county fair, where he found a job working for an obscure firm that supplied decrepit horses to rodeos for use in relay races. Smith was put in charge of training and shoeing six racehorses. He did a superb job, nursing the horses’ ailments while honing their speed. It was strictly small-time racing, but Smith’s horses were winning. A giant of a man named Irwin noticed.
“Cowboy Charlie” Irwin ran two businesses: a raucous Wild West show in summer and an even more raucous racing stable in winter. Irwin was a colossus, in form and personality. His weight, thanks to a glandular disorder and 50-pound tumors, swung from a comparatively petite 400 pounds to 540 pounds, packed mostly in a monstrous quaking belly that won him the nickname “Ten Ton” Irwin. His immediate surroundings had to be remade to accommodate his girth. He ran his business from the overburdened back of a freakishly oversized Standardbred horse wearing a superwide saddle. Because Irwin didn’t come within 200 pounds of fitting through a standard car door, he drove a customized sedan outfitted with a wide-load rear hatch through which he wiggled in and out.
Irwin was incurably newsworthy. At the hanging of his friend, convicted killer Tom Horn, he made national headlines by stepping up to the gallows and belting out “Life’s Railway to Heaven.” When notorious fugitive Bill Carlisle robbed a train on the Union Pacific Railroad, Irwin galloped off with the posse that hunted him down, then recounted his story of how he “bagged the gamest train robber that ever pulled a hold-up in the West” in blazing prose in The Denver Post. As an agent for the Union Pacific, he single-handedly saved Colorado’s wool trade during a blizzard by ramming locomotive plows through snowdrifts to open the tracks for trains bearing sheep feed.
Important people were always hovering around him, from General John Pershing to Will Rogers. Teddy Roosevelt once bailed out Irwin’s show when it went broke and got stranded in Sheepshead Bay. Charlie paid him back with a pinto pony and a long friendship. Irwin greeted newcomers with bone-crushing handshakes and tooth-shattering back-slaps. He smothered men in broad smiles, fast talk, and wild stories. He was bold, innovative, blessed with an instinct for promotion, slick, unscrupulous, and completely magnetic. Some of his neighbors, traditional livestockers, didn’t like him much, but he was the prototype of the new breed of western man. Invariably, those who knew him summed him up with the phrase used by former jockey Mike Griffin, who never forgot a brief riding audition he made for Irwin: “the biggest man I’ve ever seen.”
Irwin saw what Smith could do with a horse, and he needed as many good horsemen as he could find. He offered Smith a job as a foreman, farrier, and training assistant. Irwin was a very hard man to refuse, and Smith had few choices. He said yes.
The Lone Plainsman had signed on to a turbulent life. In summer he clattered around the nation by rail, pulling into towns to put on the show under circus tents Irwin had bought cut-rate from the Ringling Brothers outfit when it merged with Barnum & Bailey. The acts were a curious mix of history and myth, everything from cowboy-Indian fights, Pony Express rides, cavalry rescues, and stagecoach robberies to Roman-style chariot racing, relay races, women’s steer wrestling, and mounted rope tricks and gymnastics. The supporting cast was mostly disenfranchised Indians, Mexicans, and cowpunchers, all of whom possessed horsemanship and livestock skills honed on the vanishing frontier.
The headliners were Irwin’s windblown daughters, Frances, Joella, and Paulene, all fearless horsewomen. As a pigtailed child, Joella had once ditched school to compete in, and win, a horse race against legendary Arapahoe riders. She came home to a whipping from her mother and a new horse from her beaming father. Smith worked mostly behind the scenes but occasionally came into the ring to hold relay horses for Irwin’s daughters. Irwin oversaw it all from the back of his huge yellow horse, galloping around the center field with his feet jutting out to the sides, hat waving, booming encouragement to his cowgirls. The nation couldn’t get enough of it, and the show was a sellout from coast to coast.
In the winter, the Irwin racing stable got rolling. Thanks to the wagering ban, the only places for it to go were seedy tracks, backwater ovals so small they were called “bullrings,” and dirt roads, but this was Irwin’s kind of racing. On this circuit, Ten Ton Irwin was king.
The Irwin racing outfit was a little city on railroad tracks. When the bigger tracks—Tijuana, nearby Agua Caliente, or Omaha’s Ak-Sar-Ben (Nebraska spelled backward)—were running, Irwin’s railcars would rattle into town. The workers would pull the horses and tack off the cars, throw up the Ringling Brothers tents and seats, open up “all you can eat, pitch till you win” kitchens inside horse stalls, and settle in for an assault on the racing community. Irwin’s stable was probably the largest in America at the time, and may have been the largest ever, but most of the horses would have been hard-pressed to outrun Irwin himself. The vast majority were relegated to claiming races, rock-bottom events in which any competitor can be purchased for a set, low price before the race. Irwin took a shotgun approach, throwing as many horses as he could into claiming races in the hope that a few would hit pay dirt, then reloading the ones who hadn’t been claimed for another go in a day or two.
When the big tracks closed, Smith and the Irwin crew piled back on the railcars and began endless loops of smaller towns, stopping off in big cities like Kansas City and crossroads like Laramie, Medicine Bow, and Sheridan, Wyoming. Indian reservations were also on the itinerary; Irwin would schedule his arrivals for the day after government checks came to be sure that everyone had betting money. Upon arrival in the town or reservation, Irwin would trot the horses off the railcars and straight to the nearest back road or bullring, where he would implement a nearly fail-safe betting system. He would talk the locals into racing their horses against his for side bets, with a forfeit fee of about $10. He would accept all comers sight unseen, but in the interim between the deal and the race, he would spy on the training of the local horses. If he thought they’d whip his runners, he’d fork over the forfeit fees and skip town, often “forgetting” to pay his hotel bill on the way out. If the local horses were clearly inferior to his, he’d talk their owners into betting all of their cash. When the cash ran out, he’d work on them until they had staked practically everything they owned, right down to their horse blankets. Irwin’s horses almost always won, and Irwin would clean out the locals, pack the horses back on the trains, and leave. “Irwin would put a guy out,” remembered Hall of Fame trainer Jimmy Jones, who cut his teeth running horses against Irwin’s. “The minute [a man] got any money, Irwin would rob him of it. He was an old racketeer in a way.”
This was a rough life for man and beast. For a wage of about $60 a month, Smith slept and ate in horse stalls and struggled to keep up with the farriery needs of fifty-four horses. And Irwin was no easy boss. He had a contract jockey named Pablo Martinez, who worked on a set salary instead of being paid per ride. To save himself the $5 fee a replacement rider would cost him, Irwin once hauled poor Martinez out of a hospital bed and made him ride a race. Though he was down with pneumonia, Martinez somehow managed both to live through the afternoon and to win the race before wheezing his way back to the hospital.
The horses fared worse. Irwin was known to pack thirty horses onto a single four-door railcar, ship them to a race, yank them off the car, and run them without giving them water or letting them warm up. His racing schedules were barbaric. In an era in which one race a week was considered a full calendar, he ran a mare named Miss Cheyenne sixteen times in twenty-one days. He ran another unfortunate horse every day for eight straight days. Rival trainers who claimed horses from Irwin sometimes found them so exhausted that they had to give them long layoffs before they were capable of running again. The hardship paid off for Irwin, who became the winningest trainer in the nation, but it took a toll on the animals. Smith patched them together, soothed their ailments, and learned.
It must have been humiliating for Smith,
