Bedfordtimesregister.com - Horses were once a big part of everyday life for most

I don't know a lot about horses, but I am old enough to remember when horses were common on city streets. They pulled wagons delivering milk, ice, produce and bakery to private homes.

I remember seeking horses being used to dig basements and to hoist large buckets of soil out of a trench into which sewer pipes were laid. To move a very heavy load or to pull a stump out of the ground, a cable would be attached to a firmly anchored drum and a horse would go round and round winding the cable around the drum. The best part of watching was when the horse had to step over the cable every time around. I never saw one trip or stumble.

As a boy, I could see horse droppings just about everywhere. In more populated areas, or in business districts, whitewings were hired to clean up. The job required a large bucket on wheels, a big broom and a shovel. The men always wore white uniforms.

Horse watering troughs, feedbags and horse anchors were familiar to just about everybody. Many Western movies included a scene where the bad buy would fall into a horsetrough. The feedbag became part of our language. To "put on the feedbag" meant "It's time to eat." The horse anchor wasn't as common. You can't park a horse the way you park a car. The best way to be sure your horse doesn't wander off is to tie it to something. Instead of parking spaces and parking meters, places of business had hitching posts out front. A private home might have a single post that could accommodate one or two horses. A business would have a rail that could hold several.

On a city street, there often was no handy place to hitch a horse. That's when the driver placed a heavy piece of cast iron on the ground and tied the horse to it.

I have a favorite farmer/horse story. Except for milking cows, farmers observed Sunday as a day of rest for both the farmer and his team of horses. In the early days of automobile travel, there were few hard-surfaced roads. Horses were much better suited to dirt roads than to pavement. Young couples often went for a drive in the country on a Sunday afternoon. Parking in a shady spot along a country road for a picnic lunch and maybe some "sparking" was just as exciting with a horse and buggy as with a Model T.

One Sunday, a farmer was sitting on his front porch smoking his pipe after a home-cooked meal and just relaxing, when along came a couple in one of those horseless carriages. It had rained that morning and every little pothole in the road will filled with muddy water. The city slicker's Tin Lizzie got stuck in the mud and the driver couldn't get it out, so he approached the farmer for help.

The farmer wasn't about to harness his team for work on a Sunday because there was lots of plowing to be done the next day. But the young man made a very generous cash offer and the horses easily pulled the car out of the mud. As the car drove off, the driver looked back and saw the farmer busily making the mud hole bigger.

I once visited Churchill Downs, where the Kentucky Derby is an old tradition. In the off-season, there was a caretaker in charge of a souvenir shop giving information about the track. He would buy used aluminum horseshoes for more than the salvage price and sell them as souvenirs to tourists. I have one.

When cowboy movies were popular, every cowboy hero had a horse and some of their horses became as popular as the cowboy heroes. Tom Mix rode Tony, the Lone Ranger rode silver and singing cowboy Roy Rogers always rode Trigger. Dale Evans rode Buttermilk.

The Budweiser team of eight huge draft horses is pretty well known and they serve as a reminder of the days when teams of two to eight horses pulled heavy loads. The stage coaches often had four-horse teams and 20 mule teams made Borax famous. Horses worked underground in mines and carried the mail in the days of the Pony Express. Horses also pulled streetcars and hearses and mules or horses hauled barges up and down canals.

Automobiles, trucks, tractors and motorcycles, plus electric motors and gasoline engines, have all but replaced horses. Now, if only a car would come when called, or a truck could swim, then maybe, just maybe, horses would really be obsolete.