Page 45 - New Mexico Horse Breeder Summer 2018

A MOMENT IN TIME
and a taste for the excitement of racing and the world outside the San Luis Valley, Burns hired on in the early 1920’s with the legendary Col. C.B. Irwin, promoter extraordinaire and owner of the Irwin Brothers Wild West Show. Irwin,
a mountain of a man at roughly 400 pounds, was an old pro. He had originally organized his show, one of the largest of the old-time Wild West troupes, before the First World War. In the 1920’s his outfit – featuring cowboy-Indian skirmishes, staged bank robberies, trick riding and roping, and the like – toured the West, and Irwin was always in the market for real cowboys willing to make a buck by amazing the green- horns. Additionally, he owned perhaps 100 to 125 race horses running at tracks all over the West, especially California. Irwin had many uses for a man like Frank Burns, and Burns worked for him off and on throughout the twenties and thirties as a kind of a contract cowboy.
With the Irwin show Frank gained a trea- sure chest of rare experiences, memories that make a city-slicker green with envy. He rode and bunked with Bob Crosby, one of New Mexico’s own and the single most famous rodeo cowboy of all time. He performed in a number of movies which used the colorful Wild West Show as a setting and rubbed shoulders with Wallace Beery, Hoot Gibson, and Ken Maynard, among others. (Burns doubled for Maynard in one movie scene where the star was expected to race pell-mell around the arena on
a palomino stallion – at a speed somewhat too fast for the Hollywood cowboy!) He acted in the Old West “dramas” the Wild West show staged for its audiences, shoot-‘em-ups in which Burns might play the bank robber desperado who shot up the town or the valiant Indian- fighter who saved the settler from the “savages.” But ultimately most important of all, with the Irwin Wild West show Frank Burns became a world-class rodeo cowboy.
Though he developed all-around cowboy skills during his years with the Irwin show, two relatively unusual (these days) riding events became his real specialties, competition in which he displayed championship level talents. These were relay racing and Roman riding, contests not often seen in modern day rodeos – and we are the poorer for it. The essentials of relay rac- ing are pretty easily summarized. Using (usually) three different horses – once around the track with each – the contestant tried to beat his com- petition to the finish line. Put in one flat, bland sentence like that, the event sounds deceptively simple and only a little more exciting than a hot Chinese checkers tournament. It’s only when you look at the relay race up close that you begin to sense the raw excitement of the event and the special skill and timing required in it.
To recapture its drama, picture five or six teams of competitors stretched across the finish
line of a narrow track. Each team at the start involved one horse and three cowboys – a rider, a “holder,” and a “catcher.” (Over at the side stood another cowboy for each team holding the two extra horses used in laps two and three.) Imagine the hubbub! For a normal, six-team competi- tion the race began with 24 cowboys, 18 horses, and miscellaneous personnel, all crammed into the limited space of the starting ara. At a gun signal they were off, riders flailing their mounts furiously around the narrow track. While the rider was making his first circuit, his holder and catcher took their places at the finish line with the horse for the second lap. The catcher would be responsible for grabbing the first horse after the rider jumped from its back about twenty to thirty feet from the finish, jerking his saddle with him. The holder would be positioning the sec- ond horse, making sure it was standing correctly – feet squared away and standing at a right angle to the onrushing rider on the first horse. At just the right moment, the rider, racing full speed toward the finish line, reached down beneath himself and via a ring mechanism snapped his rubber-cinched saddle loose. The momentum generated at thirty miles per hour flung him run- ning toward the back of horse two. While the catcher caught the first horse, the holder released the second and its start jerked the rider into the saddle. That’s all there was to it! The real finesse of the process, however, is not appreciated until you realize that it has taken much longer to read about it than to do it. “If we hit the timing just right – I could be off the back of the first horse and gone on the second in three seconds. If you had to do it standing still, you couldn’t, but
the speed of that first horse threw you toward
the second, and if the holder had him angled
just right and let him go just right, why it was easy. But if you didn’t hit that waiting horse just right – at thirty miles per hour – over and over you’d go!” Three seconds. Nothing to it! And, of course, the entire delicate operation was repeated when the rider approached the finish line to begin the third lap.
The “World Championship Relay Rider” plate mentioned earlier indicates that Frank Burns didn’t “miss that waiting horse and go tumbling over and over” too regularly. Along with the 1933 World’s Fair title, he won the relay riding competition at the world famous Cheyenne Frontier Days almost a dozen times, including five years in succession, 1935-39. He dominated the event at the equally presti- gious Pendleton (Ore.) Roundup throughout the late 20’s and 30’s. and although he clearly could compete in the “big time,” he could also be found riding his relay string at less exalted places all over the Rocky Mountain West – at the Monte Vista (Col.) Mile-High Stampede; the Cowboy’s Reunion Days in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; or at smaller rodeos in towns like Raton,
New Mexico; Capulin, Col.; Sheridan and Gillette, Wyoming; Billings and Great Falls, Montana; and many, many more. His skill
at relay riding, put bread on his table in the 1920’s and 30’s as he followed the rodeo cir- cuit across the West, winding up every year in Alamosa to wait out the winter.
The phrase “Roman riding” in the sentence above probably completely unfamiliar to nine readers out of ten, yet it was one of the most dramatic and colorful of all old-time rodeo events and the second of Frank Burns’s special- ties as a rodeo performer. Thousands of spec- tators would cram the rickety grandstands in places like Monte Vista, Colorado (as many as 40-50,000 at Cheyenne or Pendleton) to watch the Roman riders pound around the track, and big money would change hands among the onlookers, depending on who best handicapped riders and mounts. It was all very simple, Burns insists, “really simple, though it might look a little hard. It was just like riding a bicycle: once you got your balance, you didn’t think about
it anymore.” All the Roman rider needed was a couple of good, fast horses, preferably racetrack experienced thoroughbreds who really liked to run – plus strong nerves and maybe a little dash of showmanship. At the start of the race, the rider would sit astride one of his two mounts, holding the reins of both. With a shout the competitors – maybe as many as ten, but usu- ally four of five – would be off. Before the first turn was reached, usually about a hundred
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In that fifty-year-old flashback, he’s riding out into a crowded Soldier Field in Chicago while
the announcer booms, “Competing for the relay riding championship of
the woorrlllddd, Frankie Burns!” He grins as he remembers the shudder that stretched out ”woorrlllddd” sent up his spine. He must not have shuddered or shaken too much, though, because there sits the silver plate: “Presented by the Chicago Daily News to FRANKIE BURNS for WORLD CHAMPION RELAY RIDER, World’s Fair Rodeo, Soldier Field, Chicago, 1933.”