Page 103 - Speedhorse March 2018

In the springtime of 1928, a slim man of medium build with blue eyes secured enough cash to acquire 240 acres of land in the Osage
Hills of northeastern Oklahoma. Against the advice of friends who feared the rumbles in the national economy and suggested waiting until times were safer, the man and his wife, and their two daughters, set up housekeeping on the spread between Nowata and Bartlesville the following year. Electricity and plumbing were lost items. The only available water was pumped from a small well.
The man christened the spread Cross J Ranch. He was determined to build it into a haven for sleek Herefords, but – above all – he envisioned the Cross J brand on the thighs of the rodeo and race horses he dreamed of breeding.
As the years unfolded, the Cross J evolved
into a four-thousand acre spread of bermuda and bluestem. A majestic, two-story home made of native stone from Cross J land dominated a hill. The man behind the Cross J brand designed the house, reserving the first floor for comfortable dens and offices. Bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, etcetera, were up there on the second floor out of his way.
Decade by decade, the horses that left home with the Cross J brand on their thighs would,
briefly put, blind the souls of many strong men and women to all but Cross J blood. Quarter Horse breeders deemed it the magic potion to strengthen their programs. Straightaway addicts chased it. Rodeo greats contracted for Cross J foals still in their mammas’ bellies. At the same time, Cross J Thoroughbreds caused some ripples in the purple- bred set by lowering a few records for a mile or more east of the Mississippi and south of the Rio Grande.
Some of the Thoroughbreds that left the Cross J were progeny of the black stallion from Oklahoma that could finish a quarter in :21.6, but lost momentum beyond that pole and could never be rated in Thoroughbred circles. Beggar Boy. This was the stallion whose blood the man behind the Cross J brand chose to cross on to the daughters of the mahogany bay with a star and a left hind sock, Oklahoma Star.
Oklahoma Star and Beggar Boy were marked for greatness, and they achieved it – singly at first and then together on the Cross J. Their blood, separate and blended, did as much as
any and much more than most to revitalize the “zing” of the frontier horses that became the backbone of AQHA foundation stock.
Beggar Boy and Oklahoma Star proved to be
of such mettle that their names, inserted into any conversation among horsemen of that era, could upstage anything – even other Cross J horses. Consequently, many of the Cross J greats ran second to the romance, the legend, and the fact of Star and Beggar.
Today the man behind the Cross J brand
– Ronald S. “Ron” Mason – is going on ninety- one. Ron and his second wife, Monett, live in a long, low, white house on a hill overlooking the golf course west of Nowata, Oklahoma.
Monett lights a fire in the big, stone fireplace in the living room at dawn on chilly mornings and turns on a few lamps that send a glow to all the horse photos and paintings lining the wall. About the same time blades of sunlight replace the lamplight in the living room, Ron appears. He is as slim as he ever was. His legs and back bother him on occasion, but he will not bend to them.
“I never killed anybody or ran off with another man’s wife or made a dishonest nickel off of anybody. Now I might have sold a horse too high on occasion, but for every one I sold too high, I sold lots of others too low.
“The one thing I always wanted to do, and never did, was take my horses all the way, to the
The Man On The Hill
Part 1
On The Road To Stars And Beggars by Lyn Jank
“Big Red and me” – Ronald Mason with his big range using horse. Ron loved the horse that was both friend and transportation during the heyday of the Cross J and kept a section of his scrapbook devoted to photos of the horses. Big Red descended from the family of Coke Blake’s Cold Deck, by Steel Dust or Steel Dust’s son Old Billy.
SPEEDHORSE, March 2018 101
LOOKING BACK - AN EXCERPT FROM MAY 1981 ISSUE
E