Page 49 - NMHBA_Winter2022

Ray Reed, Jimmy and Carla Claridge, Robert Driggers, Jim Powell and Gerald Marr after Bedex won the New Mexico Horsemen’s Association.
“My dad, W.I. “Buster” Driggers, started handling the Bar Y brand back in the 1920s,” Robert Driggers said. “We had hundreds of thousands of acres back then and at least 100 head of broodmares. We had a lot of Norfleet horse and a lot of ol’ Billy Cleggs. We even brought in some government remount stallions from Oklahoma.”
The AQHA hadn’t seen the light of day when all this was happening. The Quarter Horse breed was being sculpted. A bunch of tough ranchers knew what they needed on those “hundreds of thousands of acres” and, piece-by-piece, they made a custom horse.
Almost everyone was interested in speed. They needed to be faster than a brush-faced steer. They needed to be calm and steady enough to drag up a calf for doctoring, and they sure as heck needed to be fast enough to pick up a few extra bucks on a dirt road on a back section of the ranch.
The Norfleet horses that peppered the Bar Y in New Mexico came out of Texas, many of them from the legendary J. Frank Norfleet. Known as a crime fighter, a Texas Ranger, a trail driver, a buffalo hunter, an Indian fighter, a jockey, and a U.S. Marshal,
Norfleet allegedly engaged in his last gunfight at the age of 90. Norfleet was just a “typical Texan” who would rather be shot dead than be connected with any slow-moving, sissy horses. The Norfleets contributed mightily to the emerging Quarter Horse.
“Warren Shoemaker was another one
we watched as he added to the Quarter
Horse breed,” Driggers continued. “My
dad and brother raised a lot of those early, pre-association horses but we also had Thoroughbreds at the same time. Not as many as the Quarters, but remember, way back then the Quarters didn’t even have an official name.”
DelRae & Robert Driggers
WINTER 2022 47