SADDLE MY CAYUSE
BY DON DOUCETTE
CAYUSE HORSES
Interesting, the flow of large watersheds east and west of the Rocky Mountain Continental Divide – the large Mississippi River system southeastward and Colorado River drainage southwestward to name just two major American western watersheds.
Encompassing lands of our many ancient North American tribes and very late in the game, our childhood western television cowboy and cowgirl heroes.
Curious, as children we viewed many cowboy programs on TV during the 50s – the Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the Range Rider, Buster Crabb and Fuzzy Jones, Hop-a-long Cassidy etc.
All rode beautiful western horses – Trigger, Silver, Champion to name a few.
CAYUSE HORSES
And the many beautiful Indian ponies…we never knew their names. Hollywood never connected those dots for we naive juvenile western fans.
And about Roy Rogers, a wonderful western singer, heard as we traveled home this evening from an evening meal at Morin’s Diner in Attleboro.
We tuned Willie’s Roadhouse on Sirius Radio and there was Roy Rogers singing a famous and familiar western-style song, DON’T FENCE ME IN.
I’ve listened to those comforting lyrics for a lifetime and finally tonight stopped dead in my tracks…it’s in the lyrics, “cayuse”…heard it many times…”what’s a cayuse?”
And once home the unexpected learning experience, a general term used to identify Indian ponies and…a name for a specific recognized horse breed in the Pacific northwest, the CAYUSE horse.
The educational process never ends and like the classic mythical western range, is never fenced in…our educational experience is an ever-flowing intellectual storehouse…constantly and consistently free for discovery and internalization.
Don Doucette
“Ten Mile River Rambles”
Friends of the Ten Mile and Bucklin Brook
Citizens of the Narragansett Basin