Every month I attend the Oklahoma Electric Coop State wide Association meeting in Okie City. Since Ozarks Electric, where I am a director, serves a couple of counties in Oklahoma I’m their rep over there. At a meeting earlier in the year a man came up to me asking about a horse and mule sale in Berryville, Ark. His name is David Blackburn and he lives in Atoka, Okla.
David is a retired Oklahoma State Trooper who snickers about bringing feeder pigs home in his patrol car’s trunk during his career. Raised on a farm in southern Oklahoma, his father never believed in tractors – farmed all his life with teams. He also did not like mules and in fact, he climbed in a wagon one day with David who had a perfect team of mules hitched to it. His father said disgruntledly that they’d probably run away, and sure enough they raced off throwing both of them out of the wagon and wrecking in a fence.
One day while on trooper duty, David spotted a farmer with a pickup bearing a nice looking mule in it. Finally he stopped the man and explained there was nothing wrong but he simply wanted to look at his mule. It came to him that this old man in his bib overalls might sell that mule worth the money. The man told him he used the mule without lines to skid timber—by voice commands. When he asked the man if he’d sell his animal, he answered in a screechy voice, “I’d not take a dime less than five thousand dollars for him!”
So much for bargain mules.
David told a story of his good friend Ed. They had hitched Ed’s mules to the chuck wagon in the cattle trail drive that went through Oklahoma a few years ago. He thought it was a neat experience to step back in time like that and be apart of what made the west.
David’s Belgium horses and wagon along with Ed’s mules and wagon make many parades across the state. Besides the big horses, David keeps a team of Haflingers, a smaller breed of draft horses that belong to the local funeral home owner. From time to time these are used to pull a small hearse to the cemetery.
The director phoned David one morning and needed him to hitch up the team and bring the hearse that day for a funeral. He apologized, said he’d gotten so busy and forgotten to call him earlier. David told him he had a meeting to attend and couldn’t, but would mules do the job? The funeral director agreed.
So he called Ed and told him to take his mules and wagon down there and park a half block away. But Ed wanted no part of a funeral or dead man in his wagon no matter how much they paid. It took some convincing and Ed finally agreed for one time only he’d do this for his friend but not to call him ever again and ask him to do this.
David said he couldn’t understand how they went to all these parades and never got any money, but his friend wouldn’t welcome a well paying job. The day of the funeral came, and there was Ed with his mules, parked half a block away. When the man from the funeral home waved him to come down, halfway to the spot a wheel fell off his wagon and the axle dropped.
Poor Ed must have seen that as a sign cause they said he ran around the wagon holding his head. Then in desperation he began searching for the nut off the axle. Being a small Oklahoma town, three guys in pickups had stopped, jacked it up and put the wheel back on by the time he got back with the nut.
David had told him to strap the casket over the top and use a binder too so it didn’t slide out of the back of the wagon. The deceased tied down, by this time shaking in his boots, Ed headed his mules for the graveyard.
A cop stopped the traffic for his passage and one of those halted was a big eighteen-wheeler tractor and trailer rig. When his mules came right up beside it, his air brakes went off. The mules thought they were shot. They tore out across the road, down through the bar ditch and back on the road on two wheels. Ed was a real skinner, and a good thing, too. He finally managed to get them under control and delivered the casket, intact, to the grave.
He called David that night and said once again, under no circumstances or for any amount pay was he ever again hauling a dead man to his grave.
Nothing like country fun is there? Don’t turn over the wagon or have a runaway. See you next time.
Western novelist Dusty Richards and his wife Pat live on Beaver Lake in northwest Arkansas. For more information about his books you can email Dusty by visiting www.ozarksfn.com and click on 'Contact Us' or call 1-866-532-1960.
