When struggling with subsistent farm life, families pick up on many different lines of trade or products to help out the family budget. Mack Rob and Ulrich Watlington were thought of as ``cotton tenant farmers'' but their experience with livestock and especially horses often provided income as well as food and horse power for the family. One of these ventures was the faithful sorrel mare, Daisy, who proved to be a very valuable work animal, buggy horse, brood mare, and family friend.
Daisy came into the family about 1912, and died at the time Jennie S. Watlington died in 1941. That means she was around for about 29 years, and although the count of her colts varied, the story was the she had given birth to ``seventeen mule colts'' and Dinah, a pretty marble gray mare who was supposed to be her replacement as a good brood mare. Dinah turned out to be a good ``single-footing'' riding animal and a dependable work animal but never gave the family a single colt.
But the ``seventeen mule colts'' were like money in the bank. They were a source of ready income when mule-power was in demand through the 1920's and 30's. Some of these were sold quite young, others were broken to work and sold or traded later as prime work mules. Ulrich never backed off from ``breaking a mule'' to harness, saddle, and work.
In fact he often traded for high-spirited horses or mules that gave other people problems and thus were less valuable to them. Then he brought them under control. Once he noticed his sons were having difficulty bridling a mule in the stable, which turned away every time they approached and threatened to kick them. He took the bridle from them, spoke to the mule, and the moment the mule turned and offered the rump to him he struck the mule's butt so hard with the leather bridle and bits that the mule was quite willing to offer his head to him and take the bridle. His comment was that ``one has to be smarter than a mule to handle one.'' It could have been that one has to be rougher than a mule to manage one.
Grandpa Watlington and Ulrich were horse traders, trainers and handlers. They would sell, trade, train, and buy promising animals. But Daisy, and later her mare colt Dinah, were fixtures, perrenials. To train a young animal you needed a steady, sane animal to hitch them beside. So Daisy served for training purposes, and not just for breeding. Daisy was intelligent enough that you could cultivate row crop with her by talking to her, without a ``plowline'' to guide her. But she could avoid stepping on the plants or step on them deliberately, according to the mood she was in.
One story they told repeatedly about Daisy was the time Papa was harrowing with a four-horse abreast team near the cowbarn. Some of the children were playing nearby and as they neared the edge of the field old Daisy stopped suddenly and caused the other three horses to stop. Trusting Daisy's judgment, Papa checked to see what the cause might be, and he found that Daisy had bumped a three year old son to the ground and stepped on him lightly; but realizing what had happened brought the whole team to a halt. According to family legend, the price went up on Daisy that day; she just wasn't for sale. I was the child and so heard various versions of the story across the years. Daisy had saved my life, but stretched my stomach.
Another part of the story is that as a six or seven year old I was getting into the empty wagon for a ride by climbing up the spokes of the back wheel as a ladder. The wagon started up, not realizing that another child was climbing on, and the movement threw me to the ground, with the wagon wheel passing over my turned-up stomach. Perhaps it was soft ground or a hard stomach but there was no permanent damage. By the time I was ten I had developed a ``buttermilk stomach'' (similar to a beer belly) and the brothers would say that my stretched stomach came from Daisy's footstep and the wagon wheel.
Daisy was Jennie's favorite buggy horse, probably because she was so tame and easily harnessed. Without help she could catch Daisy, harness her to the buggy and go visiting. In a similar way many of the boys were taught to harness a horse and hitch up to plow Daisy because she offered no special danger to them.
But the time came when Daisy's teeth wore out and she might have been sent to the fertilizer (tankage) factory, but she wasn't. She had a bad shoulder from collar burns years previously, and a swollen front knee and wasn't good any more for heavy team work or wagon service except for short hauls. But she was special. Some believed that Ulrich found her so contrary at times that he wanted her to live a long life and suffer much for all the grief she had caused him across the years. But I believe that Ulrich and Jennie had realized that she was one of the family's best friends and that she had saved several of their children by her work and her colts and by being gentle with boys learning to harness her, ride and plow.
She was available into her last years for garden plowing, or pulling the ground sled around the farm to haul feed or plows. But she needed corn that her teeth would not grind, so Ulrich and the boys would grind her corn for her in a mill intended for mechanical power to run it. We had adapted a handle to turn it but it was not a grinder for women or children. Some boys had wished Daisy dead several years before she gave up the ghost. Even then she got the best of us, for Ulrich would not call the tankage company truck to come and make fertilizer of her mortal remains. He hitched up a team and drug her to an appropriate sand ditch and saw that we shoveled enough dirt over her so that no buzzard or dog would ever touch her.
If Jennie had been there she would have cried. In fact, one of the few times I saw Jennie cry was when Ulrich finally traded Dinah off for a young mule. She did not complain; she did not wail out loud, but as Dinah was loaded up to go away, Jennie cried unashamedly. Such were the bonds of our family to our favorite horses. Some relationships may still be sacred, even among the animals.