Horsewomen Gather For Sale

Men were welcome, but women were the focus at B Bar B Ranch during the weekend at the second Women of the West horse sale.

If not for the women riders showing off the sale horses, it might have looked like any other performance horse auction. And if not for B Bar B ranch owner Katie Breckenridge’s tribute to her mother Miriam Breckenridge, it might have seemed like any other sale.

Miriam Breckenridge worked alongside the men in the livestock business in the Stanley Basin and in the Wood River and Magic valleys. Her daughter praised Miriam Breckenridge’s gentle but rugged womanliness and other women who were on hand.

“Many of you came a thousand miles and some of you came a quarter mile, yet all of you came to watch we the women work our animals,” Breckenridge said.

Tan Hermens traveled from her Rudio Creek Ranch in Kimberly, Ore., hauling four paint horses, two young horses and two finished horses. “There’s a lot of great women horse trainers out there. It’s kind of a man’s world, though. I think this is a really good event, a chance for women to be noticed and I hope gets bigger and bigger each year,” she said.

Her daughter’s elegant paint horse brought top dollar at the sale with a $8,500 bid that couldn’t really make a dent in the actual cost of bringing it to a high level of schooling. But Hermens intends to keep trying to sell her horses at a cost that indicates her hard work.

Women of the West is advertised as a fundraiser for the Wood River Medical Center’s Women’s Resource Center in Hailey, but proceeds from horse sales went to the sellers. Resource center executive director Lisa Laajala said the center received less than $1,000 from the 1996 Women of the West auction, and she expected less this year.