Breaking New Ground Love Nudges Cowboy Nomad To Settle Down, Train Horses In Colfax

The corrals Keith Danielson built last year were intended to keep the young, wild colts he trains hemmed in.

He might as well have built them for himself.

“The hardest thing to adjust to was the smallness of places,” said 36-year-old Danielson, who spent his adulthood drifting through the Intermountain West cowboying at cattle ranches before moving to Colfax two years ago.

Danielson is a buckaroo.

Try explaining that to the wheat grower in line at the grocery store.

“I try to tell people he’s not a farmer, he’s a cowboy,” said Carla, his wife of five years. “It’s amazing how many people don’t know the difference.”

Buckaroos are a cadre of respected horsemen in the northern Nevada range cattle industry.

Many don’t realize there are still hundreds of them pushing cattle through the bunchgrass, carving real cowboy lifestyles from some of the toughest terrain in the West.

Danielson, who worked ranches for 15 years in Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, gave up his roaming lifestyle two years ago to settle in Colfax. He’s using his buckaroo experience to launch a horse training business.

His wife calls him a horse whisperer. He avoids the term, saying sheepishly that he still has much to learn.

“People ask me if I’m a horse whisperer,” Danielson said. “I tell them sometimes I whisper, sometimes I yell.”

While the term buckaroo and cowboy are interchangeable, buckaroo denotes a northern Nevada tradition.

Big ranches often have their own hierarchy made up of bosses, then buckaroos, the expert horsemen at the center of the work. Below them are ranch hands and helpers.

Buckaroos practice a specific etiquette and style passed down from older hands, said Danielson. They use longer ropes and leather on the saddle-horn instead of rubber, for example. They typically wear jeans, a pair of short fringed chaps called “chinks,” low brimmed hats and “wild rags,” silk scarves wrapped around the neck and tied in front.

Danielson became known as a buckaroo who trained colts, also known as “bronc busting.”

As he tells it, he liked the job in part because he was too young and foolish to know better. He moved to Montana out of high school in Minnesota, following a childhood dream to be a cowboy.

He had lived in Montana once before, during a stop in his father’s travels as an Evangelical Free Church preacher. When he walked onto his first ranch, he was green but full of nerve. He always asked to ride the horses that bucked.

“A person without any fear doesn’t know how badly they can get hurt,” Danielson said. “But the more a person does it, the more leery you get.”

Over the next decade he ranched through Montana, Wyoming and Nevada, staying as long as a year, as short as a few months. He learned to shoe and doctor animals and honed his techniques for building trust between man and horse.

Throughout the ‘80s, he worked huge ranches - up to a million acres of rangeland, a dozen cowboys, 100 horses and 5,000 head of cattle. He and other Nevada buckaroos were featured in a cowboy photography book. His image even made it into a 1997 cowboy calendar.

But the life was far from glamorous. Camps were sometimes 50 miles from the nearest telephone, outside of places like St. Xavier, Mont.; Thermopolis, Wyo.; Deeth, Nev.; and Adel, Ore.

Places that now make Colfax feel like the city.

“You are used to living where there’s no boundaries. You see country … ridge after ridge, ” he said. “It’s hard to go to where there’s a boundary every couple acres.”

But Danielson’s love for Carla outweighed his passion for open spaces.

They met in an Elko, Nev., casino through mutual friends. It was a case of opposites attracting.

“He thought I was a city girl and I had never seen a real cowboy before,” Carla recalled.

At the time, Danielson said, he could feel God tugging at his soul about the “bad living,” that goes along with the cowboy lifestyle: drunkenness, selfishness, immoral choices.

So over the next five years, Danielson cowboyed his way north from Nevada, eventually reaching La Grande, Ore., and then Plymouth, Wash., where Carla could drive from Colfax each weekend to see him.

Finally, in 1996, he moved to Whitman County with his horse Pretty Boy and began building fences for the Lazy K Bar C Corral.

He’s worked a variety of jobs, but isn’t interested in mechanics, computers, or even engines.

“It’s creation that I’m in love with,” Danielson said. “Whether it’s horses, or the land.”

He now teaches basic horse skills for Colfax 4-H students, shoes horses and is training three colts.

He charges $425 for the first 30 days and $325 for each 30-day period after that. Such time is a luxury for a man who once handled 45 colts in a month and a half.

Inside the corral, he locks eyes with a nervous colt and tosses his rope around its neck. He moves closer, puts his hand between the horse’s ears, increasing pressure until the animal “gives,” to him, lowering its head.

Some days he spends hours just petting them, then doing “groundwork.”

From the house above, Carla watches him through the French doors she had built into her kitchen for that purpose.

“His ability is learned,” she said, glancing out to where he’s feeding the horses. “but natural instinct is a gift.”