A farrier’s toolbox is not a simple thing. It takes years to build right. The nippers and the pullers and the rasps and the pritch hill and the hammer and the anvil, each one chosen for weight and balance, worn to the specific shape of one man’s hands over years of use. You cannot replace a working farrier’s tools the way you replace a hammer from a hardware store.
The tools that Roy Decker had accumulated over 22 years of shoeing horses across Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, and Utah were worth more than the $780 the finance company got for them at auction on a Friday morning in March of 1956. Here is the story. Roy Decker was born in 1912 in Thermopolis, Wyoming, the son of a man who ran a small blacksmith shop on the edge of town and shod the horses of every rancher within 30 miles.
He learned the trade the way a boy learns a trade when his father has it by watching, then by doing, then by doing wrong and being corrected, then by doing right until right became automatic. He could shape a shoe by the time he was 12. He could fit one clean by the time he was 16. When his father died in 1934, Roy was 22 years old and the shop was mortgaged and the depression had made the mortgage unpayable and the shop went to the bank.
Roy kept the tools. He put them in the bed of a second-hand truck and started driving. A traveling farrier is not the same as a blacksmith with a shop. A traveling farrier goes to the work. He drives the ranch roads of the high country and shows up on a schedule and shoes the horses and drives to the next ranch, and the one after that.
Roy built his circuit the way a man builds a route, ranch by ranch, handshake by handshake, over years of showing up on time, and doing the work right, and not overcharging for it. By 1956, he had 47 ranches on his circuit across four states. He kept them in a small green notebook he carried in his left shirt pocket.
Names, addresses, the last date he had been there, the number of horses shod, any particular notes about an animal’s feet or temperament. Some entries went back 15 years. The notebook was soft at the corners from being in the same pocket in the same shirt for 22 years. He drove a 1948 Ford truck, dark blue, with a portable forge mounted in the bed, and a steel toolbox bolted behind it.
The toolbox held everything. The rounding hammer worn smooth on the face, the pull-offs that had opened 10,000 clinches, the hoof knife with the rosewood handle, the rasp that had been his father’s, and that he had re-sharpened so many times the blade was half the width it started at. The small anvil, 70 lb, that he could lift with one hand because he had been lifting it since he was 16.
Each tool in its place, each one worked in, each one the right weight for his particular hands. In November of 1955, he was at a ranch outside Lander, Wyoming, shoeing a gray quarter horse that had been difficult before, and was difficult again. He had the right front foot up, and was setting the shoe when the horse shifted its weight without warning, came off the cross ties, and put the full force of its hindquarters against Roy’s right leg below the knee.
The tibia snapped. He went down on the barn floor. The foreman of the ranch drove him 40 miles to the hospital in Lander and helped him through the door and told him to send the bill. Roy was in a cast from knee to ankle for 12 weeks. He could not drive. He could not work. He could not reach the 47 ranches on the circuit.
He sent letters to the ones he knew well enough to write to and asked them to hold his place on the schedule. Most of them said they would. He had $280 in the account at the Casper bank, which covered the first two months of the truck payment and the tool loan payment to the Western Finance Company of Casper and left him $40 for food and the phone at the boarding house where he was staying while the leg healed.
In February, the cast came off. He was walking by March, slowly, with a cane he had cut himself from a cottonwood branch. But the third month had not been paid. The finance company had sent a notice in January and a second notice in February and a man in a company truck had come to the boarding house in the first week of March and taken the keys to the Ford and the keys to the toolbox and driven the truck away.
The tools went with it. The forge went with it. The rounding hammer and the pull-offs and the hoof knife with the rosewood handle and the rasp that had been his father’s and the small 70-lb anvil. Everything. The finance company auctioned the lot the following Friday. Roy was not there.
He had the green notebook in his left shirt pocket. He had $42 in the account at the Casper bank. He had the canvas work coat he was wearing, which had a tear in the right knee from when he went down in the barn at Lander and the cane made from a cottonwood branch and a coffee can that somebody at the boardinghouse had given him for a cup.
He walked to the feedlot on the east side of Casper and sat on the top rail of the fence and drank the coffee from the can and looked at the road. John Wayne was 49 years old in March of 1956. He was driving west on the Casper Highway after looking at a cattle operation south of Douglas that a friend had recommended for a purchase he was considering for his Arizona property.
He had not bought the cattle. The operation was not what the friend had described. He was driving back toward Casper to get on the highway south. He passed the feedlot east of Casper and saw the man on the fence. He drove another hundred yards and pulled over on the gravel shoulder. He had spent enough time on sets and on ranches to know a working man’s hands at a distance.
The man on the fence had them. They were visible even from the road. Large, thick through the knuckles, the particular shape that comes from gripping tools for 20 years. They were wrapped around a coffee can. Everything else about the man, the canvas coat with the torn knee, the cottonwood cane leaning against the fence rail, the way he was looking at the road, said something had gone wrong recently.
Wayne got out and walked back to the fence. The man looked at him and placed the face and did not make anything of it. He was a Wyoming man and Wyoming men of that generation did not make a ceremony of recognizing someone. Wayne asked if he was all right. Roy Decker said he was fine. Wayne looked at the coffee can.
He looked at the cane. He asked if he could buy the man a cup of coffee at whatever was nearby. Roy looked down the road. There is a place a quarter mile, he said. They walked to it. It was a diner attached to a truck stop. They sat at the counter. Wayne ordered coffee and pie for both of them without asking, and Roy did not argue.
They sat and drank the coffee, and Wayne asked the kind of questions a man asks when he is genuinely curious and not performing interest. Roy told him the trade, the circuit, the 47 ranches, the horse in Lander, the 3 months, the finance company truck driving away with the toolbox in the bed. He told it plainly, the way a man tells a story he has already accepted the ending of.
Wayne listened to all of it. He drank his coffee. He looked at Roy’s hands on the counter. He asked how much to replace the truck and the tools. Roy looked at the counter. A used truck could be had for four, 500. The tools were the problem. A proper set of farrier’s tools, bought new, was close to 300.
A used set from someone who had quit the trade was less if you could find one, and might be right or might need replacement inside a year. He said his father’s rasp was gone, which was not a dollar amount. Wayne nodded. He asked what the finance company had gotten at auction. 780, Roy said. Wayne looked at the pie he had not touched.
So, the auction price was less than what it would cost to replace what they sold, he said. Roy said that was generally how auctions went. Wayne put the long brown leather wallet on the counter. He opened it. He counted out $800 in bills onto the counter between the coffee cups and the pie plates. He counted them flat and slow, the way a man counts when he wants the number to be clear.
Roy looked at the money. He looked at Wayne. He said, “I am not going to take that.” Wayne said, “It is not a gift. You have 47 ranches waiting on you and horses that need their feet done and you cannot get to them without a truck and tools. Call it an advance. When you get back on the circuit, you shoe my horses at whatever your standard rate is until it is paid off.
I have a ranch in Arizona and horses on it that need the work done right.” He took a card from the wallet and set it on the counter beside the bills. “My ranch foreman,” he said, “call him when you are back on the road. He will put you on the schedule.” Roy looked at the bills. He looked at the card. He looked at his hands on the counter.
The big scarred knuckles and the thick fingers and the palms mapped with the specific calluses of 22 years of hammer and rasp and pull-off. Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. He said, “I have never shot a horse badly in 22 years.” “I know you have not,” Wayne said.
“That is why I am putting $800 on this counter.” Roy picked up the bills. He folded them once and put them in the pocket opposite the green notebook. He picked up the card and looked at it and put it in the same pocket. He drank the rest of his coffee. He said, “Your horses will be the best shod horses in Arizona.
” Wayne picked up the pie he had not touched. He ate it. They sat at the counter a while longer and talked about horses and Wyoming and the state of the cattle market south of Douglas and did not talk about the $800 again. Roy Decker bought a 1951 Ford truck from a man in Casper for $460 3 days later.
He spent the remaining $340 on tools. He could not replace everything. The rounding hammer he found at a pawn shop in Casper, heavier than his old one, which he adapted to over 2 weeks of practice. The pull-offs were new, shipped from a farrier supply in Denver. He found a used hoof knife at a ranch estate sale north of Douglas, a good one, bone handled.
The rasp was new. It was not his father’s. It never would be. He sharpened it six times in the first month and by July it had begun to wear to his hand. He was back on the circuit by April. He wrote letters to all 47 ranches. 39 wrote back and said they would be ready. The other eight he showed up at unannounced and they were ready, too.
Because a man whose horses need shoeing is always ready for the farrier. He drove to Arizona in the fall of 1956 and spent 4 days at Wayne’s ranch outside Stanfield. He shod 12 horses. He charged his standard rate. The same rate he charged every ranch on the circuit. He made a note in the green notebook.
Wayne’s ranch, 12 horses. October 1956. He did the arithmetic on the way back to Wyoming. He had four more trips to make before the advance was paid. He made them over the next 3 years, noting each in the green notebook. In the fall of 1959, on the fourth trip, he shod 14 horses at the Stanfield ranch, drove north to Phoenix, and mailed a letter to the ranch address.
The letter said the account was paid in full. He did not expect a reply and did not receive one. He kept going to Arizona every fall anyway for 7 more years because the horses needed it and because the foreman was a man he liked and because the drive through the high desert was worth doing once a year.
Roy Decker shod horses until 1978. His right leg never fully straightened after Lander and he walked with a slight list to the right for the rest of his life. But he worked around it. He retired at 66, not because he could not do the work, but because his son Clifford had been riding the circuit with him for 4 years and was ready to take it.
The circuit had grown to 61 ranches by then. He died in 1981 in Thermopolis in a house three blocks from where his father’s blacksmith shop had stood before the bank took it in 1934. He was 69 years old. Clifford kept the circuit. Clifford’s son took it after him. The green notebook was in Roy’s shirt pocket when he died.
It had been in that pocket every working day since 1934. It held 47 years of ranch entries in Roy’s compact hand. The ink faded to brown on the earliest pages. The last entry was from October of 1977. The last full season Roy worked alone. Clifford donated the green notebook to the Wyoming State Museum in Cheyenne in 1983.
He also donated the bone-handled hoof knife Roy had found at the estate sale north of Douglas and a single horseshoe, size one regular, stamped with the small RD mark Roy had used to identify his work since 1938. The display is in the trades and crafts section of the museum on Central Avenue in Cheyenne.
The notebook is open under glass to the page covering the fall of 1956. The page shows three entries, two Wyoming ranches, and at the bottom, Wayne’s Arizona ranch outside Stanfield. 12 horses, standard rate. The handwriting is the same compact hand across all three entries. One ranch is not different from the others.
The placard reads, Roy James Decker, 1912 to 1981, farrier, four states, 61 ranches, one green notebook. These items were donated by his son, Clifford Decker, who learned the trade from his father and kept the circuit after him. If this story reached you, pass it on. Share it with a veteran in your life.
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