John Wayne Saw A Broke Rodeo Champion Sell His Saddle In Prescott 1957 — Then He Gave Him A Ranch

John Wayne Saw A Broke Rodeo Champion Sell His Saddle In Prescott 1957 — Then He Gave Him A Ranch

July 1957 Prescott, Arizona The oldest rodeo in the world is in town and the finest bronc rider it ever turned out is mucking the stalls behind the shoots for $2 a day and a corner of the hayloft to sleep in. His name is Wade Tully. 12 years ago in 1945 on these same fairgrounds where he is now shoveling manure into a wheelbarrow Wade Tully won the all-around saddle bronc, bareback, and steer roping and they set a hand-tooled silver mounted championship saddle up on his shoulders with his name and the year cut deep into

the skirt and a whole grandstand came up onto its feet and hollered his name into the Arizona sky. He was 29 years old. There was not a better hand anywhere on the circuit and everybody in that country knew exactly who Wade Tully was. He is 41 now. He walks with a bad hitch that a horse put into him and this afternoon he is going to do the one last thing a champion ever wants to do.

A tall man in a tan Stetson up from his ranch for the rodeo is going to stand in the crowd and watch him do it. Here is the story. Wade Tully came up out of nothing. A hard-scrabble place east of Snowflake where his daddy ran a few sorry cows on a lot of bad ground. What Wade had that the good Lord hands out to about one man in a hundred thousand was a seat.

He could ride anything. He sat a bronc the way water sits in a glass easy and exactly right and he had the timing of a man who could hear the horse think a half second before or horse did. He went down the road at 17 with a borrowed saddle and a cardboard suitcase. And by the time he was 25, he was winning everywhere.

 Cheyenne, Pendleton, Fort Worth, Calgary. And in 1945, he won it all. And they gave him that saddle. He married a girl named Ruth from Holbrook the next spring. A steady, clear-eyed girl who loved him before he was anybody and would have loved him if he’d never been anybody at all. They bought a little place outside Chino Valley with the winnings.

 40 acres and a barn and a windmill. And for a couple of years there, Wade Tully had it all. The whole of it. The saddle and the girl and the ground and his name in the paper. Then came the wreck. It was the summer of 1948 in the chute at a rodeo in Salinas on a big black saddle bronc called Copperhead that nobody had ever ridden the way a horse is supposed to be ridden.

Copperhead reared straight up in the chute before the gate ever opened and came over backward and there was no place for Wade to go. The horse came down on top of him and rolled. And when they pulled Wade out, his right hip and the top of his leg were broken in a way that the doctors in 1948 could set but could never really fix.

 He was in a cast to his ribs for 5 months. He learned to walk again. He never could ride again. Not the way it had to be done. And a bronc rider who has lost half a second is a bronc rider who’s going to get killed. And Wade knew it. And so the thing he had been put on this earth to do was simply over at the age of 32. He tried to come back. Of course, he tried.

He spent the better part of a year getting on colts and old gentle horses in back corrals when he thought nobody was looking, telling himself the seat would come back if only the leg did. The seat did not come back. He got bucked off things a green kid would have sat without thinking, and the ground that had been a friend to him his whole life was suddenly a very long way down and full of hard edges.

The last time he ever climbed off a horse, he stood alone in an empty corral for a good while, and then he limped to the gate and shut it behind him. And that was the end of that. A man can lose his work and survive it if he has something to put in its place. Wade Tully did not. He had been the best in the world at one thing, and now he could not do that one thing, and the not doing of it ate him alive.

He took to the bottle the way ruined men do, slow at first, and then all at once. The 40 acres went, sold off to pay what he owed. He hired on at outfits as a hand and could not keep up and got let go, kindly at first and then not so kindly. And Ruth, patient, clear-eyed Ruth, held on through more of it than any woman should have to.

And then, one gray morning, with her heart breaking, she packed a bag and went home to Holbrook because she could not watch him do it to himself anymore. And he would not stop. That was 3 years back. By the summer of 1957, Wade Tully was 41, and he had nothing. And he had drifted into Prescott for the Frontier Days the way he drifted everywhere now, picking up day work.

And the rodeo committee had given the old champion a job mucking stalls and a place in the loft because somebody on it remembered him and felt the ache of it. He did the work without complaint. He kept to himself. He did not go up to watch the riding and he owed $190 to a stock contractor named Dell Stroud, borrowed in a bad stretch over the winter.

 And Dell Stroud wanted it back. And Wade Tully did not have it. And the only thing left in the whole world that Wade Tully owned that was worth $190 was the saddle. The 1945 all around championship saddle. Hand tooled, silver mounted, his name and the year cut deep into the leather. He had slept with his head on it in boxcars. He had carried it through every bad year and never once let it go because as long as he had it, there was a thing in the world that said Wade Tully had been somebody, even if the somebody was gone now.

On Saturday afternoon, he carried it out from the loft to settle his debt. Dell Stroud had set up at a plank table by the stock pens. And there were men around, cowboys, hands, a few old-timers who had been coming to Prescott for 30 years and knew exactly whose saddle that was the second Wade set it down on the table.

Stroud looked at it a long moment. Then he looked at Wade and he smiled a little, the way a hard man smiles when he has another man right where the other man cannot get out. “That’s a real nice saddle, Wade.” He said loud enough. “Used to belong to somebody, I hear.” A couple of men laughed the uneasy way. “Tell you what, you owe me 190, I’ll call us square for the saddle and give you 10 on top.

 $10 and your slate’s clean. That’s more than fair to a fellow in your shape. It was robbery. And every man standing there knew it. That saddle was worth 400 to anybody, six to the right collector. But Wade Tully owed the man. And the man had him. And Wade stood there with his hand flat on his own name cut into the leather, and he could not say a word because there was nothing to say.

He nodded once, looking at the ground. Nobody said anything. The afternoon sounds of the rodeo carried over from the arena. An announcer’s voice, a far-off smatter of applause for some other man’s ride. And here at the plank table by the stock pens, it was dead quiet. One of the old-timers, a man who had watched Wade Tully win Prescott three separate times, turned his head and looked off at the mountains because he could not stand to watch this happen.

Wade kept his hand flat on the saddle a moment longer, on his own name cut into the leather, the way you keep your hand on something a breath longer before you let it go for good. And a voice from the edge of the little crowd said, “I’ll give you 400 for it.” Every head turned. There was a tall man standing there in a tan Stetson and a canvas coat, 50 years old, broad as a barn door.

And the men around the table went quiet in a different way than they had been quiet for Dell Stroud. He came up to the table easy and unhurried. He did not look at Stroud. He looked at the saddle, and he ran one finger along the name cut into the skirt, slow. “Wade Tully,” he read out loud, like it meant something, because to him it did.

“I had $10 on you to win at Pendleton in ’46, son, and you paid me. I never forgot how you rode that day.” Then he turned and looked at Dell Stroud, and his voice did not go up at all. “How much does he owe you?” Stroud’s smile had gone somewhere. “190.” The tall man took a long brown leather wallet out of his coat and counted $190 onto the plank table, slow, in front of all of them.

“Now, he doesn’t owe you anything,” he said. “And the saddle stays right here on this table, because it isn’t yours, and it never was going to be. You can go on now, Dell.” And Dell Stroud, looking at the money and at the face above it, and at all the men watching, picked up the cash and went. And that was the end of him.

Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. Then the tall man turned to Wade Tully, who had not moved, who was standing there looking at his saddle still sitting on the table, his clean saddle that he did not have to sell after all, and could not understand why.

“I didn’t ask you to do that,” Wade said. His voice was rough. “I don’t take charity. I’ll find a way to pay you the 190.” “It isn’t charity, and I don’t want it back, and that’s not why I’m standing here.” The tall man hooked a boot on the bottom rail of the stock pen and settled in like a man who had all day.

“I’ve got a ranch down by Stanfield. I run a lot of horses on it. And I am surrounded, son, by young fellows who can rope and ride a little and who do not know the first true thing about starting a colt right. I have been looking for 2 years for a horseman. Not a cowboy, a horseman. A man who can take a green 3-year-old and bring him along so he’s soft and willing and right for the rest of his life.

He looked at Wade. I watched you ride for 15 years. There has never been a pair of hands in this state like yours. Your legs are done. I can see the hitch. I’m not blind. But a man doesn’t start colts with his legs. He starts them with his hands and his head and his patience. And you have got more of all three than any man I ever saw sit a horse.

Wade Tully stared at him. I’m 41 years old and I’ve been drunk for the better part of nine of them. Then you’re done being drunk because I don’t keep a man who drinks and you’ve just been offered a reason to quit. The tall man took a card out of his pocket and set it on the table next to the saddle. Foreman’s name is on there.

 Hundred a month, a house of your own and every colt on the place to bring along your way. Nobody looking over your shoulder. It is not a handout. It is the hardest job I’ve got and the most important one. And I am offering it to you because you are the best man in Arizona to do it. And I would be a fool to drive home without you.

He picked up the championship saddle off the table and he handed it to Wade and he closed Wade’s arms around it. This is yours. It was always yours. Put it on a horse of mine and let’s see what you’ve still got. Wade Tully held his saddle against his chest, the way a man holds something he had already said goodbye to.

And his eyes filled, and he could not stop them. 41 years old in front of all those men, and not one of them was laughing now. “What do I call you?” he said. “You call me a fellow who knows a horseman when he sees one,” the tall man said. “Come to work Monday.” And he turned and walked off through the pens toward the gate.

 And one of the old-timers by the table said it, soft, the way you say a thing you can hardly believe. “Boys, that was John Wayne.” But the tall man was already gone, and he did not turn around. And Wade Tully stood there holding his name in his arms with the whole rest of his life suddenly opening up in front of him like country after a long ride in the dark.

Have you ever watched a man get handed back not a thing, but a reason? The one thing that ruin takes from you first and gives back last. It is a harder gift than money and a rarer one. And it does something to a man that money never can. Wade Tully went to work that Monday, and he did not take another drink as long as he lived.

 He dried out hard those first weeks in the little house down at Stanfield, and then he went to the horses, and the horses gave him back to himself. Within 2 years, the colts coming off that ranch were the softest, best started young horses in the Southwest. And men drove from three states to buy a horse that Wade Tully had put the first 60 days on.

He wrote to Ruth that first fall, the first honest letter he had sent her in years. And Ruth, clear-eyed Ruth, who had never once stopped loving him and only stopped watching him drown, came out on the train to Stanfield, and she stayed. And they had the years together they should have had all along. There was a sorrel colt in those first years, a hot, scared, beautiful thing that three good hands had already given up on and written off as an outlaw.

 And Wade took him on and never once raised his voice and brought him along soft over a whole winter. And that colt turned into the finest using horse on the place. And John Wayne rode him for years. Wade never said much about it, but the men who worked that ranch knew exactly what it meant. That the thing in Wade Tully, which everybody, including Wade, had buried out behind the bottle, had not died after all.

 It had only been waiting all that time for somebody to hand it a horse. John Wayne never once called it a favor. In all the years Wade worked for him, he never let the thing be spoken of as charity. Never let Wade thank him for anything but a job. “You earn your hundred a month and then some,” he’d say. “You don’t owe me a sunrise.

” And it was true because Wade was the best hand he ever had. The old-timers who’d been at that plank table in Prescott told the story for years, which is most of how it ever got out at all, because the two men in it never did. Wade Tully ran the horses on that ranch for the rest of his working life, near 30 years, and somewhere in there John Wayne deeded him the little house and the 40 acres it sat on free and clear, so that the man would have a place of his own to grow old on.

 Which is the part Wade would tell you mattered most. A champion who’d lost his ground and got ground again. He raised two kids in that house with Ruth. He died out there an old man, respected all over that country, a horseman to the end. And they buried him within sight of the pens where he’d started a thousand colts.

The championship saddle is still in Arizona. It sits today in the Rodeo Hall up at Prescott on a stand behind glass. The silver gone soft and warm with age, and the name still cut deep and clear into the skirt. Wade Tully, all around, 1945. There is a small card beside it that tells about the rider, the wreck, and the long climb back.

The card does not say who paid the $190 at the plank table that Saturday, or who handed the saddle back, or who offered a finished man the hardest job on his ranch. That name isn’t written anywhere on the card. He never would let it be. The light comes through the windows of that hall in the long Arizona afternoons and lies across the old saddle and the silver and the name.

The way the grandstand light once lay across a 29-year-old kid who could ride anything God ever put hair on. And the Rodeo still comes to Prescott every July, the oldest one in the world, the way it always has. If this story reached you tonight, do me a favor. Pass it on. Share it with somebody who’s down right now and thinks the best of them is behind them.

 And remind them that a man is never finished as long as somebody still willing to hand him the reins. And go ahead and hit that subscribe button if you haven’t yet, because there are more Duke stories coming. because they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore.