Still Horse Crazy After All These Years

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Literature

By Jim Wofford

Book Review by Caroline Treviranus Leake

Still Horse Crazy After All These Years, James Wofford, Trafalgar Square Books, North Pomfret, Vermont, 2021, $27.95

James Wofford was born in 1944 in Kansas. His father was stationed at Fort Riley, longtime home to the U.S. Cavalry. Early on, at the age of three, Jim received ‘riding lessons’ from his older sister and brothers, including jumping little fences on his 12-hand Shetland pony, Merrylegs. He would grab the horn of his Western saddle and ‘hang on.’ His siblings led the pony over the fences after which they allowed Jim to jump on his own.

As a result of that early and sophisticated training regimen (or despite it), during Jim’s competitive career, he earned team silver medals in two Olympic Games, an individual and a team bronze at two World Championships, and team gold at the Pan American Games. He also won five US National Championships (each on a different horse) and two Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Events on two different horses.

How Tony Gammell Trained Hounds to Hunt Only the Red Fox

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Hounds

By Norman Fine

Huntsman Tony Gammell and the Keswick hounds in 2012   /   Liz Callar photo

Foxhunting Life first published this story in 2012, when Tony Gammell was huntsman at the Keswick Hunt (VA). He'd trained the pack of American foxhounds to hunt the red fox and only the red fox. No gray fox, coyote, deer, or any other woodland creature. The article was well-received, and we decided it was worth bringing back.

Why wouldn’t he want to hunt gray fox? I wondered. Yes, they run short and tight with more jinks and double-backs, but they make hounds work for every inch of sport. It can be fun to watch. And even assuming he has good reason for not hunting gray fox, how does he teach hounds to ignore the line? I collared Tony at an MFHA Staff Seminar and asked, and I got more hound wisdom than I bargained for.

The Unintended Consequences of Messing With Foxhunting

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Norm Fine's Blog

Britain―after having attacked, harried, and banned the sport of foxhunting―now finds itself missing the hedgerows built and maintained by foxhunters. Britain is missing her hedges not only for esthetic reasons but for practical reasons as well: carbon capture and the battle against global warming.

Robert Lane Fox, writing in the Financial Times, said, “The finest hedges in Britain are those planted and cared for by hunters: even as legal trail hunters, they want to be able to jump them with pleasure on horseback. For that reason, swaths of Leicestershire, say, or Herefordshire have been transformed and treasured. If hunters knock a hole in them they are promptly fenced at their own expense and cut and laid so as to grow back.

Mark Beecher: From Ireland to the USA

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People

By Noel Mullins

Mark Beecher riding Professor Maxwell, winners of the 2013 Maryland Hunt Cup   /  Noel Mullins photo

It’s always fascinating to talk with somebody successful in one equestrian discipline, challenges himself in another, changes continents, and proves immensely successful again. Now Mark Beecher has decided to step back from competitive riding and take up training.

I talked with Mark at his present home in Maryland in the USA. He is from a hunting and showjumping background. I was aware of some of his successes in the States, having seen him race riding, but I didn’t realise the enormity of what he has achieved in just eight years as a jockey in the USA. Surely, hunting and show jumping have contributed to that success.

Lost Hound

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Literature

By Robert L. Ashcom

Illustration by Jane Gaston from "Lost Hound," Robert Ashcom, The Derrydale Press and Millwood House, 1999, 161 pages

If you’ve ever walked the interstate
You know the dream of summer thunder with
No rain and heat in solemn surge like fate
Gone out of sync―where eighteen-wheelers brew
Their shouted, tire-born songs with diesel breath;
And fast food wrappers feed the session’s mood.

Mystery Photo

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Picture of the Week

By Norman Fine

Calling hunt historians for help identifying the individuals in this old photograph which may have been taken at the venerable Norfolk Hunt (est. 1895), west of Boston.

The man in hunting attire is Henry Vaughan, MFH of the Norfolk from 1903 to 1933. In the early part of the twentieth century, Henry Vaughan was well-known up and down the Eastern seaboard as an ambassador for the growing sport of organized foxhunting in North America. He participated in the founding of the MFHA in 1907 and was elected the first secretary-treasurer of the fledgling organization. In 1918, he was named vice-chairman of the National Hunt and Steeplechase Association. Vaughan traveled extensively for both associations, judging hound shows and officiating at race meets. In 1931, he was elected president of the MFHA, a post he held until his death in 1938.

I’m estimating that this photograph was taken no earlier than 1930. Vaughan would have been sixty-two years old in 1930. (I have a 1933 photo of him in the same hunting attire and appearing about the same age, if not younger.)

A. Henry Higginson is supposedly in this photograph as well. Higginson would have been in his mid-fifties in 1930 and could even be about sixty in this photo. If anyone can identify Higginson and others in the picture, a great puzzle will be resolved! And we will publish what we learn and give credit accordingly. Reply through the Comments feature or by email.

Posted May 28, 2021

William Dunlap: The Walker Foxhound as an Allegory

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Art

By Norman Fine

"Dunlap" by William Dunlap; foreword by Julia Reed, essay by J. Richard Gruber; Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2006; available at Amazon

William Dunlap is an important contemporary artist of the South with a powerful affinity for southern landscapes and Walker foxhounds. Dunlap’s work may be seen in many prestigious collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Corcoran Collection of the National Gallery of Art.

His book, Dunlap, features more than one hundred works, produced over a thirty-year period. It was published in a trade hardback and a limited edition of two hundred signed, bound-in-linen covers, housed in a matching linen-covered clamshell box. A signed, numbered print featuring four Walker foxhounds is included in the box. The book's cover features a surrealist landscape with a white Walker foxhound, Delta Dog Trot, appearing ready to climb right out of the painting, a nod to nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil techniques. The painting, “Delta Dog Trot, Landscape Askew” hangs at the Alluvian Hotel in Greenwood, Mississippi.

Dunlap’s grandfather was “a foxhunter of the old school,” Dunlap writes. “He bred and hunted generations of pure blood Walker Hounds. With names like Lucky, Mary, Speck, Sally, and Bo, these dogs were all legs, lungs, nose, and heart. They lived to run but spent most of their lives laying around the kennel, eating, sleeping, stretching, and occasionally giving off the deep-throated mouth that would send any fox in earshot scurrying for the nearest hole.

The Rock Dam

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Our Hunting World

By Epp Wilson, MFH

This ancient rock dam, hidden within a 1,600-acre woodland, is known by all who have hunted the fox and coyote through the Belle Meade Hunt country in Thomson, Georgia. Which means it’s dearly familiar to the Belle Meade members and has been seen by a thousand foxhunting visitors from at least fifty different hunts from fifteen separate nations! It appears to the rider as he or she drops down to a water crossing, looks to the side, and beholds the massive rock-faced cliff standing over its pool in complete concert with its natural surroundings. One is often on the move while hunting at Belle Meade, with little chance to stop and absorb the peaceful beauty of the scene, which disappears behind just as suddenly as it revealed itself. So let’s pause for a moment in this off-season and let Master Epp Wilson tell us what he has learned about it.

The Rock Dam on Maddock’s Creek, McDuffie County, Georgia, is a magical place. Some like vanilla, some like chocolate, but everyone likes or loves the Rock Dam. History. Water. Strength. Engineering. It is truly timeless and holds something for everyone, young and old. City person or countryside person. If there is one place that we could say is the most popular place in our hunting country, the Rock Dam is it.