Blog 3702 – 12.24.2025

Wild Horses

Thirteen years ago while working as a welding inspector on a twenty-six mile gas pipeline near Baggs, Wyoming, it was my privilege to drive past a herd of wild horses twice a day on my way to and from the job site. While there I purchased a this framed picture of that herd of wild mustangs in a thrift shop in Baggs.” I keep it hanging by my bed to encourage me to keep dreaming of wild horses.

I had at that time entertained for some years the notion of one day owning a hundred acre horse ranch. Seeing the wonderful site of these magnificent animals in the wild only fueled my desire to someday own some land of my own with horses. A few years before this six month work assignment in  Wyoming I had seen the movie An Unfinished Life with Robert Redford, Jennifer Lopez, and Morgan Freeman. Most of the movie is set supposedly on a ranch in Wyoming. The movie was actually filmed in British Columbia. Wyoming is only green and lush looking like that for a couple of weeks in June after the snow melts so the lengthy shooting schedule of a feature film would have been all but impossible in Wyoming. East Texas like British Columbia gets a lot more rain than Wyoming and the grass grows and stays greener most of the year, making it a far more agreeable place for horses and would-be cowboys.

Until a year ago I had all but given up on my dream of owning property that might support even a few horses. Then my son drove me to a sixty acre timber property that he had purchased in Bon Wier, Texas. The driving time and distance between Houston and Bon Wier is two hours and thirty-three minutes and one hundred and sixty-one miles. As we drove and walked his property he shared his dream with me of having a hundred acres one day. Fully expecting to out live his mother, my wife, I asked him if he would let me park an RV Camper on this place and live out the rest of my life there someday. He said that would be fine and on my second visit there as we were clearing his southern property line so that he could put metal tee-posts where the wooden surveyor stakes were to have it more permanently marked, I ask him if he would allow me to help him realized his hundred acre dream. He said that too would be fine, but warned me that he had already made offers to the folks who owned the property around his and that no one was interested in selling. I said, let me try, they might be more open to an older guy, near their own age. My son went on to say that there were two fifteen acre tracts just north and east of his both with county road frontage that were owned by a brother and sister who had inherited them from their parents. Since he had only about a hundred feet of road frontage with no cleared road back into his sixty acres he was hoping to get one of those tracks and have a road cut back to a power line easement road that we had use to get to most of his property in his pickup on our first visit there. He had still had the permission of his then southern most neighbor to use his access road to drive back to the power line easement road at that time, but when the property changed hands he no longer had permission nor access to his acreage by truck. 

My son also said the northern most fifteen acre tract, owned by the brother, was the higher of the two with the best potential routes for an access road to his property. There was also a “sweet pond” on it and that according Google Maps it was full of water year round. There was even an orange paddle boat visible in the Google map pics. I wrote to the brother making an offer and then gave him a phone call. He was interested in selling to me, but since he had a quote for harvesting the timber on the property his counter offer was several thousand dollars more to include the value of the timber that had not been harvested in over fifty years. I agreed to his price and we closed on the property in early November last year and I became a timber rancher. Last spring with the brother’s help I was able to convince his sister to sell her fifteen acres to me also for the same price. Then I went after the property to north with additional county road frontage. It had been in probate since the owner had died in 2013. His will left the listed 3.2 acre tract to his great niece. She had passed a few years ago so her daughter had been paying the taxes as her great great uncle’s will had stipulated that if his great niece did not survive him that his property should go to her daughter and son. I made them an offer on the property and agreed to pay the legal fees to get them a clear title to the property. I also paid for the survey required by the title company which revealed that the property was larger than the 3.2 listed, actually 4.938 acres.

The smaller tract had been a small ranch up until the great uncle passed. It is my hope, my dream to make it so again and to pass it along with the other two tracts to my son getting him quite close to his hundred acre dream coming true. With less than four acres to go and as determined as he is, I am sure that wild horses cannot keep him from realizing his dream. And it looks like my dream of owning a horse ranch is coming true as well, a smaller more manageable ranch to be sure at just shy of five acres, but with roads and trails over almost ninety-five more acres adjacent.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White

Still dreaming of wild horses.