animal's head up and prevented his falling to the ground. Practised riders sometimes show their skill by putting a silver coin the size of a half-dollar between each thigh and the saddle, and retaining it there in spite of all the plunging and bucking of the animal.[1] One of the men gravely told us he had seen a man thrown twenty feet into the air by a bucking horse, and then come down astride the saddle in exactly the right position. Another said he had seen a horse swell himself suddenly, so as to burst the girths of the saddle; the saddle and the man on it then went fully ten feet into the air, and came down on the horse all right and in order. We had intended to tell them about the remarkable riding of Buffalo Bill and his cow-boys, but after these two stories we had nothing to say.
COMING IN FROM PASTURE.
- ↑ In an article on "Ranch Life in the Far West," in The Century Magazine for February, 1888, Hon. Theodore Roosevelt says: "The flash-riders, or horse-breakers, always called 'broncho-busters,' can perform really marvellous feats, riding with ease the most vicious and unbroken beasts, that no ordinary cow-boy would dare to tackle. Although sitting seemingly so loose in the saddle, such a rider cannot be jarred out of it by the wildest plunger, it being a favorite feat to sit out the antics of a bucking horse, with a silver half-dollar under each knee or in the stirrups under each foot."
