LOSING A GOOD ONE: Young boy’s horse purchase taught him horsemanship, friendship
When Tate Kelly was eight years old, he spent $23 on the best investment of his life.
It was 2009 at a Sugar Bars sale in Sheridan, Wyo., when a weanling filly was no-saled.
As Shirley Wetz of Stirrup Ranch Quarter Horses of Vale, S.D., walked out of the ring with the filly, Tate walked up to her and offered her $23 for the horse.
Before she sold the horse to the boy, she told him he had to call his parents first. Tate was at the sale with family friends Jeff and Tamie Simmons, while his parents, Tom and Carrie, were at a high school rodeo with Tate’s older siblings. When Carrie got the call, she said she’d pay Jeff back. But Jeff said, no, Tate already bought her, with the $5 he’d gotten from his parents and a twenty-dollar bill from his granddad (he’d spent $2 on hot chocolate, which brought his balance to $23). When Carrie heard how much the mare cost, her response was, does she have three legs?
When Katy, as the dark bay was known, came home, Tate spent every chance he had around the mare.
She became his main mount for everything: mostly for ranch work but also as a head and heel horse and, in the college rodeo practice pen, dragging out bulls and picking up.
She was also the first horse he trained. His training methods weren’t perfect, but Katy overlooked his mistakes. “She taught me right and wrong, because I made a lot of errors on her,” Tate said. “If I taught her something wrong, she was forgiving enough to do it right and not hold mistakes against me, like a lot of horses can.”
She wasn’t a big horse, standing maybe 14 hands tall, but “wide as a bed,” Tate said. She was compact, with a short neck. “Half the time you couldn’t tell she had a neck when you were on her,” he said.
But she was gritty. “She was one of those horses, that when you stepped on her, you knew you were mounted,” he said. “She was super forgiving and one of the toughest horses I’ve rode. Truth be told, she was one of the best horses I’ve ever owned, for the simple fact that she was so willing to do anything.”
Katy liked to buck, and occasionally would try to dump her owner. Sometimes she did it at the most inopportune times, like the time Tate and his dad Tom and brother were gathering bucking bulls, who were hot, not looking for a gate but looking to blow by a gate. Just as the men were about to get the bulls through the gate, Katy decided to buck. “She blew up,” Tate remembered, “and bucked through the middle of those bulls and scattered them every which direction. She made me a really unpopular person that day,” he chuckled.
Anybody could ride her, but her heart was for Tate. His older sister Timber had a strong dislike for the horse, because Katy would buck with Timber. And “my mare didn’t quite like Timber either,” Tate said.
“I could always tell when I stepped on her, compared to when someone else stepped on her. When somebody else got on her, her ears never went forward. As soon as I walked into the pen, her ears went forward.
“When I got on her, that mare gave her full heart to everything. She tried her heart out. She’d do absolutely everything for me, and do it the best she could.”
Because she bucked, Tate, now a PRCA saddle bronc rider, got his first taste of riding bucking horses. She rarely bucked him off, but he loved the adrenaline of riding her through the buck. “It was something I looked forward to,” he said. “She’s who put the drive for bucking horses in me.”
After high school graduation in 2020, Tate went to Odessa (Texas) College. He rode Katy as he picked up broncs in the college rodeo practice pen, and used her to drag out bulls, too. She loved the work, never being intimidated by the big animals.
She was also queen of the herd, no matter if she was at home or in the rodeo pen. Tate recalls a time she retaliated when a bigger horse tried to intimidate her.
They were picking up the bareback riding when a big bay horse, seventeen hands tall and pushy, rolled into her as Tate tripped the flank. The bareback horse pushed her, nearly knocking her off balance. “I felt her drop her shoulder and she checked him hard enough that he bounced into the bucking chutes,” Tate said. “It left my leg purple for a month. That mare was never afraid of a fight and she didn’t know she was small.”
Her small stature didn’t mean anything; she stood toe to toe with the big horses. One of her favorite things was to sort bucking horses. “She loved it,” Tate said. “Those broncs will try to run you over, but that little mare would get in the middle of them” while sorting.
And when it came to pulling, she gave it her all. “She’d get super-low, to the point where my stirrups dang near drug on the ground. We never lost a pulling battle.”
Among the college kids, her nickname became “Katy Bug.” Even the bull riders used her, riding her as they jumped in the round pen, to help them refine their ability to post. “The bull riders grew fond of that little mare,” Tate said.
Katy was a ranch horse, first and foremost, Tate said. He took her with him at each of the ranches he day worked at. “She was so much fun to cowboy on. On a jig line, you never had to worry about where you put her. She’d stay true to the jig line all day long.”
And in the brushy country of west Texas, her Sugar Bars bloodlines made her hone in on the cow.
“Working down here (in the Odessa area), the brush is so thick, there are a lot of places you can’t see but twenty feet away. You have to pay attention to your horse. When they smell a cow, they’ll let you know. That little mare would never fail to let me know.”
Katy Bug passed away in November of this year.
Tate had roped six head of steers on her and someone else was cooling her down.
He heard a commotion, and Katy was lying on her side, kicking out, like it was a seizure. She died that day.
A couple of veterinarians have told Tate that she might have passed from an aneurysm caused by the buildup of snake venom. She had been bitten by a rattlesnake three times in her life, and the vets think that the accumulated residual venom may have caused her death.
She was buried on the Kelly place near Odessa.
Tate loved his friend.
“She was the most valuable horse on the place,” he said. “I knew there wasn’t a single thing I couldn’t get done on her. She became my main horse. She left a big mark on my life.
“Heaven has horses, and if she’s in my string when I get there, I hope she blows up on me.”
