Monte Foreman - Horseman

by Johanna C. Fallis

When a dark colored pickup with a large box over the bed and a Texas license stopped before Fallis Custom Saddlery in Granby, Colorado, I didn’t dream the relationship between us and Monte Foreman, the man who stepped out of the pickup, would last for thirty years. He was thirty-eight and it was May, 1954.

Foreman’s article, Tall in the Saddle, had been published in March, 1951, Western Horseman Magazine, generating a great deal of controversy, including four articles by other horsemen/Western Horseman contributors:

• Tall in the Saddle, But Not That Way, by Jack Casement, May, 1951.
• Tall in the Saddle, This Way, by John Richard Young, June 1951.
• Regarding "Tall In The Saddle" by King Merritt, July 1951.
• and a hilarious parody, Sprawl In The Saddle, Anyway, by Dick Sebald, August, 1951.

As riders ourselves, though mostly trail riders, we were suspicious of all of them, though John Richard Young seemed to be the most logical. Foreman’s visit was spawned, in a round-about way, by our contact with Young.

Foreman’s arrogant, abrasive style wasn’t the most effective sales pitch and when he threw his beat-up looking saddle on a three year old green-as-grass mare we had raised, and stuck a snaffle bit in her mouth, we were even more dubious. After walking and trotting her down the wide, grassy barrow pit beside US-40 to warm her up, he didn’t canter or gallop--he ran her as fast as she would go, turned her, literally over her hocks, raced her back and stopped her on the gravel in front of the shop, sliding her at least six feet. We were no longer skeptical that this man knew a great deal about handling horses, though he had yet to convince us that how he did it and how he said he did it were the same.

Two days later, after viewing several large reels of 16mm film, which he narrated and often reran in slow motion so that our inexperienced eyes could see the detailed action, he convinced us that he thoroughly understood and related what he did.

We asked why he developed his special stock saddle, which he called “The Balanced Ride.” He told us that when he went to work, training horses and riders, for the King Ranch, he used their stock saddles at first. Shortly, he realized his horses weren’t working the easy, graceful way he was used to with his jump saddle. Over a period of several years he analyzed the problem with motion pictures of their riding. They compared the stock saddles versus jump saddles. He developed the saddle he was using to get the results we had seen on the mare. Laughingly, he told us the saddle he rode had been taken apart and reassembled so many times it scarcely held together.

What was this man’s background in horses? Over the years of working with him he told us a bit about that. His first mounts were probably farm horses though he never admitted that in so many words. He began riding in earnest as a youth in New Orleans where he jockeyed race horses, played polo, jumped horses and boxed as a featherweight. It was during this period that his life-long love affair with good-moving horses in general and the Thoroughbred in particular took shape. Times were tough during the depression, but with several offers of boxing scholarships, he accepted a lone polo scholarship to Auburn University in Alabama.

Wanting to stay with horses, he didn’t complete college but joined the U.S. Cavalry. Foreman was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, training soldiers to ride at the time General Chamberlain was rewriting the cavalry manuals. Though not a commissioned officer, because of his ability, Foreman was asked to play polo and ride in jumping competitions. During his cavalry career he rode the jump horse in an advertisement for a 1938 Dodge. He became an officer in the early forties, serving in Europe, then in the Pacific, but, not being interested in a mechanized cavalry, he opted out after the war.

Besides working for the King Ranch, Foreman trained and showed cutting horses in the late forties, the most famous being Muchacho de Oro, the horse of the Disney film The Horse With the Flying Tail, which was about Chacho’s jumping career. There were two things Monte said about his life until this time: he didn’t have the wrist strength to be a great polo player and that Chacho was the fastest working cow horse he had ever ridden.

Monte Foreman and the great horses he rode were poetry in motion but quite a few derogatory riding stories circulated about him. He didn’t deny any of them, including one about a horse he was showing that ran away and jumped the arena fence at Fort Worth. The tellers either conveniently left out, (or were ignorant of), the fact that Foreman had told the owner that the horse wasn’t ready to show and was told to show him anyhow. Because the identity of a few of the tellers irked Foreman, he didn’t discuss it much, but when he did, the story was hilarious.

A man well ahead of his time, he coined the word roll-back for Horse Handling Science, his series of articles in The Cattleman magazine in the late forties. He expounded the necessity of knowing leads in horses for all kinds of horse handling–not just dressage–and developed a consistent, non-contradictory method of riding and training that was transferable to others, both two legged and four legged. Many people denigrated his ideas but today, many years after his death in 1987, you have only to watch the top reining horses in the nation to see his influence. The best of them work easy, at speeds that terrified most riders of yesterday, riding patterns that are far more intricate, combining the control of jumping, the flair of polo and the precision of dressage, just as Monte Foreman did fifty years ago.

What was the box on the back of his pickup in 1954? The first camper that we had ever seen–and we lived in a country catering to tourists. This was a man who was innovative in many fields besides horses.