Fallis Saddlery - A Short History

by Johanna C. Fallis

Fallis Saddlery began in my mother-in-law’s Queen Anne living room just before Christmas, 1950. Myrlin (Slim) Fallis was out of work. The job he had been promised when we returned to Denver from Montrose where he worked for Allison Saddle Shop, had fallen through and saddle making jobs were scarce. Three saddle club friends asked him to make them saddles for Christmas.

On his knees tracing patterns on three sides of saddle leather spread over the floor, he was happy as a child with its second ice cream cone. I knew then I had married a saddle maker—nothing more and nothing less. We had been married for seven months.

In November of 1951, at Granby, Colorado, we opened the first real store front for Fallis Saddlery. The first month’s receipts totaled $56.14. That winter was one of the worst on record. Six foot high piles lined both sides of Main Street. Four foot piles marched up the middle.

During that year a controversy, sparked by Monte Foreman’s “Tall in the Saddle” article, started in the horse world. John Richard Young’s article “Tall In The Saddle, This Way” made the most sense to us.

Through his own riding, Slim knew the design of most stock saddles was bad but he wasn’t enough of a horseman to understand the problem was something more basic than comfort. He built his saddles with the front of the seat much lower, better shaped to fit human anatomy and get the rider off the horse’s kidneys. To remove the heavy brass rigging dee or ring under the rider’s knees, he used a flat plate rigging.

In the fall of 1952, we borrowed an 8mm movie camera from a friend and Slim took a role of film of my riding my mare across a field at all three gaits. Admitting we were both rank amateur riders, we sent the film, along with our explanation of what we believed to be the problem with saddles, to Young, via Western Horseman, starting a dialog with him which lasted many years. He didn’t comment on the film (thank goodness), nor on the fact that he forwarded it to Foreman with the suggestion we might be the people he was looking for. Nothing came of this for many months.

After Christmas, 1952, we made the leap to mail order, sending our first ad to Western Horseman. The Fallis Balanced Seat Saddle ad was in the March issue. By the end of the year we had a backlog of ten saddles. By the end of 1953, the backlog was fifteen.

In May, 1954, when the pickup truck with the camper box on the back stopped before our new shop on Highway 40 at the west end of Granby, we didn’t know the man from Adam, but Monte Foreman stayed three days, proving to us with one ride on a green mare we owned and the motion pictures he showed us, that he certainly knew a great deal more about riding than we did. He walked out with an agreement we would build his ’Balanced ® Ride’ saddle which changed three features: the stirrups were hung forward, the rigging was built into the skirts, and the seat was built up in the back. He lived at Colorado Springs at that time we delivered the first saddle to him in June.

Monte and Slim went out to Don Flint’s ranch to try it. Monte liked it and the rest is history. By the end of 1954 we had a backlog of ninety orders, shipping to all fifty states and Canada. By today’s standards, those early ’Balanced ® Ride’ saddles are strange looking, but they rode well and were comfortable. Over the following years, with Foreman’s approval, we implemented many asthetic improvements.

The Foreman 54 model had a 12" Little Wonder fork. The Foreman 55 had a rounded, roper fork, and the Foreman 56 was a slick fork with a knee-shaped jockey we called the Bransby jockey. Monte had apoplexy over the slick fork with many unpleasant comments about security in the saddle and amateurs designing things that weren’t necessary. So we made a conventional saddle (with old set-back stirrup leathers and a flat plate rigging) of the slick fork and Bransby jockey, and, with his permission, called it the John Richard Young. That pleased Young and infuriated Monte. There were no egos involved, of course.

Slim was an artist and close to a perfectionist in his craft. His art training was with the Vance Kirkland Studio, run by the well-known Denver artist. While their mediums were quite different, Slim achieved almost as much renown as his teacher. From his mother, a florist, and his grandmother, a gardener, he learned to really look at flowers and leaves, a skill he transferred to leather, the first to use roses to decorate a saddle--roses that looked real because they were designed as the plant actually grew. He despised and refused to use the common stamping patterns of the forties and fifties, calling them cabbage leaves.

The next pattern he designed was the Oak Leaf, and after it came the Maple Leaf. At my insistence, he agreed to try a Columbine, the Colorado state flower. We took rolls of film of Columbines growing wild in the mountains where we lived, and from those we designed the Columbine pattern.

What was my part in Fallis Saddlery? I had taken bookkeeping and salesmanship classes after dropping out of Denver University where I had intended to major in journalism. I handled all office duties, including designing the ads. I also learned a great deal about making saddles and horse gear, becoming a fair stamper, operating the stitcher, covering stirrups, finishing, and did most of the packing and shipping. I had a strong belief in taking care of our people, be they customers or employees. I enjoy people and I suppose that showed because many of our customers became friends and some stayed with us, ordering saddles for their children and grand children over the years.

We didn’t have a telephone until 1956. Slim did not like to be bothered by people and more than once Foreman advised me to keep Slim away from the phone as he more often than not made people mad. Keeping him off the phone suited him, but some still insisted on talking to Mr. Fallis, not Mrs. Fallis, whom they considered some lackey around the place. Slim usually made short, not very tactful, shrift of them and they had to talk to me anyhow. I tried not to laugh at those few, but it was sometimes difficult.

In 1957, we moved the shop to Longmont, Colorado, where we could ride all year. This gave us a chance to search for an answer to an increasingly vexing problem which manifested itself in dry spots on the horse’s back, sometimes scalding to the point of turning the hair white or causing sores. The “Balanced ® Ride” saddle design, which made a great deal of sense from the rider’s viewpoint, put the rider’s weight inches forward of the conventional design, and sometimes increased the problem. Though we suspected that stock saddle trees, the wood and rawhide foundation for stock saddles, did not fit horses properly, we were not certain if this was a design flaw or a quality control issue. Saddle trees had been designed by non-horsemen and manufacturing them was a hit or miss operation at best, all of it done by hand and eye from flat patterns.

Handmade, by wood craftsmen of varying skill levels, no two trees were identical. We had to return those which were so crooked even a blind man could see it.

With the phenomenal popularity of the Quarter Horse in the forties and fifties, tree makers, saddle makers and horse people alike thought these animals had wider, broader backs than other horses. Using plaster-of-Paris casts and wire frame forms of horses’ backs and consulting with the veterinarians at the CSU Vet College, what we discovered was the opposite.

Regardless of how a saddle is designed or the style of riding, a horse carries weight best where his skeleton is strongest–supported by the ribs which connect to his breast bone, forward of his diaphragm. This skeleton is covered by heavy muscles attached to the spiny structure which forms his withers. The higher the withers, the more area to attach these muscles, and the more muscles, the broader the back. The wide, flat back of the Quarter Horse (and the “classic” Arab), is an optical illusion; the structural area which best carries the rider’s weight is, in reality, smaller and narrower than on high-withered Thoroughbreds.

The wire frame model of the horse’s backs and the underside of the saddle trees bore little resemblance to each other. The weight bearing area of the back varies little among horses and is slightly convex, but tree bars were even more convex. The effect was like trying to fit one ball to another. The rounder either ball, the smaller the surface contact. To test our theory, we increased the roundness of the bar and the dry spots got larger on all test horses. By making this area flatter and wider so that the weight is distributed over a larger area, and giving the bar a little different twist, we improved the fit for all horses. It still was not perfect, but as long as the tree maker stayed within specs, it proved itself.

Testing consisted of riding the horse (we used several), hard enough to make him sweat heavily. Most of it was done during the day in hot weather, either by Slim or me. After each test, the skirts would come off the saddle and I’d work over the tree with a sander. Because the bar twist and curve from front to rear was so badly off, we sanded the back third of the bars completely off and had to build them up with plastic wood. I soon lost track of the number of tests, but the process lasted all summer and fall of 1959 then lay dormant until the following spring when the weather was warm enough to cause a horse to sweat. By June we had a working model and I did final testing when I completed the California Tevis Cup 100 mile, one day ride in 1960 with no adverse affects on the mare.

The only new advance on the Foreman saddle was what Monte called a fender catch, which he patented in 1961, but we called it the ’58 fender catch from the year we started using it.

After the first saddle we made him, Foreman had lived in Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, but he moved back to Colorado in September of 1960 and agreed to teach me to ride a reining horse in exchange for a silver mounted show saddle. Once and sometimes twice a week for the next year, I hauled my horses the forty miles to Paradise Hills on Lookout Mountain west of Golden, where he was training. Teques Lady 49, which he used as a clinic demonstration horse for years, was one of those horses. In October 1961, I sent Foreman on his first clinic tour, using our customer base to set up clinics in the Pacific Northwest. From that time until we all moved to Elbert, I scheduled the clinics. It was profitable for both Foreman and Fallis Saddlery, as he took equipment with him, demonstrated it, took orders and left catalogs wherever he went. Slim was happy because he had plenty of work and didn’t have to deal much with the public.

We outgrew our Longmont facilities and, in 1963, we jointly bought 600 acres of rolling, short-grass country east of Elbert, Colorado, splitting it in half. Few people thought a small business could survive in a rural setting like that, but we proved them wrong. I continued riding, showing some, and our younger son, John Montana, showed interest in both riding and saddle making.

We computerized the accounting in 1976, and I believe that’s all that saved us from disastrous losses during the double digit inflation years of the late seventies. Business was becoming more and more regulated, making it difficult for a small company to handle all the paper work the government insisted on.

By 1980, I was reaching burn-out fast. When Slim died in 1982, I quit, went to Denver and got a job programming (which I had learned with our computer). John was too inexperienced to handle it all and a year later Gordy Diers came in to run–and finally acquire–the company. He moved it to La Grande, Oregon, but he had taken it over too late to save it and I was beyond caring. I worried about my son, but I believe the trauma helped make him what he–and John Fallis Saddlery–are today. Fallis Saddlery, Inc., breathed its last when Oregon shut it down for non-payment of taxes in 1985. Thirty-four years is a good run for a mom-and-pop business and Slim Fallis will be remembered as a master of his craft. His son follows in his footsteps with John Fallis Saddlery, born in Elizabeth, Colorado, now located near Wilder, ID about 15 miles west of Caldwell.