rodeo hand as a saddle bronc rider, bull rider and team roper. He was also a noted rodeo pickup man. Taylor bought a stallion named Roanys Tomcat from Bub Nunn, the owner of High Rolling Roany. High Rolling Roany was sired by Roan Prairie by Cibecue Roan by Red Man. Red Man was sired by Joe Hancock by John Wilkens by Peter McCue. Nunn and High Rolling Roany had developed a top performance horse breeding program giving the area some great rodeo horses.
move of Awesome Pete to Texas came about. Hauerland started with his interest in the Peter McCue horses. “I have always admired the Peter McCue horses. I grew up with them. I grew up around an old man named Owen Lay that had racehorses. I was born in 1946 and in the late ‘50s I was a jockey for Mr. Lay and he raised Painted Joe, the paint horse that outran horses like Clabber. “I learned most of the good ropers wanted the Peter McCue blood. We
As the story goes, Taylor bought three Nunn bred weanling colts. Roanys Tomcat turned out to be the best and the one he used in his breeding program. Roanys Tomcat was out of Jax Red Cat by Apple Jax by Two Eyed Jack. When Taylor retired from the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Refuge he started working for local ranchers and one of them was Bob Shelhamer. This introduced Taylor to the Oswald horses and, as they say, the rest is history. Taylor bought Awesome Pete in 1999 to cross on his Roanys Tomcat mares. The Taylor plan was in place to bring the breeding program of Bub Nunn and the High Rolling Roany blood together with the Bob Shelhamer Oswald bred horses. The breeding program came together with the help of rancher, author and historian John Moore. The Taylor breeding program sadly came to an end when Lynne Taylor would unexpectedly die of an aneurism. When Lynne Taylor passed away, the family decided to sell his horses and this brings Leroy Hauerland of Sealy, TX, into the picture. Hauerland, a long time horseman and a source of much of the information on the Jess Koy stories in the last two issues of Working Horse, recalls how the
Lynne Taylor bought Awesome Pete in 1999 to cross on his Roanys Tomcat mares. Photo Courtesy John Moore
were as poor as church mice and we had to ride what we could afford. But the good ones were Peter McCue horses and through men like Mr. Lay and Jess Koy I learned the value of good bloodlines. “My son Brad is a pretty big guy and he was wanting a bigger horse.,” Hauerland continues. “I had a good line of Doc Bar bred horses but he wanted something with a little more size and bone. We had the cow but we didn’t have the size. The 15 to 15.3 hands 1200 to 1300-pound
horse is what he wanted. Our horses were in the 1100-pound range. So we went to looking for something bigger.” Hauerland learned about what he calls the Montana horses. “About 20 years ago I took a horse to Billings, Montana, to the Bill and Jann Parker sale and, to make a long story short, I got to meet Bill and Jann and a fella named Bub Nunn. Bub Nunn had High Rolling Roany by Roan Prairie who goes back to Joe Hancock. I talked to others like Ray Beecher and John Moore and I learned about these Montana horses and their Peter McCue blood. “John Moore was key in getting me the history of these horses, especially the Shelhamer horses,” Hauerland says. “I studied the pedigrees of these horses and they are linebred to Peter McCue as far as you can go. I realized Shelhamer knew what he was doing with Oswald, as they have a significant look to them. That look came out in Awesome Pete, a blood bay with black mane and tail. He was what I would call the old blood bay. He was a really dappled dark black bay with the black feet, black mane and tail. He had a big black foot and feet hard as a rock. “I never got to meet Lynne Taylor but I learned that he was not only a bronc rider but a pickup man and he did a lot of team roping. I found out that Lynne had bought Awesome Pete, or ‘Bob’ as he called him. Lynne had worked for Mr. Shelhamer as a day rider. I never had the privilege of meeting Mr. Shelhamer, either. “So Lynne had Roanys Tomcat and Awesome Pete and he had acquired some Poco Pine mares and was crossing them on those two stallions. He ended up with some really nice mares. He started crossing the mares out of Roanys Tom Cat on Awesome Continued on page 72
WORKING HORSE MAGAZINE• August/September 2016
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