MAPLE CREEK, Sask. – While others are lying under the stars or sitting before the fire composing poetry, cowboys Brian Barron and Guy Murphy use time on their hands to work with their hands.
The two rawhide craftsmen make intricate and elegant tack, and displayed their wares to cowboy poets and fans of the cowboy muse at a Maple Creek artistic gathering last month.
“When I’m riding, a pair of rawhide reins feels so much better” than cured leather, said Murphy, a Maple Creek cowboy. “They’ve got a little life to them, whereas if you’ve got a great big, wide, old leather rein it’s just like holding a chunk of cable.
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“The horse will feel your hand and the signals through the rawhide way better than through a pair of leather reins.”
Barron, who works on a ranch near Calgary, said he picked up the almost lost art of rawhide making from “an old cowboy who showed me how to do one knot.” Murphy learned his rawhide talent from his grandfather.
While both sell some of the rawhide tack they make, they admit it is more of a hobby than a money-making project.
Still, “if you can make your own equipment it saves a lot of bucks,” Barron said.
Rawhide has to be made without chemicals. An animal hide is stretched until it is “bone dry,” then the hair is shaved off. The skin is softened, then cut into crude, centimetre-wide strips. It is tempered inside a wet burlap bag and then split and cut so the strips are of uniform thickness. Fine strings are cut from the crude strings and then beveled.
Tough but flexible
Unlike the flat, stiff leather of most horse tack, rawhide is soft and flexible. But Barron insists rawhide can be as tough as cured leather, if it isn’t left on a critter’s dinner plate.
Added Murphy, “two things are bad for rawhide. One is a dog, the other is mice and rats.”
While the rodents might not gobble an entire set of reins or a knot, they can ruin good rawhide by snacking on one or two strands, allowing a slow unravelling to begin.
