The American West: Steamboat Embodies Wyoming’s…

The Wyoming icon that people instantly recognize is a cowboy riding a bucking horse. The roots of that image come from Sheridan.

George Ostrem took his horse Red Wing to France in World War I with the Wyoming National Guard. While there, Ostrem painted an image of Red Wing on the company drum and it became the symbol of the 148th Field Artillery.

This was the first cowboy image of Wyoming, recognized throughout France and Germany during the war.

But it is another horse that is the icon of Wyoming, associated with the image on the Wyoming license plate and with the University of Wyoming Cowboys: Steamboat, a black colt with three white stockings who was born in 1896 on the Frank Foss Ranch near Chugwater.

Jimmy Danks was the first man to fork the horse. As he did with other Swan Land and Cattle Co. horses, Danks saddled the black horse and jumped aboard.

“Jimmy hadn’t gotten Steamboat under control yet when he realized he had a bandit in his hands,” said brother Clayton Danks.

Jimmy added: “I think he thought bucking was his business.”

Wild from the start

Jimmy was the boss at Swan’s Two Bar Ranch and was there when they threw the colt to the ground to be castrated.

They hit his head a little too hard, breaking a bone in his nose which Sam Moore cut out. From then on the horse made a characteristic whistling sound when he bucked.

And Jimmy Danks named it Steamboat.

Two Bar cowboys tried to ride the horse, but it soon became apparent that Steamboat was not destined for the Swan Range as a cow pony. Instead, when Duncan Clark of John Coble’s Polka Dot outfit rode over to see if the Swan had any bucking horses they wanted to sell, the cowboys on the Swan told him about Steamboat.

Clark bought Steamboat for Coble’s bucking rope and the horse ended up in the rodeo arena and later as the star of the Irwin Brothers Wild West show, a venture by C.B. Irwin and his brother Frank.

Who is driving the steamboat?

The most enduring symbol of Wyoming is our cowboy license plate.

In Wyoming, there is an old and ongoing controversy over the driver depicted on a license plate.

If you go to Pinedale country, old hands will tell you it’s Guy Holt. In Lander, the sentiment leans toward Stub Farlow. In Laramie, the name most often mentioned is Jake Maring.

We agree on one thing: Steamboat is the horse.

In 1936, Wyoming Secretary of State Lester C. Hunt contracted Denver artist Allen True (whose family had long lived in Wyoming) to design the license plate emblem.

“I have been glad in the intervening years that I let Mr. True do the drawing instead of using a photograph of a bucking horse, because Mr. True, by his knowledge of art, understood what design could be stamped in steel and retain its identity at some distance,” Hunt is quoted as saying. “He therefore did the drawing with only one rein, and only one left foreleg on the horse, and with only one rider’s foot.”

True was paid $75 for his efforts.

That drawing has become world famous. It is a legacy to a great bucking horse and represents Wyoming cowboys from far and wide.

But what about those cowboys?

Danks was one of the top hands at the Swan Land and Cattle Co.’s Two Bar Ranch, which is saying something in an era when cowboys working Wyoming ranches spent most of their time in the saddle.

Jimmy was the first to ride Steamboat, as part of his job was to break horses for the Two Bar. He is known to have saddled and attempted to ride Steamboat five times, all at the ranch.

He soon realized that Steamboat had too many males to ever become a hunting horse.

By all accounts, Danks was a better cowboy than his brother Clayton, but Clayton’s real fame came when he won the 1909 World Steamboat Championship in Cheyenne. Clayton had also won the saddle bronc championship in Cheyenne in 1907.

An old man said of Jimmy Danks, “He’ll tell you himself he could out-do Clayton. But he didn’t make rodeoing his career like Clayton did. His cowboys were on the ranch.

“He did not let his horses buck for exercise. … He got his exercise in his daily work.”

In 1903, Jimmy Danks competed in the Cheyenne Frontier Days and finished in fourth place with Little Tex.

That year, Holt, a cowboy from Hecla (just west of Cheyenne), won Cheyenne with Young Steamboat, the horse who was a half-brother to the older, more famous Steamboat.

Also in 1903, Holt entered the Festival of Mountain and Plain in Denver, where he won the championship. And he confirmed his cowboy credentials that year with a ride on the Steamboat at the Albany County Fair in September.

Holt finished the race in second place, behind Ed Danks, a brother of Jimmy and Clayton. But the ride is immortalized in a photo taken by University of Wyoming professor BC Buffum that is iconic.

The classic image of Holt’s bucking horse on a steamboat was used when the University of Wyoming developed its cowboy logo in 1921.

Holt’s ride on Steamboat wasn’t perfect.

While “Steamboat looked fat and swaggering,” Holt was riding a borrowed saddle, and as any bronc rider could tell you, that’s a recipe for disaster. He lost his right stirrup on the second jump, and according to newspaper accounts, “on the third jump he grabbed the horn and ripped the leather out for all he was worth.”

No 8 second rule

In those days, grabbing a horn didn’t disqualify a cowboy, and there was no eight-second rule. They rode until the horse stopped bucking, or they fell to the ground.

Holt was certainly shaken after his ride on Steamboat, but the next day he mounted a horse named Teddy Roosevelt in a head-to-head match with Clayton Danks.

Holt rode well, striking his horse repeatedly and showing no sign of letting up. But according to the judges, Danks rode better that day, winning the race on Steamboat “with his hands down and a firm grip on the hackamore rope,” according to newspaper reports.

The best accounts of Steamboat’s career in the rodeo arena (at that time a place was often described as an open field surrounded by cowboys on horseback forming a perimeter) relate to the horseback competitions of Cheyenne Frontier Days.

It is sometimes said that no cowboy ever rode Steamboat. But that is not true. Jimmy Danks did, and Clayton Danks and Holt too.

And there were others, including these CFD Saddle Bronc champions: Fred Bath, the 1898 champion; Thad Sowder, the 1900 champion; Otto Plaga, the 1901 winner; Harry Brennan, the 1904 champion; Hugh Clark and Sam Scoville, co-champions in 1905; and Scoville won again in 1910; and Dick Stanley, the 1908 winner.

Stub Farlow, the Lander cowboy whose name is often associated with the image on a Wyoming license plate, was an excellent horseman, but he never had the chance to ride Steamboat.

Jake Maring rode the Steamboat again in Laramie in 1905 and 1911. On that second ride, he stayed on the horse and rode it to a stop, but he later said that he “couldn’t eat for two weeks because of the shaking I got.”

Maring had a third chance at the black horse later that fall. Once he was in the saddle, he said, “Let him go.” Steamboat took off with a snort and soon threw Maring into the sand.

The cowboy would later say, “I’ve done nothing all my life but ride bucking horses. I can safely say that Steamboat was the hardest bucking horse I ever sat on.”

Candy Moulton is the co-author of “Steamboat: Legendary Bucking Horse,” published by High Plans Press in Glendo, Wyoming. She can be reached at: