Tales of an Old Horsetrader: The First Hundred Years

by Leroy Judson Daniels, Helen S. Herrick

Leroy Daniels was born in 1882 near Adair, Iowa. When he was ten, his father gave him a pony and a checkbook and sent him out to buy cattle. By the time he was sixteen, he was alone on a ranch in Montana with a herd of seventy wild horses to break. At twenty-one, he was trading horses in the Chicago stockyards, where he told Henry Ford that a horse was better than a car any day. At one hundred, he retired to tell his memoirs. The years in between are well worth reading about. Lee Daniels followed a plow all day long, worked coal to make ends meet, raised and traded and sold all manner of four-legged stock. But horses were always part of his life. Daniels traded them in Chicago for decades, sold them to Italy, England, France, and Belgium during World War I, inspected them for the army once the U.S. joined the Allies, bought them for eighty dollars in the morning and sold them for thousands by noon. He handled show horses, work horses, and trick horses, traveled the country over to fill his show barn with the best of them, befriended, understood, and loved them. These pages tell the tale of a unique and vigorous American whose every word reveals his love of this land and its animals. If you weren't lucky enough to live like Lee Daniels, reading about his life is the next best thing.

Genres: Biography

247 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Dawn Plimmer]

Having grown up in Iowa with horses and grandparents that told me stories of how they lived on farms working the land with horses I found this book to be particularly interesting. It actually probably aligns closer to my great grandparents lives. The book tells stories and personal accounts that aren’t often shared in books and movies today I would really compare his life to that of a salesman at a time when people did whatever they could to earn a living. It’s an interesting perspective on horses and aligns very well to my grandfather‘s comments that a lot of people didn’t like horses. They were just what they had to use for transportation, farming, and earn a living. They were really a commodity and not the pets and companions they are today. You can tell Lee was someone that did the right thing in how he managed his businesses and the animals that passed through his farms, pastures and sale barns.

The book is a really interesting snapshot into life at that time. It’s like sitting down with a centurian listening to all of his stories. I love the perspective of life and the simplicity of considering how people lived in the context of the time they lived. I know most of us today wouldn’t have the “gumption” to do what they did just to survive. Worth a read and some reflection.

Will pass this around my family as there’s a long list of people that want to read it after I shared that I found it at a book sale!

[Stephanie A.]

Picked up randomly at a library sale, there is definitely a good amount of horse trading involved, with plenty of stories about particularly memorable horses and mules who passed through his hands. But it's also just the general story of how a man made a fairly prosperous living (largely through a combo of the titular subject and general agriculture, with some odd jobs thrown in) throughout the late 19th and 20th century. He experienced such an incredible century+ of American history that it's a real treat to have these written down. Despite not sugarcoating some of the harsh realities horses faced in the past, particularly during the mass transition to automobiles and farm machinery, which can be hard to read about.

The afterword mentions that Helen Herrick, a cousin, conceived of this book during a brief visit in the mid-60s, listening to him tell stories that she had the sense his family had heard a thousand times before. She thought someone ought to write them down so everyone could hear them -- and then she went ahead and did it, tape-recording his stories and (eventually) editing them into this manuscript.

They're well organized into chapters, but the effect is still exactly like what she experienced: listening to an old man - whose body and mental faculties both remained sharp enough that he continued farming and living independently well into his 90s - tell you stories from his long and colorful life. A gift for the public, and even more so for his direct descendants.

[Flowerdreaming]

What an interesting look into old America. Henry Ford put Lee out of business. I loved the details about horses and the tales about his rich full life. He outlived 3 wives and died at 103. I wish I could have met him. WOW.