CORRECTIVE FOOTGEAR is just one of Don Baskins' specialties. The self-taught farrier travels several states and has shod horses for several generations of owners, not to mention multiple generations of horses. His patient in this picture is a pigeon-toed mare that Baskins has kept sound and rideable for more than a decade and a half.

Self-Taught Horseshoer Covers
Lots Of Country In His Trade

By David Bowser

PAMPA, Texas — "I bought her when she was two years old," Della Moyer said. "Don's been keeping me on her for 16 years."

The 18 year-old mare, A Lou Step, is by Big Step out of a Leo mare, and she's pigeon-toed.

But working from his Haybudden anvil off the tailgate of a Chevrolet Sonoma pickup with 300,000 miles on it, Don Baskins can fix that.

He has an 1880 full Scotch hammer and tools that are older than he is. His scarred anvil is a farrier's anvil made in 1910.

The Tucumcari, N.M.-based farrier travels five states, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado, shoeing horses. He keeps a set of tools in Arizona and periodically flies to Phoenix to work with a horse chiropractor there.

"I get their feet fixed, then they'll fix their backs," Baskins says. "We've recouped a bunch of them old soldiers."

He's been going out to Phoenix for about 12 years now on such jobs.

"I don't do a lot of corrective work," he says gruffly. "I just go shoe those horses like they're supposed to be shod."

If it's done right, he maintains, there shouldn't be any problems.

Baskins is now working with the third generation of many of the families for whom he's shod horses during his career.

It was in 1964 that Baskins was asked by Albert K. Mitchell to come up to the Tesquesquite Ranch north of Tucumcari.

"I've been going there for 38 years," Baskins says.

In that first visit, Mitchell, a founding member of the American Quarter Horse Association, took Baskins down to a corral where he had about 20 ranch horses to be shod.

That afternoon, after shoeing the horses, Baskins returned to the big house to collect his fee. Mitchell, who claimed nobody could shoe that many of his horses that quickly, got on a small Cushman scooter and rode down to the corral. After inspecting the horses, he returned to the house, wrote out a check, and Baskins has been shoeing the ranch's horses ever since. Now he shoes the horses for Albert Mitchell's granddaughter, Lynda Ray.

He figures more than 75 percent of his customers have been using him at least 14 years, a testimony to his skill.

Born in Burns, Wyo., east of Cheyenne, in 1931, Baskins grew up on a ranch north of Cheyenne, near Chugwater.

"West of Chugwater, there's a railroad crossing called Diamond," Baskins says. "They have the biggest rattlesnakes there of anywhere in America."

He says he was four when he first remembers being fascinated by the men who came from Cheyenne to shoe horses at the ranch where his father was foreman. After spending his first decade working with horses and cattle, Baskins saddled his horse when he was 11 years old and rode out.

"My mom was the boss, my dad was the boss, my brother was the boss and we had two hired bosses," Baskins says. "It seemed like I was the only worker."

He rode into a Seventh Day Adventist boarding school in Northern Colorado where he stayed and graduated from high school when he was 15. In his spare time, Baskins clowned at rodeos, fought bulls and rode broncs.

"I just grew up," he says. "Kinda like a weed."

After high school, he made three universities in one semester.

"I was such a nice child," he grins.

By then he was already well experienced with horses and was looking for something new.

"I joined the Marine Corps so I wouldn't have to shoe horses," Baskins says.

He spent the next few years at El Toro and Camp Pendleton in California, shoeing horses for the Marines.

Occasionally, they would fly him to Quantico, Va., to shoe horses there.

"I'd shoe those old pinto horses they had back there," he shrugs.

After he got out of the Marines, Baskins continued to shoe horses, mostly on the West Coast. He shod a lot of gaited horses and some show horses. Occasionally, his business took him to Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

He still drives 100,000 miles a year, but it was one of his early trips to New Mexico that changed his life.

"I went to Santa Rosa to shoe some horses," Baskins recalls.

It was there he was introduced to Oda, the woman who would become his bride. She was a native of Cuervo, N.M.

After they were married, they settled in Tucumcari, along the Texas-New Mexico border. Baskins say it was centrally located in the area where he wanted to work.

The veteran horseman says he's home-trained. He never went to a horseshoeing school.

"Everything I know, I picked up on my own," he says. "I learned from doing and observing everything else that people did wrong."

He says the major mistakes he sees include people trying to use too small a shoe, and tending to get lazy in putting them on or taking care of the horses' hooves.

Today, Baskins still shoes a lot of show horses, but he also does a lot of ranch horses. In the Texas Panhandle here, he shoes mostly cutting horses.

"I never tranquilize a horse or tie a horse down," he says.

Over the years, he's developed his own method of working with horses, a method outlined in a book published by Western Horseman magazine a couple of years ago.

"They've been doing books for 65 or 70 years," Baskins says. "It was the first horseshoeing book they'd ever published. I thought it was the greatest honor I'd ever had when they asked me to do it."

The book, while it includes some of his experiences, is more than anything else a primer on horseshoeing.

Baskins says he was especially fascinated by the artwork in the book that was done on computer.

The horses in the volume aren't just there for pretty pictures. The photos and illustrations are of Baskins' work. For instance, the horse on the cover of the book was a $40,000 show horse that went lame.

"When all the juice got out of him, this horse was dead lame and couldn't walk," Baskins says. "I went and took an old rasp and hammered it sharp and made me a burning bar."

He then took the red-hot rasp and cut the foot loose.

"This horse was so constricted in his heel that he didn't have room for the bone in his foot to function, which made him lame," Baskins explains.

Diagrams in the book indicate how Baskins cut the foot.

"In 30 to 45 minutes, this horse's foot had opened nearly three-quarters of an inch," Baskins says. "This horse walked off sound."

The owner's daughter showed the horse for the next four years and went to the Youth World in as many as seven events.

"They're using this book in a lot of the horseshoeing schools," Baskins says.

What Baskins has learned by trial and error over the last six decades, he is able to pass along to others.

"We did the book mainly for the horse owner so he could read it and learn and see if his horseshoer was doing a decent job," he says. "Those guys that are shoeing horses, it really helps them."

Baskins spends a lot of time working with people who are genuinely interested in shoeing, but he doesn't suffer fools.

"About every weekend, I'll have from four to 15 calls," Baskins says. "I'll ask those people where they got my number, and they'll say off the Internet."

He trained a number of people, including one in Amarillo and another in Lubbock.

"I've trained six guys that have become preachers," Baskins drawls. "I don't know what the hell I do to them."

But the scariest thing he ever did was after the book was published — he undertook a book signing and lecture tour.

"I never carried one note," he says. "I just took the book and talked bad to everybody."