More than three-quarters of a century after his death, people still talk about the brown streak-faced Joe Hancock who never met a horse he couldn’t beat. Many of his descendants still carry some variation of his name.
By Sue Jones
Some people would correctly call me a “tenderfoot,” but my feet aren’t as tender as when I first arrived at the ranch. “The ranch” is what staff members sometimes call the National Ranching Heritage Center when we talk among ourselves. “I’ll meet you at the ranch” or “it’s in my office at the ranch.”
I hired on as a writer when I first came to the ranch—or at least that’s how I saw myself. We didn’t have a lot of cowboys at Baylor, and Georgia and Mississippi weren’t good training grounds for ranch talk. I was long on writing skills but short on vocabulary when I got to the ranch.
When someone doesn’t know what a “remuda” is, that’s a good reason to assume they’re a tenderfoot. That would be me five years ago. I opened a Ranch Record and read a cutline that said something about a remuda. I remember thinking, “What’s a remuda?” That’s embarrassing now, but everything has a first time.
Take as an example my early days at the ranch when I was talking to some German guests engrossed in viewing our gun exhibit. One of the men asked me how the six-shooter got its name. I stared at him in silence. Figuring out the answer to that question doesn’t take a rocket scientist, but the answer isn’t on the tip of your tongue if six shooters have never been part of your life.
I came to the NRHC literally from the other side of the tracks—the academic side. A railroad track actually existed years ago between the historic park and the Texas Tech campus. Today that track has been replaced by a freeway and numerous man-made hills.
On the other side of the tracks, I never had a reason to wonder what a dam is in regard to a horse and what that funny looking thing is on the wall that resembles a horseshoe but has a circular ring too big for a wine bottle. With that kind of naivety, I was not quick on the draw when I heard people talk about Joe Hancock. Who were they talking about? Joe Hancock. Tom Hancock. John Jackson Hancock. All those names are in my family. We could be kinfolks.
The closest I ever came to horses with people names was when my folks took me to the Ruidoso racetrack and told me not to tell anyone we’d been to the races. Red Stegall is the one who finally broke the news to me. Joe Hancock was a horse—but not just any horse. If Joe was going to be a Hancock, I was proud to know he was not an ordinary horse. In time I’d learn that Joe Hancock the horse was named after Joe Hancock the man, who might still be kin to me.
In 1927 a Hancock relative named Bird Ogles took the two-year-old colt to a country fair in Comanche, Okla., to enter the horse in his first race. When the racing secretary asked for the colt’s name, Ogles said, “He doesn’t have one, but he belongs to a man named Hancock. Just call him Joe Hancock.”
Joe the horse won that race and went on to pound his adversaries into the dust with his great strength. He ran throughout Oklahoma and North Texas beating all competitors at all short distances up to one-half mile.
Perhaps Joe Hancock’s most important race was the one he won when matched against a horse owned by Tom Burnett of the Four Sixes Ranch. Legend has it that Tom never liked anyone to have a faster horse than he had so he bought Joe Hancock and gave him a home on his Texas ranch where Joe began his career as a senior stallion for the Burnett Ranches.
In spite of all the races he won, Joe made his greatest name as a sire. Some of his offspring were Little Joe the Wrangler, War Chief, Little Black Joe, Red Man, Roan Hancock, Brown Joe Hancock, Joe Jr., Buck Hancock, Anne Joe, Jo Jo Hancock, Joe Tom and my personal favorite—Susie Hancock. He sired 157 registered horses in 15 crops before he died on the Four Sixes Ranch in Guthrie, Texas. More than three-quarters of a century later, horsemen still talk about the Hancock horses.
My introduction to Joe Hancock the horse took a giant leap forward when I found a Ranch Horse Journal article written by Bruce Beckmann and originally published in 1990 in The American Quarter Horse Journal. The author had obviously interviewed Tom Hancock, a son of Joe Hancock the man. Tom was full of information intriguing to a tenderfoot, including how close the Hancock family came to castrating a legend.
In about 1925 the nameless two-year-old colt began to display his libido as a stud. Rancher Joe Hancock had a few mares but didn’t figure he needed a stallion in his Nocona, Texas, pasture, so he sought the services of a veterinarian. Just as the vet started to make the cut, he stopped, looked at Joe and said, “I’ve cut a lot of horses and I’m fixing to cut another one, but damn, this is a helluva fine horse.”
According to Beckmann, Hancock took another look at the hobbled horse, scratched his head and said, “Let’s take those hobbles off.”
Joe Hancock the horse stood 15.3 hands high and had inherited strength and stature as a foal of a brown, unbroken half-Percheron mare bred to one of the best sons of Peter McCue. Tom Hancock’s grandfather bought the stallion John Wilkens from the JA Ranch in Clarendon, Texas. Born out of the fast Thoroughbred mare Katie Wawekus, John Wilkens was an old horse by the time the Hancock family led him from the JA Ranch. He had raced only sparingly, but he passed along the speed of his famous forebears to his nameless streak-faced brown foal.
So the horse with no name until his first race was spared the knife and grew to become so famous that he was inducted into the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame in 1992. My dad would have loved that story.
