Calgary Stampede: Farriers at the World Champion Blacksmiths Competition

They call it the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth. There's no event quite like Canada's Calgary Stampede, held each July in Calgary, Alberta. It's the world's biggest rodeo melded into the world's biggest country fair and a world cultural fair, to boot. You can learn a lot, or just have fun. It has to be one of the world's largest volunteer-run events of any kind. The World Championship Blacksmiths Competition for farriers has been held at the Stampede for more than 30 years.

NOTE: On Sunday, July 10, the farrier competition will be livestreamed on The Hoof Blog. Watch the WCBC farrier events live on video. (Sorry about the ads, the stream providers just do that.)

Video clip assembled yesterday, shot during the two-man farrier competition.

Open-hearth coal fires blaze at Canada's Calgary Stampede in Calgary, Alberta.

The World Championship Blacksmiths Competition (WCBC) has attracted individual farriers and some national teams from England, Denmark, New Zealand, Scotland, Australia, Ireland, Norway, France, Wales, Belgium, Northern Ireland, South Africa, the United States, and Canada.

Competing for more than $50,000 in cash and prizes, the winning farrier receives a $10,000 check, a limited-edition bronze trophy, a Stampede hand-tooled buckle, and a champion’s jacket.

Steven Beane of England entered this year’s competition seeking his third straight Stampede title. Last July, Beane, from Northallerton, North Yorkshire, became the WCBC’s first back-to-back champion since Billy Crothers of Wales notched his second and third Calgary crowns in 1995 and 1996.

This year, WCBC organizers are also placing special emphasis on the four-man team championship, with the winning squad splitting a $10,000 pot. The competition’s forging and shoeing champs will each earn $1,000, as will the top rookie. The farrier competition begins before the Stampede does, with an educational clinic for the farriers.



Here's a quick video introduction to the agricultural side of the Stampede, including scenes from the farrier competition. Notice the spectator children touching the baby pigs and kissing a horse on the nose. Calgary still allows old-fashioned, unsanitary behavior like that. Long may they!

The Stampede has a terrific heavy horse show in addition to the rodeo.

People from all over the world flock to Calgary each year to see the rodeo, but there's a  lot more to see at the Stampede.

If I ever saw an event that would have me strapping on a helmet and a body protector, the chuckwagon races would be it. I always thought it should be called the suicide runaway races. The Stampede beefed up its equine welfare program this year by implanting microchips in the horses to keep track of how often they race. Each horse is only allowed to race four days in a row, one race a day. Sadly, one horse has broken a leg and had to be destroyed. Two people have been killed in the races in the past 25 years.



The assembly of Native American nations at the Stampede makes it a world cultural event like no other.

I think the thing I like best about Calgary is that everyone in the city seems to be involved and they act like they are having a good time, even if they only wear a cowboy hat once a year! It's one of the best cultural mashups on the planet, as this string section illustrates.

The celebrity factor went a little off the charts this year when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge decided to stop by. The farriers were disappointed that they didn't come by the competition.

Stampede Photos by Mike Ringwood and Chris Bolin.

 © Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.  

 

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Who was the real "Village Blacksmith"? Meet Dexter Pratt, Longfellow's inspiring neighbor

People sometimes ask for names of famous blacksmiths and farriers. There are too many, history is full of them, from the gods of antiquity, Vulcan and Hephaestus, to today's highly skilled farriers using modern materials like engineers of the hoof and artisan maestros of forging like Francis Whitaker and Samuel Yellin.

But Dexter Pratt may be the most famous of them all.

For many people, their earliest images of who a blacksmith or farrier is and what s/he does were formed by the immortal words of the poem, The Village Blacksmith, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The smith in the poem seems like Everyman. Most wouldn't think that there was a real man behind the anvil in that story, but there was.

First, a refresher, in case you don't remember the poem:

Longfellow was America's most famous poet, but he was also a professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When he walked to and from the campus, he passed a mighty chestnut tree on Brattle Street, under which stood the modest smithy of his neighbor, Dexter Pratt. Dexter is believed to be the inspiration for the poem, along with the fact that Longfellow's own grandfather, Stephen Longfellow, was a blacksmith in Newbury, Massachusetts.

If there was a seed of inspiration for the poem somewhere in Longfellow's fertile mind, it was reinforced and enhanced every day by his encounter with the smith, who became his friend.

Longfellow's home on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts is open to the public as a National Park site. It is across and down the street from the site of what must have been several blacksmith shops in Harvard Square.

Longfellow probably wrote The Village Blacksmith in 1839; it was published in 1840. Longfellow was paid $15 for the poem by Knickerbocker magazine.

Around the same time, Longfellow met a very interesting man named Elihu Burritt, known as "The Learned Blacksmith". He was living in nearby Worcester, and Longfellow encouraged him to move to Cambridge; the poet even offered to support the blacksmith.

But Burritt turned the famous poet down. He wanted to keep working in the forge while he pursued his studies.

At one time you could buy prints and post cards of Dexter's smithy, long after it and the chestnut tree were gone. Maybe you still can.

Dexter's shop and tree probably could have become one of the greatest tourist attractions in Cambridge, except that urban planning interfered: there was a curve in the street where they stood and the city wanted to straighten it. The authorities didn't see a way around it: the big tree had to go and, with it, Dexter's shop and forge. Not even Longfellow could save it.

The big tree was cut down in the 1870s.

Longfellow's chair, made from the wood of the spreading chestnut tree.

What a day it must have been when they cut it down. Cambridge schoolchildren took up a collection to make a memento. A chair was made from the tree for Longfellow, and you can see it if you visit his house. The poet wrote the children a poem of thanks. It is an ode to the tree; it doesn't mention the blacksmith, though.

"The Village Blacksmith" has outlived Longfellow, Dexter, and the tree. And so, it turns out, have the two houses where the men lived. They're still there.

Dexter Pratt's more modest home on Brattle Street is painted almost the same color as Longfellow's, but it's not so grandiose. (Wikipedia photo)

Dexter's house at 54 Brattle Street is in the National Register of Historic Places and owned by the City of Cambridge. It is now known as "The Blacksmith House". It was built in 1808 for a blacksmith named Torrey Hancock, who sold it to Dexter Pratt. It's interesting that Pratt's daughter sold the house to a runaway slave named Mary Walker, who lived there with her family for many years.

During World War II, a bakery opened in the house, selling baked goods made by women refugees from Europe.

Over the years, The Village Blacksmith inspired a lot of people. In 1922, famed director John Ford brought The Village Blacksmith to the silver screen, in a melodramatic story based loosely on the blacksmith in the poem. The subtitle for the film was "The Blacksmith's Daughter, Falsely Accused".

Almost 100 years after Longfellow wrote the poem, a mysterious silent film pantomime of the poem appeared.  There's no documentation to go with this rough gem, which is copyrighted by the distributor as 1936 but looks to be older.

In the film, you will see first Longfellow's stately, then the more colonial home of Dexter Pratt, though I doubt it was so grand when he lived there. I don't know if the entire film was shot in Cambridge or just those buildings.



You can walk in Longfellow's footsteps down Brattle Street, and visit both houses. If you walk down the street to the Mount Auburn Cemetery, you'll find the graves of both men. A chunk of the chestnut tree is preserved in the Cambridge Public Library on Broadway.



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© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission,but you are welcome to share the link. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). 

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Disclosure of Material Connection: The Hoof Blog (Hoofcare Publishing) has not received any direct compensation for writing this post. Hoofcare Publishing has no material connection to the brands, products, or services mentioned, other than products and services of Hoofcare Publishing. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.