04/08/2022
A HEART ATTACK finally forced Bill Maddox into retirement several years ago, not counting the rawhide plaiting he still does on the porch. He spent his life moving across Texas, but wherever he was there was a horse nearby.
Bill Maddox Grew Up Horseback,
Made His Living On Horses
Republished From April 18, 2019
By John Bradshaw
SPRING BRANCH — In the early 1980s Bill Maddox was helping clean out wild cattle near Spring Branch so developers could move into the area. They came upon a bad Santa Gertrudis bull that wouldn’t drive, so Maddox roped it. When another cowboy came in to heel the bull, it turned and disemboweled his horse.
Before it was over that bull got on the highway and began hooking police cars. The cops couldn’t tolerate that, so they shot the bull to death.
Maddox didn’t know back then that he would end up back in the same area nearly 40 years later, but he has. A severe heart attack a few years ago finally ended his career as a horse trainer, horseshoer and cowboy.
He now lives with his daughter and her family in an upscale rural subdivision just outside Spring Branch. The area is a little too crowded for his taste. There is room for a couple horses, though and Maddox has set up shop under the porch where he plaits hackamores and other tack.
Maddox was born in 1928, which makes him 90 years old today. His family moved around some growing up, but he spent much of his childhood near Mountain Home on old Schreiner country, next to the YO Ranch.
His dad was Oscar Maddox, nicknamed Billy, who grew up cowboying in Kansas. He was one of those good hands who could work and rope on a bad horse and make it look like a good one.
In the mid-1930s his dad moved them to the border near Quemado, where he took a job feeding out seven- and eight-year-old steers out of South Texas.
“Most of them had horns so long they couldn’t get through the chute,” Maddox said. “Dad sawed the horns off of every son-of-a-gun.”
At Quemado the family met a man named Dee Barnett, who was quite a hand. Maddox said they lost touch with Barnett when they left Quemado, but many years later Maddox was working near Marathon and heard a story about Barnett. The storyteller worked on a neighboring ranch to Barnett, one day he met Barnett at a windmill across a fenceline, about lunchtime.
“Old Billy told me that Dee told him that he would share his lunch with him,” Maddox said. “All old Dee had was two crackers in his leggings pocket.”
When the Maddox family left Quemado it was for Central Texas, where Oscar went to work for the Crocker family. It was there, when Maddox was 12 years old, that a running horse stepped in a hole and fell with him. Maddox’s feet hung in the stirrups, and he rode the horse through the fall, breaking his leg, arm and collarbone in the fall. He was alone and had to get back on the horse and ride to headquarters. When he got there, he couldn’t get back off without help.
The break in his leg was such that it couldn’t be set, so young Maddox was forced to lie in bed for about six weeks. The worst part, though, was that he and the horse had rolled through prickly pear.
“I was full of it,” he said. “Every time they rolled me over, I found a new sticker.”
His brother was named Darrell, but he went by the nickname “Pistol” into adulthood. Pistol always carried a pistol strapped to his hip and tied down, and their dad always warned him to leave the hammer on an empty chamber.
“He wouldn’t listen, because that was one less shot,” Maddox remembered.
One day they were riding down a trail off a bluff when Pistol jumped a wormy and gave pursuit, down the bluff. An armadillo or some other animal had dug a hole in the trail, Pistol’s horse stepped in it and flipped.
“Pistol didn’t turn loose of his reins and he went over that horse’s head and landed on his back,” Maddox said. “The hammer hit a rock and the gun went off and shot him in the leg.”
Pistol was three inches over six feet with long legs, and that bullet grazed all the way down one of them. He wasn’t hurt badly, but he remarked that the bullet “sure was hot”.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the last time Pistol was shot. Later in life Pistol became a cattle truck driver. One night he had just bumped in Florida to load when someone shot him, this time in the chest. He recovered, but it took some time. It was thought to be a case of mistaken identity, but Maddox wasn’t certain of it.
“Knowing my brother, you never could tell,” he said. “He made a pretty wide circle.”
Maddox never finished high school. He grew up cowboying and stayed with it when he quit school. As a teenager he worked for the Crocker family, the Rocking Chair Ranch near Fort McKavett and the Liveoak Ranch at Mountain Home.
“I stayed there until I went to the Army,” he said.
That was during the Korean War. Maddox was sent to Korea, but he was never directly involved in combat. He said for him it was just like the sitcom Mash.
When he returned from the war Maddox went to work for a neighbor, Mr. Burris, who had kept his horses while he was in the Army. Maddox rode c**ts and rodeoed. In the rodeos he roped, bulldogged and rode broncs.
As a teenager Maddox was running traps on the neighboring ranch with some friends who lived there. A few days earlier the boys had seen a filly that had just foaled, but on this day, they saw the same filly without her c**t.
“We just figured she had lost it,” he said.
A few more days later they were again running traps when they saw an old Waggoner mare that was known to steal c**ts, and she crossed the road ahead of them with the black c**t that belonged to that filly.
“You could count every rib and he was stumbling, he was so weak,” Maddox said. “We knew that mare had stolen him.”
The boys jumped out and caught the c**t. Weak as he was, the c**t kicked the side of the pickup with both feet when they loaded him. The ranch didn’t want an orphan c**t and gave it to Maddox.
They raised that c**t on a bottle, and it got so mean that his mom and sister would hold the bottle out the house window for the c**t to suck. They named him Midnight.
Midnight never got very big, maybe because he was out of a filly or maybe because he was an orphan. He was very shapely but small, about 13 hands.
“Midnight would have been a halter horse if he weighed 1200 instead of 900,” Maddox said.
He had a big heart, though, and didn’t know he was a small horse. Maddox made a roping and bulldogging horse out of him, and he hauled the little black horse all over the country to rodeos. Often at rodeos Maddox slept outside on a cot with Midnight staked next to him.
“That little bo**er didn’t know he was a little horse,” Maddox said. “Gosh he was a good horse.”
At a rodeo in Mason, Maddox was entered in the wild cow milking, and the contractor had an old horned crossbred cow that was about a hand taller than Midnight.
“Of course, that’s what we drew,” Maddox said. “When I roped her, I just left there like a tripper. We drug her past W.C. like that horse weighed 1200.”
They didn’t win the milking, but they did place second. The stock contractor later told Maddox that cow had never been milked. When Maddox rode out of the arena an old man standing by the gate told him, “Son, when you caught that cow, I shut my eyes”.
One day Maddox and his friend W.C. were headed to the rodeo in Comanche when the trailer began whipping. The trailer came loose and flipped, and Maddox said it threw Midnight higher than a house. The horse got up and ran off, but he was injured badly. The horse lost an eye, but worse he broke a stifle and his withers.
The veterinarian that put Midnight down told people for years that he didn’t know who cried harder, him or Maddox.
Maddox moved around quite a bit throughout his life, but his work was always similar. Much of his time was spent at various locations around Central Texas, but he spent much of the 1960s in South Texas training roping and reining horses.
When his dad was running the Liveoak Ranch he had the cowboys shoe their own horses, and this rule applied to his young sons. Maddox began learning to shoe from his dad, who was a good horseshoer but never a professional. Then he began shoeing with Duncan Roberts, who was a talented farrier.
“He was a hand,” Maddox said. “Poor old Duncan, he finally left us.”
There are a few shoeing tools and even some nails mixed in with his plaiting supplies today. Among this is an antique driving hammer that his dad found on a trail in Kansas maybe a century ago.
Maddox shod horses most of his life, and he was still shoeing a little when he had his heart attack in his mid-80s. He still trims his own c**t today.
Training horses was always his mainstay, wherever he went. He even worked as a race trainer some in the 1970s and 1980s. He spent a year at the track at Boerne and a year at the track at Uvalde.
“I was still training roping horses along with the race c**ts,” Maddox said.
Particularly in the earlier years of his training career, horses weren’t started as young as c**ts today. Maddox started many older horses, some as old as 12. Most of them were fine, and many turned into very nice horses. A few did not, though.
He once took seven head of older horses out of Laredo, most six to eight years old. There was one grey horse in the bunch that was particularly bad. That horse was aggressive on the ground, and it would come to a man, then wheel and try to kick him.
Maddox had a good hand named Benny who worked with him then. That grey horse once bucked off Benny and kicked him with both hind feet before Benny hit the ground.
“We finally got him where you could ride him, but he was just like riding a burro,” Maddox said.
On another occasion he was sent a truckload of geldings that had been bought by famed Texas Ranger L.H. Purvis and a partner of his, off a ranch near Juno. Those horses ranged in age from four to 11, and Maddox broke them all.
“The only time they had had a hand on them was when they gelded them,” Maddox said.
The best of the bunch was an 11-year-old grey gelding about 15 hands tall. Maddox could spin the horse after riding him three weeks, and the gelding was so nice that when Purvis sold the horses, he kept that grey.
Later, as the story goes, Purvis took the grey horse with him when he was transferred to Alpine. There, a hired hand fell in love with the horse, stole it and headed for Mexico horseback.
Purvis pursued, but the horse thief beat him to the border. Purvis and a contact in Mexico continued the pursuit, and reportedly brought back the horse. Maddox never heard what became of the horse thief.
“Nobody else would have ever got that grey horse back,” Maddox said. “He was a good man and could handle anything.”
Maddox met the late Ben Johnson at Boerne and later got to know him fairly well when Johnson was making the movie Sugarland Express. Everyone around had nothing but nice things to say about Johnson.
“He was a heck of a roper and a good fellow,” Maddox said. “Gosh, I liked him.”
One day Johnson told Maddox that he was in the market for a nice black horse, and Maddox knew where one was just then, a gelding he had been showing for a lady. The horse was already for sale, so Maddox told Johnson the price and they went to look.
Johnson rode the horse, stepped off, got his checkbook and began writing the check. But when he double-checked the price with the owner, she raised the price by several thousand dollars.
“He just folded that check, looked at us and said, ‘Let’s go boys,’” Maddox said.
On the way back to town Johnson said the horse was worth the new price and he would have given it had the lady just asked that to start with, but he didn’t do business that way.
“After she found out who it was, she jumped the price and he didn’t like it,” Maddox said.
Maddox had always enjoyed West Texas, and he spent several years working on various ranches around Marathon and Alpine. When he left there it was for Stamford, where he again set up shop training and shoeing horses. He stayed in Stamford for quite a while, for him, and he only left after his heart attack.
“I was there from about ’98 to about three or four years ago,” Maddox said. “I stayed out there 16 or 18 years.”
He was still riding horses, roping and shoeing when the heart attack hit him. He has some vision trouble now, but he still believes he could ride young horses.
“I think maybe I could still do it, but my balance isn’t what it used to be,” he said.
He is partners on a running-bred Quarter Horse that is almost two, and they’re about to put it in race training. Maddox hopes it will be able to run.
Maddox has two children, his son Billy Dan and his daughter Jennifer that he lives with. He plaits and sells hackamores, reins, neck ropes and more on the porch when the weather permits.
He’s had a lot of fun over the years and it’s been a good ride, he said, but it is getting a little rocky.
“This getting old is supposed to be the golden years, but it’s for the birds,” Maddox said.
Daywork to catching cows. We have Portable pens and chutes. We have you covered. Have trucks will travel.
