A Working Cowboy Harnesses
Imagination and Vision
In movies about the middle ages, castle doors of feudal lords have a latch like on Craig Danner's shop. In the movies, it's the work of people in set design. Here, it's a working cowboy.
What he wants to be perfect, he builds, starting at the front entrance of 14 acres partitioned during creation by rolling hills.
Twin gates at the entrance, a hundred or so pounds of pipe each, glide open with an easy push.
He built the horse trailer son Cody pulled to the National Collegiate Rodeo finals, the shop, the barn, the steel house on the hill, the fences and the bracelet on wife Pam's wrist.
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He builds spurs.
"He can build anything," Pam said.
Thirty odd years ago she was a barrel racer. He was a bull rider and it took a shade over 20 years to find just the right land, to have the money, to put together the place they started planning when they married, the fall she was 17.
He was 18, a $2-an-hour Fannin County ranch hand with a pickup and enough cash on hand to pay his entry fees. They met at a rodeo in Mesquite.
She was a Markham, daughter of a Brown and Root welder. She married early, and as opposed to having his daughter married to a bull-riding ranch hand, Claude Markham steered his new son in law to a Brown and Root project in Titus County.
Claude had, after all, put his daughter in position to meet just such a boy. When he wasn't welding, Claude lived to ride and rope. Now retired, he trains horses.
In high school Craig learned to weld. At Brown and Root, he learned to work and weld, and the direct correlation of a willing attitude.
"You didn't have to be there long to see that the guys who made the most were the guys who knew the most," Craig said. From steel so thick it takes an x-ray to check for quality, to an overlays of brass and silver, bonds so fine you see nothing but metal, Craig learned to put things together.
Though said sincerely, you gotta hope his is the hollow lament of every generation of artisans - "I'm not sure there are any guys left like the guys on the job who took me under their wing," he says.
Not that he got the gravy train jobs.
"Daddy was a foreman and whether or not he was Craig's foreman, he's told me he always had in the back of his mind that if Craig got easy work, it would look like favoritism," Pam said.
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Considering the work that went into the bracelet he made her, I made that lousy joke - did she wonder what he'd done that guilt should inspire such labor of love?
"Nope," she grinned. "A friend won't hurt a friend. That's the big advantage to marrying one." It's not every rodeo that's got a girl like this.
Fittingly, on a spring day when creative elementary teachers organized a western day that went beyond hats and borrowed bandannas, Craig was recruited to talk about horses tack.
You can learn things listening to him. Next time you're out on the range and note the "jingle bobs" on a cowboy's spurs, you may confidently drawl, "Well, how's things out west, partner?"
Jingle bobs. Those are the chimes on the ring piercing the pin of the rowel in that spur Craig's holding on the cover.
"Texas cowboys don't go in much for jingle bobs," the spur builder says. "They're more the style of the fellows on the big ranches out in Nevada and Idaho - buckaroos, they call them."
Beyond geographical distinctions, cowboys have individual styles. One wants an overlay of initials, another wants something traditional, a concept with heritage, like the playing card suit insignias overlaid on that buckaroo's spur on the cover.
Rodeo fans catching December's National Finals Rodeo, televised from Las Vegas, saw Cody Demoss spurring his saddlebronc out the gate with a set of Danner-made spurs. In the Professional Bull Rider's Association, Mike White, Royd Doyle and Chris McClure wear spurs he made. Selling at generally less than $200 a pair, the marketing plan for his spur making enterprise is word of mouth, not intended to keep him buried in work.
There's always other good work at home, 14 acres shared with a friend.