Winner in 1983. The first time I ever saw Boone’s Little Buckeroo I was showing at the State Fair of Texas in 1983. That happened to also be the National Show for the year. I was going to the arena to watch a class and ran into Lowell Boone. I stopped to visit. He was waiting to go into the ring with the most delicate, gorgeous horse that I had ever seen. I had heard about a buckskin colt that he had been showing and that he had won the championship in the 1980 and 1981 national show put on by the International Miniature Horse Registry.
Boone’s Little Buckeroo
All I had heard did not do this little horse justice! Through the years I have seen only a handful of miniature stallions that seemed to be in a class all of their own. Bond Sir Galahad, Prince Tennessee of Monashee, and Boone’s Little Buckeroo – such refinement, small size, and elegance that they seem more like gazelles than horses. Justice can never be done by the camera with a horse like this….beautiful pictures exist, yes, but until you walk up tothem in the flesh you cannot imagine the delicacy that they possess.
Boone’s Little Buckeroo
Sometime later I heard that the Eberths were getting into the miniature horse business in a big way. They had bought a group of mares from Bob Bridges and had talked Lowell into selling Buckeroo to head their breeding program. The rest, as they say, is history.
The following two articles were published in The Miniature Horse May-June, 1997, and are used by permission of the authors who can tell the whole story so much better than I. The dictionary defines “odyssey” as any long journey with many adventures. Buckeroo’s story is truly an odyssey. Click on the article titles below to view the articles.
The Odyssey Begins…
-by Lowell Boone
The Odyssey Continues…
-by Robin and Marianne Eberth
The following was a note that John Eberth posted on a miniature horse discussion board, Lil Beginnings, February 26, 2002, when the discussion turned to Buckeroo.
It has been said that “word of mouth is the best advertising”. Growing up, my family did not spend a million dollars advertising Buckeroo. My mom did not put an ad of Buckeroo in every issue of every magazine printed, like some farms have done to push their stallions to try and make people believe that the stallion is that great. My mom still does not do that. If you spend enough money and say something enough times sooner or later people will believe that blue is purple. However, once the farm is gone or once the stallion has died, did those stallions and their offspring still bring the prices and were they considered great stallions by other well established breeders. Buckeroo is just now seeing the “popularity hype” that some other stallions saw much earlier in the stallions lives. Do those stallions still bring high prices, some do because they actually produce great quality offspring, while others totally were valuable because someone spent a lot of money saying the offspring were great quality.
It has also been said that “the proof is in the offspring”. There are very few stallions that their offspring have value after the stallions are dead or non-productive, pay attention to those bloodlines and where they came from and what horses have those bloodlines now, and the values they have. Pay attention to older established breeders and the broodstock they use and the pedigrees behind those horses, that will tell you what bloodlines are truly valuable. Prepotency is the true test of a great stallion. Grand-get and great-grand get with qualities of a famous stallion show dominant genes that are desired and can still be passed on.
John Eberth