Horseshoeing and Forging

A Rapt Audience   Patrick McCarron grew up on a farm near the Canadian border in the hard-scrabble, Great Lakes country of Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan. At the age of five, he was driving his father's work teams, then later the horse-drawn tour buggies and taxis on Mackinac Island, where auto- mobiles have been banned since 1896. His inspiration for a career in horseshoeing harkens back to his grandfather, a blacksmith who immigrated from Ireland to Ontario, to Michigan.      In pursuit of his own wanderlust, McCarron toured three seasons with the Caravan Stage Company, a Canadian theater troupe traveling by means of five, brightly painted gypsy wagons, thirteen Clydesdales, and five saddle horses. He was farrier, teamster, and actor on the company’s two-year swing down the West Coast of the U.S. and their summer along the St. Lawrence Seaway, in Ontario, and into New England. When he met and joined up with Kathleen Meyer, rather than move conveniently into an abode, they set off instead in a rebuilt, hundred-year-old covered wagon to spend two years viewing three Rocky Mountain states from over the big black haunches of a team of drafts.       McCarron is a 1977-graduate of Montana State University Horseshoeing School, in Bozeman, and an AFA (American Farriers Association) Certified Journeyman Farrier. He believes strongly in the educational value of continuing participation in clinics and contests and is a regular enrollee, particularly at Bob Marshall clinics. He studied draft horse shoeing with Rocky Irons at the Atlantic Farrier's School in Nova Scotia and with Edward Martin in Closeburn, Scotland. In 1990, he was the official farrier for the Wyoming Centennial Wagon Train, with its one hundred wagons and six hundred outriders. More recently, he was the judge for horseshoeing at the 2003 Draft Horse Classic in Grass Valley, California. McCarron has been a member of the Montana Professional Farriers Association since 1990; he was on the board of directors for seven years and editor of the newsletter, Iron and Hammer, for three.      Harboring a deep-seated aversion to petroleum-powered vehicles, ever- preferring to drive horses, McCarron, in 1990, opened the Romany Forge, a horseshoeing establishment in Victor, Montana. To his great delight, he manages to shoe half his horses on the premises. When he does drive his shoeing rig, he carries his grand- father's anvil. Turning the Shoe Dressing the Shoe Trimming the Foot A horse's hoof, because it grows like a finger nail, requires trimming regularly. Working horses, in addition, should be shod. Lefty's New Slippers Rasping Pancho's Hind Shaping A Shoe Wyoming Centennial Wagon Train, 1990 “As the train's official farrier, Patrick was engaged in shoeing, starting at dawn and then again each evening until all light faded.” “Pancho and Lefty wear what are called clipped, fullered plates, forged from steel bar-stock (a straight bar, ½ inch by 1¼ inches). Plates are fairly simple flat shoes, though in size, for these horses, impressive. Pancho, with the larger feet, carries on each front a shoe measuring eight inches in diameter and weighing three pounds. The fuller—or crease—is a groove into which the nail holes are punched, the clip a thin triangular tab of steel angling up along the hoof wall. Clips are drawn, or hammered, out of the steel when pulled pink-hot from the forge. Beginning with a length of bar stock appropriate to the size of the horse's foot, Patrick, by means of forge and hammer and anvil, turns a shoe. For a draft horse, he draws one clip, at the toe. A clip, he says, is as good as two extra nails for keeping a shoe attached to a foot.” (from Barefoot Hearted) Forging in the Field The Gypsy Farrier with His Laundry Shoeing at the Romany Forge . . . Shoeing Mare with New Foal Hot Steel