“He was a big skinny thoroughbred that had run registered as Mr. Casis in Detroit and Chicago and won money. When he quit winning, he was sold as a three year old in Santa Fe and then somehow came to the feed yard in Amarillo, Texas, where I was working.”
Lee remembers and tells this story as we sit in his horse barn in Kerrville, peeling pecans open with his pocket knife. “That horse didn’t know anything but running. He’d never had on a stock saddle, he didn’t know how to rein and stop or how to open gates. Well, there was a hothead kid at the feed yard that year. He picked him out of the remuda ‘cause he was tall, saddled him, and went to trying to make him open a gate. The horse had no idea what he wanted. That hothead kid beat him for hours. I never saw a horse take such abuse. He raked him open with his spurs, he ripped his mouth, he whaled on him with his lariat till one eye was swollen shut. I was mad as hell, but I knew that that kid was the kind who’d just as soon kill you as look at you when he was hot like that, so I didn’t say anything to him. When he was through with the horse, he stuck him way at the back so no one would see him.
“The boss came up and saw that bleeding horse and said, ‘What happened here?’. All I said was, “You’re a horseman -- you can see what happened.”
“A few days later that kid was gone, fired. I started petting that horse. I called him Panhandle Slim, cause he was skinny as a rail. He didn’t trust anybody then. I petted him for a month. I took my time with him. He was a challenge, but he had an intelligent eye. You can tell everything about a horse by his eye, just like a man. And he responded to kindness... Like that old saying, “That old pony’ll stand good treatment.” I ended up buying him for $200 and training him. What a roping horse! He was fast. He could get on a steer like that,” he snaps his fingers. “My god, it was fun to rope on him.”
“He became a great riding horse, one of the outstanding horses I ever rode. And after all he’d been through, he was gentle. He followed me around all the time. A horse will respond to good treatment.”
“That’s the main quality I like about horses -- their gentleness. Just like with people. Show me a kind man, and he’ll be successful.”
Judging by his gentle contributions to people and animals, Lee Karr himself is a successful man. In 1975 he published a book of his extensive collection of black and white photographs of cowboys and ropers, called Rope Burns, now a collector’s item that sells for $300 a copy at out of print book stores. The title page says Rope Burns is “a fair likeness of a few good cowboys who know the meaning of the words.”
In the introduction to his book, Lee writes, “The year was 1926.” (He was ten). “The place was the North side Coliseum at the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo. Allan Holder had just won the Calf Roping Championship for the third consecutive year. My father, Joe Karr, who ranched in Coleman County, Texas, was a roping enthusiast and this was my third time to go with him to the Fat Stock show. Little did I realize as I watched Allan win the title, that 50 years later I would be doing a camera portrait of him at his home in Rankin, Texas.”
From this early exposure as a small boy, he became a lifelong observer and student of “the roping art.”
“I do not use the term “roping art” lightly,” Lee says. “No other sport in the world takes such coordination, timing, patience and professional skill to become a champion.”
His first serious interest in roping began in 1946 when he owned and operated a studio in Georgetown. Some of his first practice subjects were Clyde and “Fat” Kimbro, Son and Buddy Glass, Gene Pearson, Lonnie Krause, Will Young, Neal and Albert Landry, J.H. Montgomery, Henry Glass and Tommy Kimbro. Some of his more treasured photographs are of Ross Martin on his horse “Sleepy,” Tony Salinas on “Stormy”, and Royce Sewalt on “Copper.”
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