Viva vaquero
When it comes to the art of horsemanship, Bruce Sandifer looks to storied lessons from the past.
Photography by Lisa RomereinOne would think Old Spanish Days arose 85 years ago to fete the thwack of cascarones on Barbareño skulls rather than the mastery of our early California horsemen. But there’s a renaissance afoot. Keen to preserve Santa Barbara’s vaquero legacy, a few local diehards have picked up the reins. By tradition, that means the sartorially gifted vaquero’s romal reins of handbraided rawhide, these days, as likely as not the work of Summerland-based bridle horse trainer Bruce Sandifer. One of a vanishing breed, this 21st-century cowboy also teaches the ephemeral vaquero riding technique. Taking on students—he currently has about a dozen—is his way of passing on lessons in horsemanship absorbed during his 25 years working cattle on open ranges everywhere from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. He professes to be a perpetual riding student himself.
“Every time I think I have it all figured out, a horse will tell me I don’t,” says Sandifer, who tops 6’ 6” in his Boulet boots and has the easy grace of a seasoned outdoorsman. More striking perhaps is the man’s classical approach to the West. Along with the silver spurs, he wears the early California cowboy’s flat-brimmed hat and arnitas-style “chinks,” the fringed half-chaps of pale leather. “They’re cooler in the heat,” he points out. And then there’s his 6-year-old quarter horse, Moonie, whose silver-furl-trimmed, oil-tanned accoutrements start with a studded headstall and browband that Cher could wear at Caesars Palace. Yet the cachet is less about the gear than how the man rides: From astride that horse at branding time, Sandifer can lay down a cow with one flick of his rawhide reata.
These days, he tends to reserve such moves for his Classical Californio Horsemanship student demos. Google that name in quotes and you’ll see that Sandifer coined the term as a riding style, tipping his hat to the equestrian prowess of California’s original Spanish colonists. Their idea of a dream mount combined the elegance and precision of a dressage champion with the agility and stamina of a workhorse, all to more seamlessly execute ranching’s requisite half turns, spins, and slide stops. “Back then, it was almost a matter of survival,” says Sandifer. “You had to be able to turn when you needed to because the terrain could be steep and rough. And when you said ‘whoa,’ your horse had better stop—otherwise, you’re going off a cliff or something.”
Toward that end, the vaqueros schooled their steeds using a jáquima (a bitless halter, today known as a hackamore), then introduced the traditional spade bit via a two-rein stage (use of both hackamore and bridle). It was a disciplined process of five years or more, the goal being for the horse to respond less by bit control than by reflex and habit with the lightest touch of the reins. Sandifer’s approach is similar albeit with a modern-day twist: He comes at it from the horse’s point of view, imparting to horsemanship through the ages his singular brand of heart and logic. “Our goal is effortless communication between horse and rider, so it becomes more give-and-take,” he says. “Mostly, it’s just letting the horse know you want to move and then getting out of his way. The horse has to come first.” He started teaching three years ago and would have done so earlier, he says, except for one hitch: “I didn’t live where there were people.”
Born in Montana, the adopted son of a Texan newscaster turned Seattle labor leader, Sandifer grew up on his grandparents’ ranch in Washington State. Astride a horse by age 4, his exposure to the vaquero mystique came almost as early. “I must’ve been 7 or 8,” he recalls. “One day this guy came to work. He was probably in his 60s. He had the romal reins, the silver bridle. There were lots of good cowboys, but he was so smooth. He didn’t seem like he was doing anything, but everything was getting done. He made everybody else look like farmers.”
Sandifer landed his first paid cowboying gig before he reached his teens. Over the years, he gleaned his vaquero style in the saddle from “talking with old timers.” He first came to California in 1989 to work cattle near Santa Maria. When he returned for another stint in 2001, he stayed on to train horses, then fell in love. Today he lives with his wife, Ute, in Toro Canyon, where, as the team behind Sandifer Bridlehorse Company, the two breed, build, and board horses. Ute, who studied classical dressage in her native Germany, likes to joke that she switched to vaquero-style riding to spend more time with her husband.
“One day this guy came to work. He was probably in his 60s. he had the romal reins, the silver bridle. He didn’t seem like he was doing anything, but everything was getting done. He made everybody else look like farmers.”
“To me, it’s the ultimate in horsemanship,” says Sandifer. “Some people want to do the old style because it’s beautiful; some want to connect more with their horse. I’m an observer. I help them find their path—I point them in the right direction so they can work independently.”
Classes, taught one-on-one or in pairs, take place on local trails and in the riding ring. There’s no set profile to his students, most of whom have been with him two years or more. “My dumb luck to meet someone of Bruce’s caliber,” says health care consultant Jeff Stone. “Next thing I know, I have horses, a trailer, I’ve bought all the gear, I’ve traded my car in for a diesel truck….” While Stone came on as a neophyte, Sandifer’s first protégé, retired schoolteacher Allen Gaines, has been riding most of his life. “Before, my approach was unconscious, just for the fun of it and being off by myself, says Gaines, whose father cofounded Santa Barbara Trail Riders. “Now I’m spending more time on my horsemanship.”
Somehow, you sense that none of his students aspire to be working cowboys. Still, they share more with the early vaqueros than a taste for filigree spurs. For some, it’s a matter of legacy: “That it’s the old California style—that’s such a buzz for me,” says gallerist and painter Patty Look Lewis, a fifth-generation Santa Barbaran. “It’s my heritage, part of who I think I am!” For photographer Gerald Incandela, who was born in Tunisia and grew up in Europe, there’s the added pleasure of connoisseurship. The Summerland resident likens Sandifer lessons to a ballet class, except that “your partner, being a horse, can’t speak, so you have to learn his language.” He took up riding in 1994 when he moved to California, then spent 13 years studying a gamut of riding styles—classical dressage, English, Western pleasure—before he found what he had been looking for: “For me,” he says, “Bruce is the last piece of the puzzle.”
You can in fact trace Santa Barbara’s vaquero roots from the eighth-century Moors who invaded Spain to the 16th-century conquistadors who brought their Spanish Riding School-finessed take on North African cavalry skills and damascene metalsmithing to the New World. And in Spanish colonial Mexico’s Alta California, horseback riding brought unprecedented social standing. By decree the privilege of the Spanish born and their progeny, it remained so until the late 1700s. With the founding of California’s missions, everything changed. Expanding cattle operations meant a need for more ranch hands, compelling the Spanish crown not only to extend equestrian rights to those of mixed blood, but also to designate dressage-trained presidio soldiers as their teachers. If the vaquero life promised freedom and prestige, the job itself was a crash course in isolation and extreme horsemanship: driving cattle year-round on vast expanses of desolate terrain while dodging predators and chasing after elusive steeds.
“Wild horses are like cougars,” adds Sandifer, who has seen his share. “They’re big and woofy and snooty.”
In their down time, the vaqueros made and swapped gear. For fun, they competed among themselves at riding and roping. And they had plenty of field practice. By around 1830, the Franciscan settlements owned more than half a million cattle that free-ranged across the California landscape. The Old Mission alone claimed some 20,000. With Mexico’s secularization of church lands in 1833, however, they scrambled to cash out their livestock holdings. To sell them off fast—as hides and tallow to Boston-bound trading ships—they held mass slaughters.
Skinned carcasses piled up for the grizzlies and buzzards in killing fields known as calaveras, the Spanish word for skulls. Within a year, Santa Barbara cattle herds had dwindled to 5,000 head; by 1842, to 1,800. Meanwhile, all the carnage further honed the vaqueros’ skills and the families that Mexico had entrusted with sweeping land grants were busy hiring them to resurrect the cattle business.
So began the golden age of the California ranchos—the vaquero big time. The adage of the day, according to Sandifer: “These guys could rope better with their feet than most riders could rope with their hands.”
Around 1860, droughts wiped out California’s cattle ranches. Not long after, the vaquero’s spade bit lost favor; the equine world had discovered the economic advantages of the snaffle bit, a still-predominant design that affords a shorter training period for younger horses. Yet in Santa Barbara, vaquero traditions lingered. In the 1930s, Old Spanish Days’ reata-wielding contests drew some 200 entrants and crowds of 5,000. It was the end of an era. By the ’40s, Fiesta headlined such glitterati as Hollywood stunt rider and horse trainer Clyde Kennedy and an agile, steed-mounted drill team known as the Visalia Rockettes.
A commercial rodeo took over Fiesta in 1958, and today’s celebration fetes an Honorary Vaquero each year, but the title’s connection to the actual riding style is long gone. Truth be told, Santa Barbara’s typical working cowboy now straddles an ATV rather than a horse and lurches out on the range geared up with an iPhone.
Along with a few other preservation-minded instructors in California (Richard Caldwell in Alturas, Pat Puckett in Janesville), it’s Sandifer’s aim to ensure that the centuries-in-the-making vaquero legacy continues into the next one. “California was the last place cowboys practiced the classical style, where it was the most evolved,” he says. “But there’s no manual on it. We’re all just following our own interpretation.”
Paradoxically, as much as Sandifer touts function and tradition, his students laud him for his form and innovation—for taking riding into a new realm altogether. “The unspoken subject of my lessons with Bruce is about beauty,” says Incandela. “The beauty of the lightness of the ride, the geometry that comes into play with the mechanics of movement; of the poetry and art in that moment. His may be the old California way, but a tradition can only stay alive if someone brings something new to it.” •
Santa Barbara Magazine
By Trish Reynales. All rights reserved.