RIP: Happy trails to Thunder the wonder horse

Thunder, local cowboy horse celebrity, has died at age 21.

He was well known for visiting area preschools, day cares and nursing homes, allowing pets, rides, and other acts of curiosity and affection.

His preschool visits, in particular, touched many young lives as he and his handler, Jim Meyer of Shell Rock, taught students the importance of living “the cowboy way,” that is, “doing things the right way.”

Thunder also worked as a regular horse, going on trail rides and working as a team pulling a wagon. He had other roles, as well. He was used for cowboy-mounted shooting, not flinching from the loud bangs of 45-caliber revolvers.

He “ponied” other horses, acting as the lead horse with another horse or several horses attached to his saddle horn by ropes. Sometimes that was for exercising the other horses. Sometimes it was to control and calm a wild one. He did it all with patience and grace.

That patience and gentleness made Thunder an ideal teaching horse, and he taught unknown numbers of riders how to ride a horse. As lead horse, he also taught many how to drive a team of horses.

“Thunder, he just took care of everybody,” Meyer said.

Thunder had an affinity with people, especially little people, which was rare. He routinely dropped his head low for youngsters and wheelchair-bound people to be able to reach him for pets or to braid his mane.

“You can train a horse to do that, but with Thunder, that was natural,” said Meyer, “instinctive.”

Thunder had a very calm disposition. His steadiness led to a long-term bond with Meyer’s granddaughter, Mallory.

“Mallory had such a connection with him,” he said. “He was so much of her life. When she decided to ride, when she was 6 years old, she wanted to do it all.”

He said she had to figure out how to bridle Thunder, how to mount him.

“I put her on the first time. I never put her on again. She didn’t want help. She was determined to get up there by herself.”

That posed a challenge, because Thunder was a big horse. He stood at 15½ hands, which is 62 inches at the withers, the top of the shoulders. That put the stirrups above the little girl's head.

Meyer described how, when Thunder was saddled next to his teammate Freckles, Mallory would “shinny up” Freckles, reaching the stirrup there, which was lower than Thunder’s. Once she was on Freckles, she would jump over to Thunder.

Later, Meyer noted, “she could put her foot over her head and put it in the stirrup, and then she’d grab the saddle strings and pull herself up until she could take one hand and grab the saddle horn, and then she could get up.”

Thunder stood patiently through it all. “She could ride him standing up. She could do cartwheels off him.”

Thunder’s special abilities became clear at the start of Mallory’s life, during her baptism dinner at Meyer’s place, when Thunder was 7. There were a lot of family members around for the occasion, and they all wanted to ride the horses.

Meyer got Thunder out, knowing he hadn’t done a lot with children. But they put a little kid on him, led him on a short route and then switched out for another little kid. After that, Thunder walked the route himself.

“He knew what his job was,” said Meyer. “Seventeen people rode him that day who didn’t know how to ride a horse.”

Eventually that led to visiting day cares and preschools.

On those visits, Meyer explained that “the cowboy way” was to “Take care of your friends. Take care of your animals. Take care of the Earth. And be a good cowboy.”

He called it an anti-bullying program but told the kids, “That’s the way the cowboys do it.”

And they remembered. Meyer heard from teachers, from parents, from kids about his and Thunder’s visits—long after the fact.

“Little kids love cowboys, and they love horses. A lot of these kids had never petted a live horse.”

Meyer started the programs inside, talking to the children while wearing all his cowboy gear, explaining what everything was for.

“And then we’d go out to meet Thunder. I’d bring him out of the trailer, and they’d be all lined up there on the curb. He would stand still and they would come in a line and pet him. And he would drop his head.”

According to Meyer, Thunder would hold his head down the entire time while every kid walked by and petted him.

“He liked it. And then when he was done, he’d raise his head and he’d turn to me because he knew he got an apple every time we did this. So I’d cut up an apple, and I’d feed him the apple, and the kids all thought that was pretty cool, too.”

Meyer knew his place in the act, and it wasn’t top of the bill.

“I was the star of the show until they stepped out and they saw Thunder. Now I’m second best.” He laughed. “I just brought him.”

He did similar visits at North Star Community Services and nursing homes. At the Shell Rock nursing home, for example, Thunder walked right in the front door and stood on the carpet greeting residents.

Meyer showed a picture of such a visit.

“And look how he just goes down with his head,” Meyer said. Thunder let a non-verbal man hold both sides of his face and get close to him. “It almost made me cry.”

Thunder’s life started in 2004 on the Canadian plains. He came to Iowa as a 2-year-old, along with many others from Canada, to be used locally for vaccine testing. Meyer had a connection with the testing operation and asked whether he could look for a saddle horse among the 50 or so 2-year-olds in the lot.

The young horses had never been handled.

“They were literally wild,” Meyer said. “They started running, and I said, I like that one, and I pointed at Thunder,” because he could see that Thunder had a nice head.

Meyer trained Thunder himself and early on noticed something different about him.

“Normally, you’ll tie a horse up for the first time, and they’ll rear back—they don’t know what it is. I tied Thunder up, and he never pulled back.”

Meyer said Thunder had already realized that he wasn’t going to hurt him.

“He only bucked me off once. That was the only time,” he said, “when I was riding him, and he got a little excited.”

In their 19 years together, that was Thunder’s only improper act. He never bucked anyone off again. He never bit anyone. He never kicked.

Meyer trained a companion horse he bought at the same time, teaching the team of horses to pull a wagon.

The next year, in 2007, Meyer took the pair as 3-year-olds to Winterset, Iowa, to drive them in a parade for John Wayne’s 100th birthday.

“This was the first time they’ve been to town, and I was pretty nervous,” he said. “A lot of people wouldn’t take a 3-year-old to town, but they got to go to town sometime, so it might as well be today.”

He was confident in how Thunder had been trained, after all, since he’d done it himself.

Thunder would go on to pull a wagon in many parades. People both local and international—from France, Germany—have driven him. Many more have ridden behind him in either a wagon or a sleigh.

“There was a lot of people that learned to drive horses behind Freckles and Thunder. Thunder was the anchor. He was really the anchor of the team.”

He was so versatile he even helped with logging once, pulling logs out of the timber.

Thunder, beloved trail horse, team horse, mounted-shooting horse, unofficial therapy horse, cattle-sorting horse, ponying horse and educational horse, developed navicular disease, which made him lame.

“There’s a bone in the hoof, and when that starts to rotate, it goes down,” Meyer explained. “If it gets real bad, it’ll come right out the bottom.”

On Oct. 18, “We put him down.”

The vet, Dave DeBower from Plainfield Veterinary Services, reassured Meyer about his decision.

“It was tough on me. Dave told me, ‘it’s better to put them down one day too early than a day too late.’” And Meyer knew, “It was time.”

Thunder is buried on Meyer’s property, by the trail he walked so many times.

Announcement of Thunder’s death on social media resulted in an outpouring of sympathy and memories: “Thunder entertained so many,” “this is heartbreaking news,” “sweet horse. The first horse I ever got to learn to drive a team on,” “Thanks for the rides big guy!” “He was such a gentle soul,” “Thunder was a special one. Thank you for sharing him with so many people.”

Meyer, who worked for years as a horseman, estimates he has handled at least 1,000 different horses in his life. Over that time, he has known of just one other horse as gentle and trustworthy as Thunder, at a stable in Estes Park, Colorado, where the horse was reserved for little kids.

“It’s one in a thousand,” he said of that gentleness and reliability.

Thunder’s rare personality was on top of everything else he did, the many roles he filled.

“Thunder was a wonder horse,” Meyer said. “He was a special horse.”