My first horse Cajun passed away a few days ago October 18, 2011. I am so thankful for the time I had with him and the memories he left me with. He made me the rider I am today. Thank you for taking good care of me, I will miss you dearly. I know you are in greener pastures now, eating all the carrots, horse cookies and watermelon rinds you want and looking over me. We will meet again someday and we will gallop through the beautiful green pastures together. Until then, I will never forget you and you will always be in my heart. I love you Cajun.
This is our story of how we found each other. I wrote this a couple of years ago for my Miss Redding Rodeo pageant and won!
“I never break a promise to a horse, Mr. President.“
That’s what Civil War Correspondent Henry Wing, said to Abraham Lincoln when he had to go behind Confederate lines to retrieve a horse he’d been forced to leave behind. I like that statement because that was exactly the way it was with my first horse Cajun.
When I was seven years old, my mom sent me to horse camp. She wanted to find out if I had the horse bug like she did. I went to a kids’ camp for two weeks and fell in love with this beautiful tobiano paint they called Prince. At the end of the camp, I told my mom that I wanted to ask the owner if I could buy him. She said that I was not yet ready for a horse and had to learn the responsibility of keeping a horse and how to care for it. I also needed to earn the money to buy it. She said she would enroll me in 4H first. I promised Prince that I would be back for him someday!
I joined 4H and we leased a really old horse named Ben. My mom took me everyday to take care of him. I only rode him a few times, as he was quite old. I learned everything I could about horses and I did odd jobs for my family to save money. I would tell everyone I was saving for a horse so they would give me money instead of gifts. Two years went by and my mom finally said that it was time to look for a horse. We tried many different horses, but none of them seemed to be the right one.
Then one day, my mom saw an ad at a feed store for a pony for sale. She called the lady and we went the same day to take a look. The pony was ornery and mom said thanks, but he wasn’t what we were looking for. She asked the lady if she had another horse for sale or knew of someone who did. The lady thought for a moment and slowly said yes. She had this horse that she really didn’t want to sell but needed to sell. She brought out a beautiful paint gelding. I immediately fell in love with him. The only problem was that he cost more money than I had. My mom said that she and dad would kick in two hundred dollars but that I had to ask the lady if she would reduce her price a bit. She obliged, as she was impressed with how much money I had earned and how I loved horses so much. That began two years of daily dedication to feeding, grooming and riding. The horses name was Cajun like the spice, three spices, and he was three colors. He kept his name.
Two years later, I was looking through some old pictures of me at horse camp when I came across a picture of another girl on a paint horse. I looked closely at the markings and compared them to my horse Cajun’s markings. I then realized I had bought Prince, the same horse from the horse camp that had I wanted. My mom was amazed and couldn’t believe it!
I guess that promise I made to Prince, that I would some day come back for him, was something like Henry Wing promising that he would come back and get his horse!
Jennifer
Cajun 
