Neil asked me to write a story of my life. Well here goes nothing with a string tied to it.

Some people told me I was born in the homestead shack on the Cayuse Ranch, but Ruby Wesley told me I was born in her house ... there at Oshoto. They told me my older brother was born in the Homestead shack with Maude Thompson as midwife ... It matters not, the important thing is that I was born and as Rubyard Kipling says to fill the hour with 60 seconds worth of distance run.

The first nine years of my life was in the far country .... and mostly camping out... in a camp someplace with Dad and Mom, wherever Dad was working on the U. S. Topographical Survey. I started kindergarten in Arizona. There were more moves, the last to Rock Springs, Wyoming ... After that Mama stayed home on the Cayuse Ranch so we could go to school and not be moved around so much.

One of the first things I remember is that I'm on top of a pack in the pack string going along a trail.... now that is imprinting ... The horse is turned loose to follow same as the others in the string. Dad put the pack on so there was a hollow in the middle/top for me to sit. He told me, no way I could fall out... and if any trouble, the only place the horse would go was to him. Just how safe could you get?

Our mother, Gennevieve Mae (Irwin) Brislawn was teaching school by the Little Missouri Buttes near the Devil's Tower, when she met and married Bob Brislawn. They had 5 children, Emmett, then me. They gave me a perfectly good name, Mabel Gennevieve, but Emmett, who was about two and learning to talk, would say Dipper when they tried to have him say Sister. So Dipper stuck. Neil came along when Dad was surveying in the Lander, Wyoming area. Then, Colleen, was born at Maggie (and Carl) Blatt's home east of our place. Shane came along and was born in Margaret Beagle's home, that was used as the hospital in Sundance and that area. Our mama died in 1942. I was nine years old at the time and was put into the woman's place as head of the house ... so grew up fast.

After Mama died, Dad stayed home to keep his family together... That was the main reason, another was his survey equipment and pack saddles were stolen. He still had the horses, but no equipment.

I was in St. Joseph's Orphanage when it was an orphanage (now a disturbed children's center) ... and worked there for 4 years, while I, first, attended the sixth grade, and, then, back for three years of high school. I graduated from Natrona County High School in Casper. Then I was sick with the rheumatic fever for two years, but healed enough to go to Heiman's Business collage in Sherdian, Wyoming. I took three years in one year, as I didn't have the money to pay for the cost. More midnight hours... I worked afternoons for an insurance company while attending this school.

Colleen and Shane stayed with me in Sundance, so they could attend school, then we went back to the ranch on weekends. Neil was away to high school in Casper and then went to the army. It seemed, like Dad said, we held the place together while Emmett and Neil were away.

While I was a teenager, and going to school at the ranch, I broke a lot of the horses. I rode everywhere. And had the job of getting other people's horses in for them so they could go to work. .. The Wesleys was easy as it was six miles to ride there. For Art and Tom Zimmerschied it was six miles over ... to the end of the rough pasture ... I was to have their horses in by daylight .... so I didn't know the rough country I was in. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. Good thing the horse I was riding could see and as you know once you start the horses for the corral, they go on the run. I could feel the horse when he gathered himself to jump, so sit tight... It was getting light enough for me to see this one morning, when the horses in front came to a deep draw or gulley 20 or 30 feet deep and about that across. The trail turned sharply and went down the side of that draw. But Dobie, having been blinded in one eye by the hondo when being roped years before, didn't see the horses turn. I pulled hard to stop and pulled his head around. He had been preparing to jump when I got him turned ... whew ... that was a close call. Dobie could be caught any where he was so gentle, but he had been 'cowboyed' and injured. Dobie was from the Holbrook herd from Colorado and had been up the trail, round trip, to Raines, North Dakota 13 times. So he was well trained and good to ride ... knew what he was doing.

Emmett got the job of trailing the Frank Mitchell buckinghorse string from rodeo to rodeo, before the horses were trucked as they are now. I helped him. One morning I was at the barn with Dad helping me get started ... as I was going to meet Emmett and the horses over by Belle Fourche. I remember asking Dad how I was going to find Emmet, as it was a big country out there. Dad said that we would both be taking the shortest route so we would meet up that way. And we did. I didn't know then, but since, now, we live over by Aladdin, it was on the Sourdough Road on the hill near Ernest Leitners, about 70 miles from home. Emmett had came about 20 miles. I turned around and was in the lead of the horses back to Hulett and the rodeo grounds there. Dad met us with the Terraphane car. We put our saddles in the trunk and went on home. That trip I was riding a mare called Cricket.

When the rodeo was over, Emmett and I took our saddles and caught two of the bucking string and used them to trail the rest 30 miles away to the D Road and the Cayuse Ranch.... Across country like that Emmett rode Tony, a bay or sorrel, that didn't buck with him. I got to ride Trigger, a black horse that was well trained and easy to ride... He just bucked when they put the flank cinch on him and let him out the chute gate. The cowboys could not ride him when he came out the bucking chute gate. It didn't help any when I told them I rode him in trailing the horses... Some of those rides were 100 miles in one day,

Then one time we trailed the horses to Gillette, I was only suppose to go part way and help but it was early about noon when we got the fifty miles to Dick Meyers place. So when the corral gate swung shut I turned around to head for home. I planned on staying at Anna and Ed Norfolks, but Anna was not home, so I headed on toward home. I could of went to Dickinson's but that was off the road a ways so I kept heading for home. Next was Heald's but that was 6 miles out of the way, so I decided to go to Patsy Brown's and be closer to home and I could stay there as I worked for them a lot. I was riding Dobie and he used his salmon gait and and was easy to ride, and could grab a bite of grass to eat along the way, and the water was along the road in the borrow pits... I lay on my belly to drink next to him. No one came with a drink of water or a sandwich. When back at Patsy's she said "Oh My, I could stay there and she would put Dobie on the circle walker." I thought Dobie didn't need to walk another hour, on a walker, I led him, letting him walk, and eat and drink, and rest, on his way back home. At home he ate his can of oats and had rolled by the time Dad was at the barn. It was just dark. Dad asked if I was going to walk Dobie and cool him off'? I answered I just did. That I had led him and walked from Browns. Next few days Dad kept watching and checking on Dobie to see how his legs and ankles were. He was still sound.

Dad and his Survey buddies kept talking about the fact that the Spanish horses they were using on the survey were becoming harder and harder to find .... and they were saying that some one should do something about it, like start a preserve or a foundation, or something ... and you, Bob, was the man for the job. Since you had the land, and the "on the ground experience" and knowledge to do such a great thing as that. I took Spanish language in High School so I could read the Spanish books for the research needed to do this. I was Dad's right hand man to help him study and answer the letters of inquires that came in by the hundreds, we answered 15 letters a day ... and worked until midnight, so if we got the 15 done before midnight, we done a few more ... until the clock struck midnight.

Larry Richards, then of Pocatello, Idaho, had wrote us for information for a Doctorate Treatise as he was studying Zoology and got his degree that way ... so we then had a Professor to put his PhD on the record. It seems that people, like me, who are out their with their faces marred with dirt, and sun burn on their hide, can't just say something and be heard. We needed a Professor to put his approval forming the Registry.

Well I am telling more about the registry than my self, but I lived and breathed the horses and rode them and wrote about a few hundred letters and read a lot of books by the old timers who were there .... and Columbus's ship's log ...

Larry Richards did that last undertaking, too, then he went to Portugal and talked to the professors and historians there and saw the horses and studied their horses also.

I cooked for the people who were at the first Mustang Meeting to organize and go to the Attorney's for the legal work on the corporation. Neil came up with name for the Registry. How many more meetings I cooked for the people, I have lost count. The Spanish Mustang Registry, Inc. was formed on June 14, 1957, With Macy and Gladstone, Attorney-at-law. I worked for attorneys Dick Macy and Scotty Gladstone then, so I was the one who typed up those papers ... hum?

I was Secretary for the Spanish Mustang Registry many years.

Emmett had the Cayuse Ranch leased .. . he wanted to go and work on the big ranches .... so I came back to the ranch and leased it, but had to work, so I worked for Scotty Gladstone, Attorney at law as a stenographer. I took shorthand at 200 words a minute and could type 100 words a minute ... but that was then. Over the years, the other places I've worked was as Teachers Aid in 4th Grade in Sundance, The Farmers Home Administration, and the Soil Conservation Service.

I married Don Brunson in 1959 and we leased the Cayuse Ranch for 6 years. Until Dad, Bob Brislawn, wanted the ranch back and have his son Emmett there to run the place. Emmett didn't want to come, as he was working where he wanted to there by Lovelock, Nevada but finally decided to do so, and stayed.

All in all, over the years, I had gone on a lot of trips with Dad while searching for the horses. We would write letters asking for information and then go have "a look see", as Dad would say. We had found only 17 pure Spanish horses before the Registry was formed.

There were other things too. When cooking supper one night, I was reading a Spanish book on the horses in South America and about their bones. I showed Dad about the bones "of the horses there". Dad said, "That's it, the proof is in the bones." And we needed proof, as I said before. So we studied the bones of the horses who died on the ranch and saw that the vertebrae had different count of different breeds of horses.

We found that there other people interested and the Registry grew and there were so many people who have helped so much. Dad went to California in 1973 where Dad and Jeff Edwards had a partnership and done research on the horses. The professors at the Universities there... found that the blood had more red corpuscle then other horses, the count will be between 8 million and 13 million. It was discovered at the University of California, at Davis that the horse is also blood packed and carried more blood than horses of their size which made them blood packed. The hearts are bigger so that pumps more blood and the lungs are bigger too. The hair has some air in it so it can keep the horses cooler in summer and warmer in winter. That is only the start of the information they learned there.

Dad felt that he had seen the Spanish Mustang restored and recognized by two departments of the United States government and listed in the Department of Agriculture Official Breeds List. The Spanish Mustang is a breed, not by declaration, but by blood and physical characteristics.

These horses came in with Columbus and Cortes and have came a long way ... and can go the distance...