At 84, Lander horseman still makes hay the old-fashioned way

FREMONT COUNTY—It’s been a breakneck six weeks, but this morning, 84-year-old Jack Malmberg can take a breather. Malmberg and his crew — four people and 12 Belgian horses — last night finished mowing, raking and baling hay for about 30 clients on several hundred acres of Fremont County land.

“I think the month of July, we never took a day off,” said Malmberg as he gazed at his horses, grazing at his home near Lander. Then he amended that — there was the day his granddaughter was married. But seeing as how she and her new husband are part of the haying crew, Malmberg said, it was a short break. “Their honeymoon was spent putting up hay.”

All told, Malmberg’s operation put up more than 300 tons. Days began as early as 4 a.m. and went until well past dinnertime. Temperatures climbed into the 90s. His hands on this early August morning looked beat up, evidence of tinkering with mowers and handling reins. Malmberg was sore all over, he said.

“What I wouldn’t give to be 82 again,” he joked.

Malmberg has been driving workhorses his entire life — putting up hay, logging and ranching. The last 40-plus years worth of horsework was in Wyoming, where Malmberg is known for his expert haying methods and where his singular logwork can be found in ranch gates, hotel exteriors and the dozens of homes he’s built. He’s humble, friends say, never the type to trumpet his talents. But boy is he talented.

“Every time you turn around, there’s a legendary story about Jack,” said his wife, Robin Levin.

To continue the kind of physical labor required to drive horses for this many decades is rare, and most of Malmberg’s peers are retired or using gas-fired machines to do the hard stuff. By persisting, Malmberg keeps alive rich practices that have largely dimmed out.

Though the work is hard, he isn’t yet interested in retiring. He can’t imagine doing anything else.

“I was really lucky,” Malmberg said in reflecting on his life — rodeoing and driving horse teams into deep wilderness, cutting cattle and building custom homes. “I’m just totally lucky I was able to do the kind of work I did.”

Now that haying season was over, Malmberg and Levin had a little time off. When I asked how long they have to rest before they get back to work, they answered in unison: “Today.”

Levin, a long-time Fort Washakie school librarian, had to head back to school. And Malmberg?

“You see that log truck?” he asked, pointing across the field. “I start hauling logs.”

He did sleep in on this single day off, after all. He didn’t wake until 6 a.m.

Cutting, curing

At a ranch near the banks of the Little Popo Agie River in mid-July, the hay was emerald green, waist high and buzzing with insects.

Malmberg and his granddaughter, Stephanie Helsen, perched on a small platform atop a mowing machine, with four horses in front of them. Malmberg wore a hydration bladder on his back and sunglasses over his pale blue eyes. The mower clattered to life and the horses began pulling. The team cut wide, arcing swaths through the field. Grasshoppers jumped in frenzied patterns through the fallen hay.

This small, irregular-shaped parcel, with its narrow gates and odd angles, is a prime example of where Malmberg works. Fields too small for the large mowing machines, where agility is mandatory, are his bread and butter.

Malmberg was born the third of seven children in 1940 in Valentine, Nebraska. His childhood was spent on a ranch his father managed 75 miles from the little town. Because there was a war on, cowhands were hard to come by, so Malmberg was put to work at age 5, he said.

“I was just about horseback all the time,” he said.

The ranch sat in the undulating prairie of the sand hills. They had no phone, received mail three times a week and traveled to town twice a year, to visit the dentist and shoe store. Malmberg attended a one-room schoolhouse for country kids that was built on skids so it could be moved every fall to another ranch.

When Malmberg was 7, his father gave him his first team of horses, two 1,800-pound animals. Malmberg had to stand on overturned 5-gallon buckets to harness them. His duty was cleaning out the chicken house, which entailed backing a wagon up to the building and hauling off the old bedding. He learned how to work with the animals, to build trust and problem solve.

He loved it. Which was good, because “we did everything with horses — haying, fencing, feeding, wind-milling.”

Technically, Malmberg was even younger when he first “drove” a team. He proved that one evening at his home when he furnished a black-and-white photo.

“That’s my first,” he said, chuckling at the image of himself as an infant sitting on the lap of a ranch hand driving a hay rake.

Reinventing

Malmberg ranched with his father and brothers until he was 22, when he went into the Army and became a paratrooper. He had hoped to go overseas, but was ordered to make jumps into Birmingham, Alabama, during the race riots. “It was not my idea of what my service would look like,” he said.

It was the first time since he was a child that he didn’t have workhorses. While his peers saved money to buy cars when they got out of the Army, “I was saving money to get a team.”

After his service, he returned to ranch work. When oil companies started buying up ranches in Nebraska, inflating lease prices, he came to Wyoming with his brother and nephew seeking affordable land. They arrived in Lander in 1978.

Around that time, Malmberg said, a USDA report predicted an incredibly optimistic outlook for American cattle demand. Buoyed by those forecasts, they bought a spread for an inflated price with a loan that reached a 16% interest rate.

Then the beef market tanked, he said.

In the end, they had to declare bankruptcy. The bank sold everything. “But the bank did not want the workhorses or the harness,” Malmberg said. “So I took them and went to the woods. And that’s how I became a logger.”

The simple narrative belies the more complex realities behind the transformation, Levin said. Defeated and left with just a team of horses, Malmberg pivoted into an entirely new enterprise, remaking his life.

Logging with workhorses allows you to go into deeper timber and pick out trees, Malmberg said, and the U.S. Forest Service and BLM both offer select-tree logging permits ideal for workhorses.

Along with felling and hauling logs, Malmberg began to do woodwork during the offseason. He polished logs down but retained their gnarled lumps, resulting in appealing rustic products.

He began building barns, furniture and fences. He built striking stout arches that sit at the entrance to Lander, the exterior of two of its hotels. An elaborate manor in Bondurant for a shipping magnate. Vanity projects, practical projects. About 50 homes.

In 2003, he built the passive solar cabin he and Levin now share. Malmberg fashioned curving tree limbs into banisters and shelf-supports. Walls are thick blonde logs. Tables, benches, bookshelves are made of the wood he cut and shaped.

Levin marvels at his evolutions.

“He’s a self-taught genius,” Levin said. That might sound grandiose, she said, but “I have not come up with a better way to describe how many times he has had to reinvent himself and become a skilled craftsman at tasks that he didn’t acquire until he had to.”

Hedgerows

It’s near the end of July, and the landscape has faded into browns and ochres. The haze of wildfire smoke is heavy. Mowed hay has been curing on a farm north of Lander, and on this day, Malmberg’s daughter, Inger Malmberg, is raking it with a two-head horse team while he’s mowing another property.

She perches atop a single seat, and it almost looks like she’s conducting an orchestra as her arms glide through the air. Only she’s conducting a team, nudging the horses into tight turns with the reins. As they make passes, the rake creates tidy hedgerows for the baler.

Malmberg taught his daughter to work with horses, but she was born with the same innate talent his granddaughter displays, he said. It’s easy to guess where they got it from.

“He knows what his horses are thinking and how they feel,” said Dr. Dan Ratigan, a longtime neighbor and friend, adding that he’s never seen anything quite like it. “He’s really connected to his horses.”

His horse sense extends to animals he doesn’t know as well. Once, a saddlehorse of Ratigan’s got loose, crossed the river and escaped onto the reservation. “So I called up Jack, and he came out and he saddled one of ours and took a lariat, and he went across the river and went after that wild horse, roped it and brought it back across the river for me. No charge.”

Two of Malmberg’s oldest haying clients are Max and Vern Haas, former neighbors who have known him for about 30 years. When a fire damaged the Haas’ property, Malmberg put a new fence up. He’s always kept them warm by furnishing their firewood. They recalled a time when Malmberg was haying their field, and a tractor was haying an adjacent field. The horses actually finished first.

Vern Haas worked alongside Malmberg to do the logging and woodwork at Lander’s Pronghorn Lodge hotel, which his in-laws own.

“It’s amazing to watch him haul the logs out with the big horses,” he said.

Aside from his fascinating work, they said, Malmberg’s funny, hardworking and sweet.

“He’s a wonderful man,” Vern Haas said. “What a guy.”

A 10-horse hitch!

Levin, who is a crucial part of the operation, is a diminutive woman with a bright smile who grew up in the Bronx. She moved to Wyoming in 1981 with her first husband to work as the Fort Washakie school librarian. Four decades later, “I’m on my third generation of students.”

In the early ‘80s during the Fourth of July Parade in Lander, Levin remembers an incredible float pulled by a 10-horse hitch. “On the back was a semi trailer. And the adult square dance club was dancing to this live band, and on the very tail end of this, they were handing out beer.

“And Jack Malmberg is driving this whole amazing float,” she said. “Ten horses!”

They married 20 years later, in 2003.

Malmberg taught Levin the ropes and how to drive a team, “which I learned to do just enough to get myself in trouble,” she said with a laugh.

Levin still openly admires her husband’s charm and resilience.

“He’s a monumental figure,” she said.

Neighbor Ratigan echoed that. “I describe him as the last of the real cowboys,” he said. Ratigan stands in awe of his work ethic, his incredible body of knowledge and willingness to share that knowledge.

“He’s the real deal,” he said. “They don’t make them like that anymore.”

Compelled

“I swear this hill has gotten steeper in the last five years,” Malmberg said the morning after hay season while climbing back up toward his home.

Over the decades, Malmberg’s been dragged by spooked horses, he’s broken ribs and punctured lungs and had too many injuries to recount. Nobody would call the work easy.

But Malmberg would call it the best method for him. Horsepower is regenerative — his mares literally produce his labor force. “So I don’t have to go to the bank to buy a new tractor.” The horses don’t get any supplemental feed; they eat the hay on Malmberg’s fields.

It’s not like he is opposed to technology. In recent years he purchased a gleaming new mower built by an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania.

Will he ever stop? Levin’s not sure. “He’s compelled,” she said.

Parked near the driveway are three 1950s-era non-motorized mowers. Malmberg’s father bought one of them in 1949. Looking at the machine, which appears to be in solid shape, Malmberg can’t recall a year when it wasn’t used. “It still mows cleaner than any mower,” he said.

Like Ratigan said, they don’t make them like they used to.

The post At 84, Lander horseman still makes hay the old-fashioned way appeared first on WyoFile .