Dawson Farm: Ride to Win

About the Book

Annie O’Reilly is a young woman from a small cattle ranch in New Mexico. Her mother died when she was nine. She was raised by a Navajo woman, Maria, who cared for her mother during her illness then stayed on to care for the household and Annie. She grew up on horseback under the tutelage of her father, Big Mike, and Maria’s husband, Jim Roanhorse, who worked on the ranch. As Annie was getting ready for college, Big Mike was killed one snowy winter night when his truck overturned while hauling a load of heifers. After his death, Annie found there was no money for college. She had to sell everything to pay off the mortgage. Jim and Maria returned to the reservation, and Annie headed for California in her old pickup with the one horse she owned in an old horse trailer. Tio Miguel was a beautiful golden lineback buckskin she’d raised from a foal and broke to ride herself. On the ranch, she had gathered herbs and plants with Maria and learned how to use them for salves, poultices, nutrition, and medication to heal numerous equine illnesses and injuries. Jim Roanhorse had taught her the Indian way to read animals—what they were thinking and feeling. She learned well and developed an ability to respond telepathically and interact with them. The story is about Annie finding and making her way to a life she could not have imagined using the only experience she had and what she knew and understood about horses.

About the Author

Sharon Angus Dodgen trained show horses and gave riding lessons to people of all ages in Southwestern Arizona for more than sixty-five years. Horses were an integral part of her life from the time she was five. As a teenager, in Southern California, Sharon showed horses owned by others—three-gaited, five-gaited, and every breed of horse except Tennessee walking horses and Paso Finos—hunters, jumpers, pleasure, trail, reining, and dressage horses. At sixteen, she became Silver Spur Rodeo Queen, in Yuma, Arizona, and as a part of her queenly duties, she roped a calf. No queen had done that before or since! Sharon taught horse science classes at Arizona Western College, wrote a column for the local newspaper, and spent forty-seven years as a 4-H horse club leader. She studied folk medicine, herbalism, and homeopathy and created a herbal liniment for lame horses. Sharon was well-known in horse show circuits and held memberships in professional associations throughout Southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico. “To me,” she says, “equestrian skills should be refined so the horse and rider’s movements are synchronized, just like classical ballet. This requires hours and hours of work and practice, whether riding English or Western.” Sharon, now eighty, lives in a wheelchair, though she’s as plucky as ever—“The last colt I broke, I was seventy-two years old.” Dawson Farms: Ride to Win is her first work of fiction.