Jordi Edens-Mitchell’s newest breakaway horse—a sorrel gelding registered as “Smokin Little Smarty” and known as “Cowtown”—came off Jordan Driver’s place in late July, and Edens-Mitchell made the short round on him at Dodge City, Kansas, the same week she bought him.
He’s a 2015 gelding by Dual R Smokin out of the Smart Little Lena mare Dollys Little Smarty, bred by J Five Horse Ranch Management of Weatherford, Texas.
The Gatesville, Texas, cowgirl has hauled two geldings this season, Pepto Pepper Rey “Tbox” and TRR Tanquery Cat “Spike,” and Tbox has been the game changer of the pair. She set herself a number for when he got a break.
“I said from the beginning of the summer that if I got to $100,000, I really wanted to take Tbox home and let him rest the rest of the summer if it was possible,” Edens-Mitchell said. “And so that horse ended up working out, and I won $600 at Salt Lake and that put me at 100, and we were going home that week and I was like, you know what? He’s going to go home and get turned out for a little bit.”
She said she felt confident enough she could finish the summer out on Spike and Cowtown. So Tbox went home.
Why Cowton Is a Match
Edens-Mitchell’s list on him is short.
“He’s easy. He scores really good. He backs in and stands like a statue most of the time,” she said. “He’s fast, and I feel like I rope better on horses that kind of carry my rope through the stop, and I feel like that’s what he does. And he breaks the rope off really fast.”
That combination is the part she keeps coming back to, because it’s the thing Tbox does better than anything else she’s ridden.
“I feel like that’s one of the things Tbox does so well—when I’m throwing, he’s already sliding, but his front feet are still peddling, so it never feels like it’s getting took away from me, and that’s very hard to find one that does that for you,” she said. “I kind of get that same feel from him. Not maybe to the extent of Tbox, how he does it, but the same sense of it never feels like I’m getting shorted by any means, but he still breaks it off. It’s hard to find one that can do both.”
She also didn’t ease into him. Cowtown went from sitting at the Drivers’ to a Dodge Cirty, Kansas, inside of a week.
“I kind of threw him to the wolves. We bought him and then took him to Dodge the same week,” she said. “I made the short round on him at Dodge, and then I got him home for two days and practiced once, and then we took back off, and I was like, oh, I don’t feel like I’m really doing him any justice.”
Staying in Caldwell, Idaho, changed that. Edens-Mitchell has spent the last week or so there roping live calves and sorting out the small stuff.
“A new horse is a new horse to anybody. It’s going to take a little bit of time to figure the little stuff out that makes a big difference,” she said. “We’ve got to tweak a few things, and I feel like we’re way more prepared now.”
A Tie-Down Horse First
Before he was anybody’s breakaway horse, Cowtown was in tie-down training with Cooper Matthews—and he was small enough that Matthews worried about him.
“Probably my senior year of high school, I was looking for something else. I actually bought him from Cooper Matthews. He was in tie-down training with Cooper, but he was pretty small,” Jordan Driver said. “Cooper was scared that he wasn’t going to be able to take the jerk for a while.”
Driver bought him as a 5-year-old, in part for her mother to breakaway on, and started seasoning him alongside another mare she was bringing along. He grew into himself.
“He’s kind of that old-school calf horse look, so he kind of took to it, and then he grew. That helped. He wasn’t this little bitty pony that was five when I bought him,” Driver said.
Seasoned in the College Pen
Driver, of Garden City, Texas, rodeoed at Tarleton State University primarily as a barrel racer due to a shoulder injury, but she is just as competitive when she gets the chance to rope.
“I love to breakaway rope. Like, if I still could, I definitely would,” she said. “I did love the whole process of getting the babies up and getting a green one ready to go.”
He became the horse she picked when the run had to be safe: long scores, fresh calves, a trip she just needed to place in the average on.
“That’s who I would ride, because I was a little more confident and he was a little more easy on me with my shoulder,” Driver said. “Going through college, he was kind of my main practice horse too, and who I did most of the reps on.”
He also picked up a resume being a go-to for a handful of Driver’s college friends. Driver’s college roommate, Tori Brower, roped on him through Driver’s junior and senior years and took him to the Great Lakes Circuit Finals, where Driver says she won two rounds on him. He’d been in the pickup races at the Texas Tech college rodeo three times, by Driver’s count, and a teammate at Tarleton tie-down roped off him when Driver wanted him to stop a little harder.
Driver rode him at the College National Finals Rodeo herself her senior year, because she wasn’t sure she could hold her mare in the box in Casper, Wyoming.
“I think I won third in the first round on him, and then I caught a tail on him in the third round,” she said.
Why He Scores
Driver doesn’t credit a training program for the way he backs in the corner and sits there. She credits volume—and the fact that a lot of different people, with a lot of different habits, sat on him.
“We all have a different way of doing things, and so I think after a while, he just finally figured it out. But we spent a lot of time scoring, and I think that was a big deal,” Driver said.
It helped that the Southwest Region rarely gave anybody a straight answer about what was coming out of the chute.
“We never knew what we were roping half the time, so I never knew if I was going to have one walk out, run out. I had to see them out all the way,” she said. “He was put in a whole bunch of different scenarios.”
“He’s been used, not overused,” Driver said.
The Sale
Driver never advertised him. She’d more or less decided he was going to live at the house forever.
“I don’t sell a lot of my horses. They’re all kind of family to me,” she said. “I hadn’t let anybody know that I was selling him, because I didn’t really want to. He’s kind of fun to have around the house and to piddle with. But I kind of had to make some big-girl decisions.”
What she wanted was for him to get used. She brought it up sitting next to Edens-Mitchell’s mother at Reno, Nevada.
“I wanted him to go to someone who was going to use him and not just be their fifth or sixth string kind of deal,” Driver said. “I was just like, hey, I’m going to sell my little calf horse, my little sorrel that I roped on, and they immediately—she’s like, I want to get on him, I want to try him.”
The Edens-Mitchells came to try him right before Dodge City, and Driver got pictures back.
“Her little boy ran to him, and they sent me pictures of him with a little boy on his back in the stall, walking around, and it was kind of like a meant-to-be thing,” she said. “I’m very glad he’s going with someone who’s going to make him shine and take care of him, and I respect Jordi so much in the breakaway world.”
Where He Fits the Rest of the Summer
Edens-Mitchell sits No. 3 in the Cinch Playoff Series breakaway standings with 731.62 points through rodeos ending Aug. 10, per the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association. The Aug. 24 cutoff sets the 24-roper field for Puyallup, Washington, Sept. 10-13, where the top four advance to the Governor’s Cup in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, no matter where they sit in points.
Cowtown is the plan there.
“More than likely, that’s where I will probably try to stay on him the majority of the summer, finish it out,” Edens-Mitchell said.
Tbox, meanwhile, is getting the rest she promised him, with a return date in mind.
“He will probably make an appearance at Sioux Falls more than likely,” she said.
