Horse owners who know the Four Sixes, King Ranch, and Pitchfork brands of Texas, might be less familiar with that of Tongue River Ranch. But Peptos Stylish Sue, recent winner of the NCHA Derby under Boyd Rice, sports the brand of this historic ranch, founded in 1898 by sons of Swen Magnus Swenson of SMS Ranches.

For S.M. Swenson, who had moved to Texas from Sweden in 1830, cattle ranching seemed a good way to help pay taxes on land holdings he had acquired as a merchant and banker. Before he moved to New York in the late 1880s, where he founded the precursor to the First City National Bank of New York, Swenson leased his Texas holdings to sons Eric and Albin, who operated them under the name Swenson Brothers Cattle Company.

In 1899, when the Texas Central Railroad forged into West Texas, the Swensons laid out the town of Stamford, hoping to entice immigrant cotton farmers into buying land. It was the Swenson brothers who organized the famous Texas Cowboy Reunion at Stamford in 1930.

In 1902, with nearly 400,000 acres in portions of twelve Texas counties, the Swensons hired Frank S. Hastings, as manager of their ranches. It was a position that he held until his death in 1922. In 1920, the Breeder’s Gazette published a series of articles written by Hastings about his early experiences with Armour Packing Company and later with SMS Ranches. In 1921, the articles were published as a book: A Ranchman’s Recollections.

Chapter XVII of A Ranchman’s Recollections, called Texas Cow Ponies and Stud Horse Luck, will be of special interest to ranch and western performance horse owners. Here Hastings notes that the foundation of the original SMS remuda was a band of 50 Spanish horses purchased from a horse trader in 1882.

“Spanish horses, as I understand them,” wrote Hastings, “were a pure Mexican breed – small, mean, tough, quick as a cat, and had the cow instinct, which suggests that it may be well to say what a cow pony should be.” He goes on to describe the characteristics of a true “cow horse,” including the ability to “counter every move of an animal that is being cut.”

Texas ranches did not, however, stick to pure Spanish horses, when breeding cow horses, as Hasting further explains. The early SMS outfits used a “white” Arabian as a sire, many of whose get were still in use when Hastings joined the Swensons.

“For years the SMS Ranch ramuda (sic) could be identified at a great distance by the predominance of white horses in it, and even today (1920), when some special occasion demands, the entire outfit will come out mounted on white horses,” he wrote.

In 1997, the 89,000-acre Tongue River Ranch division of SMS Ranches was purchased by present owner Millard Morris, who has focused on preserving the ranch’s heritage, while building a strong horse breeding program at ranch headquarters near Paducah, Texas. Tongue River Ranch has taken “Top Horse” honors two times in the past six years at the World Championship Ranch Rodeo of the Working Ranch Cowboys Association.

While Peptos Stylish Sue is probably not related to the early Tongue River or other Swenson remudas, she does have a unique heritage. Sired by the Australian-owned Peptos Stylish Oak, the NCHA Derby winner was bred by Tongue River Ranch and purchased at auction as a yearling by her current owners, Barry and Kimberly Syra. Although she has earned nearly $180,000, the first NCHA money earner on Peptos Stylish Sue’s dam’s side is three generations removed – her dam’s sire’s sire, Colonel Freckles, winner of the 1976 NCHA Futurity.