The Cogdell family’s Tule Ranch in Charles Goodnight country in the Texas Panhandle, has been singled out for the American Quarter Horse Association’s prestigious Bayer Best Remuda Award. Few ranches could match strides with the Tule outfit for both ranching and cutting excellence over the years.

The late Billy Cogdell got interested in cutting around 1944, when he was 12 years old. In 1948, he was World Champion Junior in the American Junior Rodeo Association. Polio took Cogdell out of the saddle when he was 20, but it never dimmed his enthusiasm for good horses, and for the sport of cutting.

In a 1992 interview, Cogdell traced the origins of his horses’ bloodlines to the Waggoner Ranch, King Ranch and the Hankins Brothers. One of the foundation horses was Peppy Buck, a son of Pretty Buck who measured less than 14 hands. The teen-aged Cogdell broke him and trained him until he was three.

“We used him just like a ranch horse, dragging calves and branding, and working cattle out of a round-up. It’s kind of a bred-in toughness,” he said. “They’ve got to be gutty to be little and do big things, but they can do it.

“In the cutting arena, a short horse has less distance to turn. The center of gravity is closer to the ground, and that helps, too.”

While Billy Cogdell put a lot of faith in proven cutting horses, he was never afraid to look for an outcross, which brought such famed Quarter Horse racing bloodlines as Double Bid and Jet Deck into the Tule picture. He had fond memories of Double Vandy, a son of world record holder Double Bid that turned out to be a good cutting horse after he finished racing, and left a string of cowy, athletic ranch horses.

Cogdell’s fondness for little horses paid off when he bought a 13.2-hand bargain filly named Lynx Melody for $6,500 at the NCHA Futurity Sale.

“I probably never would have got her, but everybody was scared of her size,” Cogdell said. “She probably would have brought $30,000 if she’d been bigger.”

Larry Reeder went on to win the NCHA Futurity with her in 1978. She became a top producer, whose offspring include Shania Cee, winner of the 1999 Futurity under Shannon Hall.