Timepiece: Ole Dina
Western Arkansas Educational Service Cooperative
As a child I watched all of the old westerns and longed for the cowboy accoutrement including a beautiful horse like Trigger, Champion or Silver. Those who watched the old cowboy shows know instantly which animal belonged to whom and exactly what each of those magnificent animals that ruled the west looked like. Later, to my surprise, I found a much more mundane and certainly not as beautiful animal, that actually did most of the real work on the frontier and truly settled the west — the common mule. That awkward looking, big, floppy-eared, dew-lipped beast was the animal of choice to get work accomplished. The mule is a cross between a male donkey, called a jack, and a horse. The offspring is a larger, bigger muscled version of the horse but with the superior intelligence of the donkey.