Horsy Posses

Many a man has been killed or maimed on a sheriff's posse, and three were injured last week on the Pacific Coast--but this time the damage was done not in the grim business of hunting criminals but in the merry business of posseing for fun.

Started in 1931 by politically-minded Eugene Biscailuz, Los Angeles County Sheriff and unofficial gladhander, dude-riding posses gained momentum after San Francisco, not to be outdone, formed a mounted posse for the opening (1937) of its Golden Gate Bridge. Today, nearly every self-respecting California sheriff has a posse of gentlemen riders.

Occasionally they are of some help. The Los Angeles posse, which includes Cinemactor Buck Jones, Oilman Earl Gilmore and 20 assorted millionaires, have twice within the past two years gone into remote mountain regions to recover the bodies of air-crash victims. But, for the most part, sheriff's posses are pour le sport.

The Los Angeles posse is the most gaudily outfitted. Each of its 50 members has five different changes of costume ranging from informal Western shirts and whipcord trousers to elaborate gold-trimmed Spanish outfits, must have at least one silver-mounted saddle and other tack costing anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 each.

But San Francisco's possemen are the best drilled. Probably the most swashbuckling group of two-gun capitalists that ever pulled a bootstrap, its 35 members include George J. O'Brien, treasurer of Standard Oil Company of California; Roy Bronson, attorney for Aluminum Company of America; Charles S. Howard Jr., son of Seabiscuit's owner; Tom Bacon, for whose grandfather the University of California's Bacon Hall is named; Bob Holliday, ex-publisher of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin.

Every summer these sportsmen spend two weeks at a ranch, learn cavalry maneuvers from Canadian ex-mounties and U.S. Cavalry officers. At civic celebrations they stage precision drills, trick riding, other stunts. They perform at San Francisco's annual East-West football game on New Year's Day, have appeared at State fairs, roundups, rodeos. Last week San Francisco's possemen were the feature attraction at the Pacific International Horse Show & Rodeo at Portland.

Portland's rodeo fans have witnessed many an unscheduled thriller in their arena but none to equal last week's performance of San Francisco's dude riders. In "threading the needle" (forming and maintaining a figure eight at full gallop), daring climax of their 20-horse drill, one rider misjudged his horse's pace. Men, horses and white sombreros went sprawling. One rider dropped his false teeth. When the horsemen picked themselves up, one hobbled off on a sprained ankle, another required three stitches in his gashed leg, a third had to have his cracked wrist put in a cast. But Captain O'Brien collected the remnants of his riders, completed the drill.

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