LOVELAND — Rusty May bends over the bare bones of a future horse saddle, unwraps a long strip of leather that has been wrapped around the pommel like a tourniquet, takes up a maple dowel and begins a hard buffing on a seam he glued the day before.
“It’s a trick I came up with,” he says. “It works out any bumps and bubbles from the leather, and the cinch keeps the seam in line overnight while the glue dries.”
Leather, wood, glue, sewing twine and long hours of work. That’s what goes into a Rusty May saddle. Over his 45 years of building them, May has collected a client list that includes riders from rodeo champions to neurosurgeons who may have never sat on a horse. But they all
They prize May, too. His shop was almost wiped out by the . The water rose 6 feet inside it.
When May and his wife, Jo Ann, learned that a 20-foot wall of water was surging down the nearby Big Thompson River, they had just minutes to grab some saddles and equipment, then load their horses into a horse trailer before driving to safety.
“The first saddle I ever built was buried under four feet of mud,” he says. “It was ruined, of course.”
But then something miraculous happened. Chalk it up to Old West values, small-town friendships or a lifetime of customer service, but folks .
“I couldn’t believe all the people who came by with shovels to help dig us out,” he says. “And then the checks started arriving. One was for $10,000. Another was for $12, and everything in between.”
All told, friends and customers — which for May are often one and the same — gave the Mays $60,000.
One client, a Phoenix surgeon, returned one of May’s custom saddles and told him to sell it and keep the money. It still sits in the shop.
“I reckon I’ll sell it at some point, but …” His voice trails off. “You know, we got donations from people I hadn’t even thought about in 20 years.”
At the river’s edge
On U.S. 34 two miles west of Loveland sits a plain wood-planked building with a sign, It lies under a towering cottonwood tree hard by the Big Thompson River. This is the craftsman’s shop, which he has occupied since moving with his wife from Albuquerque in 1981.
Step inside and the first person you’ll meet is May’s wife, Jo Ann. They have known each other since age 3, when they met in Deming, N.M., soon after May’s parents brought him from Michigan. They raised five sons together.
The shop has a bare cement floor; a pulsing woodstove anchors the middle of it. Tools are everywhere, arrayed on workbenches. The ones with wooden handles hold the patina of age.
A bull elk’s head is mounted on the shop’s east wall. It’s a six-pointer, and would have likely made save for a chipped tine on one antler. A few feet away hangs the rack of May’s first deer, bagged when he was 12.
May shoed horses for a living in New Mexico before switching to saddlemaking and leather work. Working with the horses wore on him.
“There are only so many horses the human body can shoe, and mine was running out fast,” he says.
May quit his day job at 29.
“I never worked again a day in my life,” he says. “This is my passion.”
May has a wiry build and strong hands. The red hair that gets him called Rusty — his given name is William — has receded. But he still sports a cowlick on the back of his head. Now and again, he runs a hand over the spot. The cowlick won’t be tamed.
On this afternoon, May is wearing a navy blue shirt, jeans held up by leather suspenders he made himself, and brown ostrich-skin cowboy boots that look as though he used them to kick down a barn door.
Maybe he did.
“You know, I might have become a potter,” May says. “In junior high I took an arts and crafts course because they offered a pottery sequence. But I loved the leatherworking course that came first.
“One day this boy stole a roll of sewing twine and tried to lay it off on me. Of course, I had to whip his ass right there in class. We were both tossed out, so I never did get to take the pottery course. But I was hooked on leatherwork.”
As a young saddlemaker, May spent three years apprenticing with an uncle.
“He taught me how to build a good strong saddle,” May says. “You couldn’t jerk his riggings out with a freight train. But it was Slim who taught me the pretty.”
He’s talking about Slim Green, a legendary leather carver in Santa Fe. “I didn’t apprentice with him, but we were close friends for 30 years,” May says. “I learned so much from him, just sitting and talking.”
Some saddlemakers now use plastic or even aircraft-caliber carbon polymers to build their saddle trees, the frames that form a saddle’s skeleton.
May’s trees are hewn from lodgepole pine, then covered with wet rawhide sewn together with goat or deer lacing. “When the rawhide dries, it’s hard as iron,” he says.
He reckons his shop harbors upwards of 1,000 tools. “I use every one of them at one time or another,” he says.
Saddlemaking equipment is expensive.
The shop has four sewing machines. The largest one, about the size of a small-block car engine, is a $7,000 Ferdco Bull made in Idaho. It can sew through an inch of leather.
May picks up a hand-tooled leather cup packed with about two dozen leather punches. “That’s $885 worth of tools right there,” he says. He sets the cup back down beside a half-dozen equally packed companions.
“These last forever and give a crisp, sharp print,” he says. “Some tools will just go mushy on you. Hit the damn thing and it bends.”
May isn’t much on bending.
Nothing on a Rusty May saddle is made outside the United States, save for the golden sheep hides imported from New Zealand. Even those are tanned in Los Angeles.
May builds fewer saddles these days — between four and eight a year — but his leatherwork has grown more intricate. “Really, it’s the carving that sells the saddle,” he says. “I have a style of deep carving that gives a real nice contrast.”
You can buy a good car for what you pay for a Rusty May saddle. The most expensive one he ever sold put $25,000 in his pocket. “That kind of saddle is a show saddle,” May says. “It sits in a museum, not on a horse.” He also makes belts, tack, holsters, billfolds, scabbards and other accoutrements.
Just building a basic saddle takes 45 to 50 hours. One of his show saddles might take three months, and that doesn’t include the fancy carving and matching tack. He can spend 16 hours or more on that, and May is a sure-handed leather carver, albeit a cautious one.
“When you feel yourself getting tired, you have to break off because that’s when mistakes happen,” he says. “One bad move with a tool, and you can ruin your work.”
About 80 percent of May’s work is shipped to out-of-state customers. Another 5 percent leaves the country.
May prizes complexity and variety in his designs, which he free-hands on graph paper to create the templates.
“A lot of times you’ll see a saddle with 50 roses carved in it, but they’re all the same,” he says. “That bores me.”
May takes a look around his shop, cracks a grin.
“Everybody asks me when I’ll retire,” he says. “Probably when I’m dead. You’re not supposed to retire from having fun, and I’m having a ball.”
William Porter: 303-954-1877, wporter@denverpost.com or twitter.com/williamporterdp
