“Every little girl’s dream is to have a horse,” said Tracy Hargis when asked how she first became interested in horses. “My dad got me my first horse when I was 16 years old.
“He didn’t really want me to date anyone. He told me I could have a horse, but no boys.”
That’s where her passion for horses began and the rest is history. Now she and her husband own Royal-T Ranch, a horse ranch located between Salem and Rolla, where she works hard to take care of her horses. They offer pasture board and stall board for horses also. Currently, there are 23 horses that call Royal-T home, with one on the way. Hargis’ personal horse is pregnant and due any day now.
There’s something special about Royal-T Ranch, at least Hargis and a lot of people think so.
“This farm has a life of its own,” she said. “Anybody can tell you. Anybody who sets foot on this farm can tell you. It’s not me. This farm has a life, it has an energy, it has a feeling.”
And something that Hargis works diligently to maintain that, and that starts with the horses.
“We do everything we can do to make our horses as happy and comfortable as they can be in a domesticated life,” she says.
“I’m a big advocate of matching horse to rider and rider to horse. My focus is on helping people understand horses.
“The big thing that I try to teach all of my riders, we have to remember that one of the worst mistakes you can make is giving your horse human emotions. Horses talk to us all the time; they talk to us with their bodies; they talk to us with their behavior, with their energy. It’s our responsibility to speak horse. It’s not their responsibility to speak human.”
Hargis said she reminds students that horses did not choose the domesticated life. Humans decided millenia ago that they would use the horse to the benefit of the human race.
“Helping in the field, helping us get from point A to point B, but never once did we ask them, would they mind doing that,” said Hargis. “We just took them and said, you are now going to be domesticated and you’re gonna do what we want you to do.”
A big part of Hargis’s work is with clients, but Hargis objects to those kinds of terms.
“A big thing that I want to convey about my farm is we’re a family,” she said.
According to Hargis her family is very loyal. She plays a part in helping raise these young people that she has trained.
“Every one of them comes back. Whether they go off to college or whether they go to a new job. And if they don’t come back I’m still very much in contact with them on the phone,” she said.
According to Hargis, she has a student (a daughter in her heart) in New York who still records the lessons she gets there and emails them back to Hargis to make sure that they’re teaching her the right stuff.
Another example of Hargis’s influence on young peoples’ lives. “I had a western dressage rider that wouldn’t speak louder than a whisper when she first came here,” said Hargis. Hargis told her that she would have to teach a lesson; she was reluctant.
“I just walked away and said, you’re doing it. And you should hear her now, man, she comes out here, she can speak up for herself. It helped in her school work, it helped her new job, it’s helped her learn how to be assertive and confident in what she knows.”
Those are just a couple of examples that Hargis gave of the farm’s impact on the world.
“They call me Momma-T,” Hargis said with an affectionate and pride-filled grin.
“Her name in my phone is Momma Number Two,” said Lexi Mullins, grinning ear to ear. Mullins has been riding for about 10 years and for about two with Hargis. Mullins interns for Hargis, which means she does a lot of work around the ranch.
“These are all my kids, I didn’t give birth to them, but they’re all mine,” said Hargis.
“As soon as you pass through that gate and you get here, and you step out of your car, you feel safe here. All of your problems outside of here just go away and honestly, I love that,” said Mullins.
Maddie Greenway, who has been riding with Hargis about four years, echoed the sentiment.
“I’m also really busy outside of this,” she said. “Like, I have a softball game after this (in St. James). And I’m not worried about that right now. Even though, I know it’s going to be really hard to get from here to there.”
Says Greenway: “When you’re first trying to learn, it’s really hard and it can be a little frustrating, but once you get the hang of it, it doesn’t take that long and it’s really fun and awesome. And I like when I get on the horse it makes me feel really tall.”
For both Greenway and Mullins it’s the hard work and dedication behind learning about the animals that provides a meditative state for them.
“I have a lot of chores to do here, but I don’t think of them as chores,” said Mullins. “I have to take care of them because they take care of me. It kind of helps with stress, it just makes me calm down and I get to breathe for a little, even if I am working hard.
“The riding, the learning how to ride, the tacking up the horses, getting all their stuff on. It’s kind of hard. I still mess it up, like a lot, but it’s just really fun to learn how to do all the stuff. Going and getting your horse out of the pasture and putting on the saddle and riding.”
“Even that’s a big deal,” Hargis chimed in. “When you first started out here, you didn’t go out and get your own horse. That’s not something that you trust a first timer with. So, as she’s grown and as she’s learned and when Momma-T says, ‘You can go get him’, you see that confidence build.”
Hargis said that she has seen the satisfaction that Greenway gets from learning how to ride.
”When we go from a walk to a trot, then trot to canter and did a small jump in the arena, when she got to go get her own horse out of the pasture, things like that, she gets a little thrill out of it each time something new comes through,” Hargis said.
“The girls that go off to college or whatever, they always tell me, ‘well I’m coming home’, Because this is home to them. I don’t know how that happened, I’m thrilled it did, but it’s not just me, it’s this world (the farm). It’s just this. I don’t know how else to put it.”
In her humility, Hargis said that she didn’t want the story of Royal-T Ranch to be about her. It's about the place and the people who come there.
“It isn’t about me, it’s about these kids learning and understanding what mother nature has given us because it’s a wonderful thing,” she said.
However, she and the farm are the common denominator that her students rely on to help them learn more about horses, and subsequently, the world.
“It’s not me, it’s this place, it’s the things they learn here,” said Hargis.
“But you’ve curated the experience for all of us. Now you’re the caretaker of the experience,” said Jaymie Greenway, Maddie’s mother.
It’s clear to see how much Hargis’s adopted family loves her when they speak to her and when she speaks to them. They reciprocated every ounce of love that Hargis pours out to share with them. They revere her as a matriarch of wholesome rights of passage and as a keeper of equestrian wisdom and a curator of memorable experiences that travel with each person that she has grafted into her family.
“I think the reason people continue to ride with me is because we respect our horse, but the horse is a tool to help people learn how to be with relationships with others, learn how to grow into a respectful adult, how to have responsibility, how to have a work ethic, how to be kind and I’m just lucky enough that I have that opportunity to do that using a horse,” said Hargis.
“Horses are wonderful and I would be lost without them, make no mistake, but they teach us so much more than just how to ride.”
