Don Yerian’s expertise working both horses and mules comes from many generations of family horse knowledge and a lifetime of hands-on experience.

Don started riding and driving as early as eight years old at the family ranch in the Bitterroot Valley. One of Don’s earliest tasks was to drive the derek horse (the horse used to pull hay up onto the hay stack). He also drove a dump rake and mower, eventually graduating to a buck rake.

As an adult Don has worked with horses every year of his life (excluding time served in the U.S. Army). Since 1966 Don has owned several small ranches, always using horses and mules as a source of work power. He has often trained horses for other people during this time as well. Off-the-ranch jobs have included horse-powered wilderness irrigation reservoir reconstruction, horse logging, utilizing hillside plows and trail graders for treading forest trails, packing and more. Don says one of the biggest challenges he faced was the placing of new bridges on the North Fork of the Blackfoot River in the Scapegoat Wilderness. He was also involved in rebuilding the Mill Dam in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness utilizing horse and manpower.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Don worked at the Bitterroot Stock Farm owned by Margit Signay Bessejey, a Hungarian countess whose dream was to train ten Hungarian horses to compete in the World Driving Finals in Hungary. Don selected the ten horses from a group of 100 and trained them; Margit placed in the upper half of the competitors and was quite pleased.

In the early 1990s Don successfully taught a five-week, state-funded horse-logging course in the Bitterroot. For the last seven years Don has been employed at the B Bar Ranch in Tom Miner Basin as head teamster and livestock foreman. Don is responsible for the ranch’s Suffolk Punch breeding program, in which he studies bloodline records, physical appearance and performance characteristics of the horses to determine appropriate breeding combinations and mating mares with selected stallions. Don deserves all the credit for helping the ranch create one of the pre-eminent Suffolk draft horse herds in the United States.

At the B Bar, Don utilizes the Suffolks for many ranch activities, including manure spreading, meadow dragging, mowing, raking, baling with a motor-driven baler and selectively logging timber for ranch construction and fencing projects. In the winter he grooms cross-country ski trails using a trail groomer behind a three-horse team and feeds daily with a winch and cable pulley system. Don puts in countless hours foot-driving young horses on the ground, eventually starting them in harness with a senior horse on a wagon. Don’s quiet demeanor and infinite patience combined with his breadth of knowledge and extensive experience makes him an invaluable horse trainer. Since 2000, more than 40 ranch Suffolks have been sold nationwide. The positive feedback we receive from their satisfied new owners is testament to Don’s diligence, care and expertise as one of the few, true horsemen around.