September 16, 2009

Ridin’ for the Law

By Sam Craig
The Chronicle

     Wasco County has a posse.
     Unlike the old-timey posses that would gallop through miles of badlands on horseback hunting bank robbers, cattle rustlers and other fearsome ne’er-do-wells, Wasco County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse takes a different route. They’re a volunteer arm of the Wasco County Sheriff’s Department, assisting in search and rescues, performing crowd control at public events and strutting their stuff at parades.
     After retiring from construction work, Bill Getz, a The Dalles resident, became captain of the Posse for around seven years.
     Last week, he was busy getting the posse horses ready for their big night at the Pendleton Round-Up. Their manes were tangled, caked with muck, mud and other gunk that recent rainfalls brought. In no time, he had them polished, sparkling and preening and ready to take their place amidst the 300-some other posse members in the Round-Up’s “Westward Ho!” parade.
     With the Round-Up and the 122-mile trek back for Historic The Dalles Days, where the posse will lead the Oregon Statehood Wagon Train into The Dalles, Getz gets pretty busy this time of year. He’s a horse kind of guy, and though it’s fun, it is tough work.
     Getz has earned his chaps as a rider in The Dalles. Involved with the Wasco County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse and spending 25 years with the Fort Dalles Riders Association — 16 of those as president of the organization — and the owner of four horses, Getz can easily call himself a horseman.
     As a member of the posse, Getz is a part of a proud Oregon law enforcement tradition. While not a cop himself, he and the other Posse members do work at the behest of the Wasco County Sheriff.
     “We go out at the request of Sheriff Rick Eisland,” Getz said. “Whatever he wants us to do. It’s mainly PR work and parades, and we help to do security at the rodeo and county fair. We ride until about 2 o’clock at the county fair. If he has a search he wants to call us on, we’ll go to that. He’s very supportive of us.”
     Police auxiliary mounted posses have been around for years, and though the name has a rough-and-tumble reputation, they’re pretty darn law abiding, as well as a big help to police. Horses can go where squad cars and police motorcycles can’t, trekking through brush and down rocky hillsides, looking for accident victims.
     In Wasco County, the posse is an extension of the sheriff’s office, but not an official part of it. There’s a reason for that, Getz says.
     “There’s been posses around for, I suppose, 50 years in Oregon,” he said. “Some of them are made up of full police reserves, search and rescues. Some are certified by the state of Oregon, some are not. We didn’t go with reserve status because we didn’t want to tote guns, and we didn’t have the time to become full-fledged reserves. But we go where we’re needed.”
     There are some perks to posse membership. A yearly celebration brings the more than 300 Oregon mounted posse members together to show off what they can do.
     “We do what’s called a ‘Showdeo,’” Getz said. “It’s a kind of horse show, with games, pistol shoots, they do all kind of demonstrations, you name it. It’s just a big get together for all the posses. It’s every September in a different county every year.”
     Parades, rodeos, search and rescue and Showdeos aside, Getz likes to change perceptions of what can be done on horseback. A while back, he and his wife, Saundra Buchanan Getz helped to start a new trend in both the equestrian and dance worlds.
     “We went down to Portland, must have been ten years ago, and there was a national square dance competition,” he said. “There were people from China, England, Germany, all of them were there. They did a few squares, then we did a performance for them on horseback. They were pretty impressed with the horseback square dancing.”
     A caller would yell out moves from a tower above, but stop the action if any of the horses got a little ornery. Eventually, the horses got used to moving in tandem so close together, and a whole new dance craze was born.
     “My wife and I were one of the very first couples,” Getz said. “There were probably six of us when we got started, then it grew to about 16 of us. But you’ve got to have a horse you can do tight things with. It did two things for the horse. First, they got out at least twice a week to ride and two it engaged the horse in competition and made them think all the time.”
     Though he’s an experienced equestrian, Getz says that horses aren’t toys, and they’re not necessarily gentle. Like any animal, they’ve all got their own personalities and temperaments, so you’ve got to play it safe, he said.
     “Horsemanship can be a lot of fun, but there can be a lot of disasters,” Getz said. “A horse is like a big dog. They’re just a little bit bigger and it hurts a lot more when they run over you.”