The Maker Stamp Under the Saddle Fender

Oak leaves are a swivel knife and bevelers and a backgrounder, and those are the part people stop and run their fingers over at a sale.

I cut the leaf and the stem freehand. No two of my corners have ever been the same.

A good saddle from me takes eighty to a hundred hours. I build about a dozen a year, some for ranch people who come to my shop and some for the store.

The store ones went on the rack by the boot wall, with a card that said who built them.

And under the left fender of every one, where the leather folds against the horse, I tool my maker’s stamp. My teacher did his on the back of the skirt.

I wanted mine where a working cowboy would see it if he ever turned the fender up to adjust his stirrup.

It reads T. Haverkamp, and then Valentine, Nebraska, and then a number. I tool the number by hand with figure stamps, one digit at a time.

The first saddle I ever finished on my own says No. 1, and it is still in my barn.

I kept the name Haverkamp after the divorce because it was the name on more than a hundred and fifty saddles by then, and because it was our daughter’s name, and because I had earned it with my own hands as much as Clint had earned it by being born to it.

Clint and I opened the store together when I was twenty-five.

He knew boots and feed and tack, and he could talk to anybody who walked through the door. I could sew. That was the whole business plan.

I started building saddles in the back room the year after, when I was twenty-six and Hailey was not born yet.

By the time she was walking, people drove from Bassett and Merriman and up from the Dismal River country to order one.

When the marriage ended three years ago, it ended quiet. Nobody threw anything.

We had been two people working side by side in a store for so long that we forgot to be anything else, and then one day there was nothing else to be.

Clint kept the store. I kept the shop, which was a calving shed on our forty acres north of town that I had walled in and wired and put a woodstove in the corner of.

I kept the house and the horses. We split everything else down the middle.

And we made a deal about the saddles, written on one page and signed at his mother’s kitchen table.

The store would keep selling my saddles under my name, at whatever price we agreed on for each one.

The store kept $200 a saddle for the floor space and the selling. The rest came to me.

It worked for two years. The saddles sold, mostly to ranch people who already knew me, at $3,400 to $4,200 depending on the tooling.

Clint wrote me a check every time one went out the door, and the card on the rack always said Tess Haverkamp.

Then Clint married Brandi, and the summer after, she took over the website and the online sales.

She had worked for a big outfit in Omaha that sold boots on the internet, and she knew how to take a good picture and write a listing, and the store’s online sales went up.