May 16th, 1897-August 1967
B.N. (Nuck) Hooper was born May 16, 1897, at J.L. Hooper’s (his father) ranch house located north of Lakeside, Nebraska.
J.L. Hooper had a herd of about five hundred horses. Bronc riding contests were held nearly every Sunday at the Hooper ranch. Nuck and his brother, Warren, drove a herd of horses to the open range country in Wyoming and Warren would stay there to herd them.
Nuck and his older brother, Pat, were breaking horses for the Spade Ranch in 1912 and I think he started breaking horses there in 1910, when he was thirteen years old.
He was a real hand with horses and would handle even the wildest or the orneriest of them. He always rode a good horse.
Nuck was a foreman at the Half Diamond E Cattle Company Ranch for 20 years and broke both work horses and saddle horses there.
He had a good understanding of the animals with which he worked. When working in a herd of cattle, he was quiet and never got the herd riled up. He seemed to know what a critter was going to do before it did and always had the horse to get it out of the herd.
When branding or breaking horses that needed to be front footed, he seldom missed. I was witness to his front footing a colt that was jumping over a corral fence. The colt came down hard on the outside of the corral, but the colt was still roped.
Nuck had a homestead on what is now the Box T Ranch near Brownlee, Nebraska, and was in partnership with Judge Quigley of Valentine, on the Boiling Springs Ranch south of Cody, for a number of years.
He and his wife, Sylvia, raised seven children and put in many hard years. He spent his entire life working with horses and cattle until he retired in 1963 and moved to Gordon. He sold Albers cattle cake for a few years. Nuck passed away in August of 1967.