Stephen Harwood was an amazing man. I had started field-trialing Brittanys around 1977 and was forced to use ‘loaner’ horses to handle the dogs. Borrowing horses is not something an inexperienced, and admittedly fearful, rider wants to do too often! Someone said that a Pointer man living north of Richmond, Tx by the name of Harwood usually kept some good “walking horses’ and might help me find one. I called him and we wound up talking bird dogs for an hour or more. He invited me out to ‘train dogs with him”. Over the next ten years or so, I was the one who ‘got the training’!
Stephen and his wife Lynn lived on 2000 acres or so just west of Houston. Today, much of this country is being developed into fancy houses with immaculate lawns. But back then, it was a dog training ‘Mecca’. With dozens of ‘johnny’ houses full of quail, chucker or pheasant, multiple flight pens for conditioning, and manicured objectives, it was without doubt, the finest dog training facility I had ever seen! My first drive onto “Sundown Kennels”, as it was named after Stephan purchased Ch Elhew Sundown from Robert Wehle, was like a kid’s first visit to FAO Swartz! WOW!
We worked dogs together for a couple of hours that morning. He was gracious and particularly complimentary about my FC Beauregard De Lamont, a large, beautifully-marked Brittany with ‘a good nose and lots of bird sense’. He invited me back….double WOW!
In time, our families became the best of friends…we became Godparents when his two sons were born. We traveled together to trials all over the state of Texas, from Paris to Nixon to Sweetwater. We took training trips to Packsaddle Ranch in Western Oklahoma and to Joe Coleman’s abundant ranch in South Texas. He introduced me to some of the best trainers and amateurs in the game and men who had become legends for their methods… John Killingsworth, Gordon Hazlewood, Harold Ray, and others. Stephen ran a large string of high-tailed pointers with surnames like Elhew, Miller’s, and Sundown and I tagged along with a couple of Brittanys with names like ‘Beau” and “Sis”. But driving into trial grounds with “Mr. Harwood” was like instant credibility and the usual jokes about ‘what happened to that dog’s tail” remained unspoken.
I was like a student at the temple of the guru! Learning how to ‘read’ what a dog was thinking, how to break a dog without breaking its spirit, how to show a dog at the right time, how to communicate to the dog through subtle movements of the horse…even learned how to stay ON a horse!
I had become accustomed to repeating “whoa” a couple of hundred times when my dog had a bird find in a trial….he taught me to have confidence in my dog, to keep my mouth shut, to walk out with my back to the dog, flush birds and fire the blank 410 as if I was downing birds and then slowly and dramatically unload, never looking back at my dog…..that took a confidence level I had never seen before, but boy did judges remember it! He could see when I had ‘overtrained’ and a dog was beginning to look stale, and he would suggest taking the dog squirrel hunting or for a ride to town together to share a burger in the front seat.
He also introduced me to Pete Thuman, who taught us both new ways of doing things. Julian Weslow, a trainer north of Houston, had met Pete on a Nebraska training trip one summer, hired him and started promoting him in the area as the ‘new guru’ of dog training. Stephen called one night and asked me to ride along to watch Pete the next day but I had to work. When I got home, he had called and said simply…”Young, we don’t know “nothing” about dog training!” He hired Pete as his full-time resident trainer and changed everything we had learned about training bird dogs. Pete was a master of the electric training collar, years ahead of the way most of us used them at the time….not as a “correction” tool but as a ‘training’ tool! To watch him yard work dogs was the most amazing, and redundantly boring, thing I had ever seen. Today Pete owns the Pecan Hill Kennels just outside Brookshire, Tx and, in my opinion, he is still a master!
I recall driving in one afternoon and seeing a young pointer male on point in a draw, just west of the main house. A pheasant was tied to a limb nearby and this high-tailed pointer was standing in a majestic, high head, high tail stance. I shut off the engine and watched for 10 minutes or so and finally saw Pete sitting alone a few yards away on a log. I walked over and asked how long he had been there and Pete said ‘about 30 minutes’. Each time the dog’s intensity would even subtly start to relax, he would silently activate a low-level stimulation from the collar and the dog would tighten up again….after another 30 minutes, I walked away shaking my head. This just wasn’t in Delmar’s book!
Stephen had recently come to the decision to quit trialing and return to his earlier passion of Team Roping and all dogs were being sold. In spite of regional successes, he never totally received the national recognition he deserved. Stephen Harwood was a giant of a man whose influence in dog circles is still being written. The dog that Pete was working that afternoon was sold a few weeks later and became a 13 time American Field “All Age” Champion, 1997 inductee to the Field Trial Hall of Fame, 2X winner of the William F. Brown Award, Purina Dog of the Year, winner of the rigorous 4 hour (total) National Free For All Championship and one of the most exciting dogs of our time…his name was “Rebel Wrangler”.
Stephen Harwood passed away September 5th, 1995.
I still see a bird dog through his eyes.
I enjoy taking bird hunting pictures! In fact, a Canon EOS 20D increasingly replaces the Winchester 101 as my preferred weapon, although it certainly doesn't do much to fill the 'bag'! Above, my friend and long time Dos Jefes partner Richard Nelson, over "Hello Dolly De Lamont" in February, 2007. (click pix for larger image)
My wife Sharon took this one of Bo Nose De Lamont. It's won it's share of photo contests and even appeared in the American Brittany Magazine. (I learned a lot from Delmar's book, after Bo let me read it!)
