He didn’t grow out of his love of the cowboy way of life and interest in the West. Even when he went to college at Princeton, and later made his fortune in commodities trading, his draw to all things western continued to grow. He eventually began collecting western art by Remington, Russell, and Bierstadt, and old firearms made by Winchester, Colt, and Schofield. He also collected antique chaps, cuffs, spurs, stagecoach driver’s coats, boots and hats, shirts, trousers and even buttons off of period garments. He collected tack such as stirrups, bridles, saddlebags and bits. He collected old branding irons and cooking utensils. But the most prized possessions in his collection were always his saddles. Over sixty of them all together by the finest saddle makers of the era—Gallatin, Meanea and Williamson were just a few of the names stamped or carved into the old and worn leather of the saddles he owned.

Even though his collection of western artifacts was of museum quality and one of the finest private collections in the country, the one item he wanted the most was the one he couldn’t ever seem to find. It was a saddle built by an almost mythical maker down in Texas by the name of Jingles Wexler. From what he could find out through his years of research, Jingles was a cowboy in West Texas who built very high quality working saddles for himself and just a few of his close friends between the years 1876 and 1881. The closest Tom had ever gotten to one of Jingles’ saddles, however, was a faded sepia photograph he had from the early 1900’s of a young cowboy sitting in one. There was no name on the photo, and from the looks of the landscape it could have been taken nearly anywhere in the western U.S., so trying to trace the photo had proven to be impossible. Still, for all his looking and all his research, it unfortunately appeared as though none of these saddles existed anymore.

By the time Tom was in his mid forties, he had made enough money in his commodities business to take his retirement early and ultimately purchase the forty seven thousand acre ranch he now lived on with Terri, his wife of nearly thirty years. Tom and Terri were very lucky in that, not really knowing a thing about how to run a real working cattle ranch, he had a acquired an excellent ranch foreman by the name of Tug Caldwell who came with the place when Tom bought it, having been the foreman for the previous owners, Carl and Edna Johansson. Along with Tug came a group of ten hard-working and dedicated ranch hands and together they all took Tom and Terri under their wings and taught them about ranching from the ground up, a process they were both still working on years later. The Essex’s renamed the place the Diamond Bar T, and it had been called that ever since.

It had been Tug Caldwell that sent a couple of the ranch hands, Ben Stuart and Cat Jones, out to repair the hole in the fence down by the river. He had not been out to inspect the fence but knew by years of experience that anytime a big rain fell, that stretch would go down. It was important to keep the ranch fences in good repair because Nevada, like many western states, practiced open range grazing. This meant that a rancher didn’t build fences so much to keep their livestock in as much as they were keeping someone else’s out. And while forty-seven thousand acres may sound like a lot of ground, when one considers that in that part of Nevada it took nearly one hundred fifty acres to feed one cow/calf pair for a year, and the Diamond Bar T had just over four hundred pairs, along with thirty good saddle horses, not to mention that one thousand acres of the land was irrigated for hay and not for grazing, suddenly forty-seven thousand acres didn’t leave much room for any extra livestock.