Because The Men Aren’t The Only Ones With Stories From The Wagon Trail

Over a span of 52 race days, the men of the wagon world (chuckwagons) take centre stage, competing across western Canada. However, when you go back behind the barns you will find the women of the wagon world helping with not only the race day activities, but the day to day as well. From wives to girlfriends, daughters, mothers, and even just friends, these women do everything from getting the trailers ready to hit the road, preparing meals, helping with chores, doctoring horses, etc.

Take for example the barn of 2022 World Champion Layne MacGillivray. If you go back to the MacGillivray barn you will find his wife Loreena and daughter Taygan both working in the barn throughout the season. Loreena was introduced to the wagons by her dad Wayne Dagg, who was a driver himself, but has been around horses her entire life.

Says Loreena, “You must look after them, brush them, and their needs come before yours. They are all looked after before you do anything.”

But the women of the MacGillivray barn don’t just include Loreena and Taygan. Throughout the years it has also included several family members including Alissa Hrynyk, who this past fall married WPCA driver, Josh Hrynyk. Her time helping out in the MacGillivray barn led to her first horse purchase, which was an outriding horse named Jim. For Christmas, in 2021, Alissa bought Jim for Josh, but jokingly she says she really bought Jim for herself. Going to pick up her first horse was not as smooth an experience as one would hope for.

“When we went to pick him up, I swung onto him like I had numerous times before, and I accidently kicked him, which spooked him. I fell off, and broke my leg,” Alissa says. “Josh and I spent Christmas eve in the hospital and then had to go back for surgery once the swelling went down a few days later.”

However, she explains the purchase of her first horse was followed quickly by the purchase of her second. 

There are numerous horse women in the wagon world, all of whom have grown up around horses, if not chuckwagon horses. In Chade Fikes camp, his wife Caitlin grew up with thoroughbreds around the racetrack. The wagon wife, mom and realtor brings her knowledge from the track to the barn every day when it comes to tending and caring for her ‘boys’. As she says though, there was a bit of a transition going from the track to the wagons. 

Caitlin explains, “Whether I’m doing legs, or on them exercising them, all that was completely my area. But when it came to being a chuckwagon girlfriend and then wife, there was a big transition. Horses, great, I can handle that, but it is completely different in all other aspects.”

“It helped having that horse background for sure, and I love taking care of the horses – it is a big thing for me, and a big thing for our team too. But I had to learn the wagon life as that was completely foreign to me.”

What was once a foreign concept is now just regular life, one she is sharing and raising her son and daughter in. 

These are just a handful of examples of women you will run into if you were to walk around the wagon barns. Other women, such as Darlene Bensmiller, have been everything from the wife and mother of a wagon driver, to the timekeeper during the events, and now the grandma of a driver, with her grandson Cruise sitting in the wagon seat. 

While the horses may be considered the soul of the sport of chuckwagon racing, the women would be considered the heart. 

This article was originally published in the Summer 2023, Issue #11 of Trailblazher Magazine.

MORE ARTICLES FOR INSPIRATION:

• When Wishes are Horses with Kaitlin Knox
• Bridging Hope: Cait Luca’s Horse Rescue and her Mission of Saving One Equine Life at a Time
• Homesteading Through the Eyes of Hadleigh Burch