The Wade Saddle Guide

Ask five saddle makers what makes a Wade a Wade and you'll likely get five different answers. Rod and Denise Nikkel, who built saddle trees by hand for over twenty years, put it plainly on their own site: every tree maker does things differently — measurements, terminology, methods, all of it varies maker to maker, even among people building the same style of tree. That's true of the Wade as much as anything else in saddle making. This guide covers where the Wade came from, how the tree is built, and what the history actually says — including the parts different sources don't agree on.

The story most often told traces back to a single saddle. Writer Mike Laughlin, in a piece for Western Horseman picked up by Cowboy Showcase, credits Idaho saddle maker Dale Harwood with this version: Clifford Wade's family came west on the Oregon Trail, and Clifford rode a saddle his father had brought from the east, built by a maker nobody recorded. Tom Dorrance, who lived in Wallowa County, Oregon, cowboyed alongside Clifford and admired both his stockmanship and that saddle. In 1939, by this account, Dorrance brought Clifford's saddle to Hamley & Company in Pendleton, Oregon, and had a new saddle built on a tree copied from it. He wasn't satisfied with the fit, so in 1940 he went back and worked with Walt Youngman, Hamley's head tree maker, to rework the design.

Frecker's Saddlery tells a longer version of the same story. By their account, the saddle's history starts further back, with Clifford's father Aaron Wade, who bought it in Deadwood, South Dakota, in the late 1800s while driving horses west from Oregon. Aaron rode it for years; Clifford pulled it out of storage decades later and found it fit horses he was riding at the time. Frecker's puts Clifford's trip to Hamley's in 1937, not 1939, and describes Dorrance and Youngman refining the tree over several years rather than in one visit — adjustments Frecker's says echo old Spanish vaquero saddle design.

Both versions agree on what happened next. Hamley's wanted to name the tree after Dorrance. Dorrance refused and insisted it carry Clifford Wade's name instead. Hamley & Company built saddles on the Wade tree through the 1940s and into the 1950s, and for years the saddle stayed mostly local — northern Nevada, eastern Oregon, southern Idaho — until Tom and his brother Bill Dorrance brought the style into California and Nevada, where their reputations as horsemen drew attention to the gear they rode.

The saddle's wider popularity is credited to one man: Ray Hunt. In 1962, Hunt asked young Idaho saddle maker Dale Harwood to build him a Wade. Harwood didn't yet have his own tree-making setup and went through several tree makers before eventually working with Walt Youngman himself at Hamley's, where he got hold of the original 1940 Wade patterns. Hunt rode that saddle through the clinics he taught across the United States, Canada, and overseas — Frecker's specifically credits him with bringing the Wade into Australia, where it influenced makers like Michael Bethel, who traveled to the U.S. to study under Harwood directly. By Tom Dorrance's own account, Ray Hunt popularized the Wade, and Dale Harwood became known for building the most authentic version of it.

One of Harwood's original Wade saddles still exists: the saddle Tom Dorrance built on that first reworked tree, which he rode and re-covered himself for decades, is now owned by Jim and Luke Neubert, sons of horse clinician Bryan Neubert — Tom gave it to them in 1989.

What Makes a Tree a Wade

Strip away the history and the Wade comes down to a specific tree design, though even here, sources describe it slightly differently. The common ground: a slick fork built around a wood post horn rather than a metal one, laminated right into the fork itself. That construction lets the gullet get scooped out without weakening the tree, which is part of why a Wade sits lower on a horse than most other western trees. The horn sits low with a pronounced lip — useful for dallying a rope and, on the older reata-roping setups, for snapping a rope under tension to hold dallies tight without burning through rawhide. The bars carry more surface contact against the horse's back than most other trees, spreading the rider's weight more evenly and helping the saddle hold still on steep ground.



Bitterroot Saddle Company's Bob Trezona — the maker Bos Saddlery's own Launa Bos apprenticed under — adds a deep seat for long hours of riding, stirrups hung to keep the rider balanced over the horse, double rigging (traditionally flat plate, though in-skirt has become more common), and a higher cantle to his list of typical Wade features. Other makers don't all list the same traits in the same order, or weight them the same way — which is the point. There's no single spec sheet everyone signed off on.

A Regional Lineage

Trezona has his own connection to this history, and it isn't incidental. He was born and raised in Enterprise, in Wallowa County, Oregon — the same county where Tom Dorrance lived and the same region the Wade tree traces back to. On his own site, Trezona writes about growing up in the shadow of "Tom and Bill Dorrance and the Cliff Wade ranching families," calling them legends in his home county and crediting the country itself — steep, unforgiving terrain in Hells Canyon and the Grande Ronde country — for shaping why a cowboy needed a saddle built exactly this way: low horn, secure seat, a tree that let a rider separate from a horse fast if a roped animal pulled wrong on a cliffside trail.

That's the lineage Launa Bos trained under when she apprenticed with Trezona starting in 2010, before going on to build Wade saddles and buckaroo gear of her own out of the Bitterroot Valley.

Why It's Still Popular Today

The reasons riders still choose a Wade haven't changed much since Ray Hunt rode one through his clinics. It sits low enough to give a horse better leverage holding heavy livestock on the end of a rope. The horn stays out of the way for roping and easy to dally around. The bars spread weight evenly enough that the saddle stays put on steep ground or flat. None of that requires agreeing on every detail of how the tree got built — it just requires riding one.

FAQ: Wade Saddles