By: Randi Allison

When most people think of the greatest horse that ever lived they think of Big Red or Secretariat but when I think of the greatest horse that ever lived I think about Sky Misty Dawn. She was a buckskin Quarter horse mare. She had a white star on her head and a white sock on her left hind leg. She was my mothers horse.

My mom bought Sky when she was 5 years old. When she got her she had not been fed properly when she was younger so her growth had been stunted and she was kind of small. My mom trained her pretty much all by herself with help from a friend named Ray. She spent countless hours in the pen and it paid off. Sky was a great horse and did everything that you asked of her.She placed in almost every class she went in at horse shows. She was the kind of horse that could run barrels on minute and win a pleasure class the next.

She was the first horse that I rode and I took her in my first horse show when I was 4 years old. I showed her for quite awhile and won many awards on her. I stopped showing her when they stopped having shows in my town. Both of my brothers also learned to ride on her and they also showed her. Many other people got to learn how to ride on her as well. And everyone that rode her said the same thing ” She was amazing”. Riding Sky was something that you would not forget for the rest of your life.

Sometime in the year of 2000 she started walking lame. We realised that it was her left hind leg. We put her on stall rest for a long time. She seemed to get better so we rode her lightly and decided to try and take her to a clinic. When she was stepping off of the trailer she took a misstep and banged her back leg that she had been sore on. We decided to move her to another barn and put her on more stall rest. We called a vet in another town and he told us to rub DOSMO on her leg. It was supposed to help. She wasn’t doing any better at the new barn so we moved her back to the older barn as it was closer to where we lived.

We continued to rub her leg with the DOSMO. The vet told us that if it would work it would start to show in a couple of months. We waited those couple of months and more and nothing was happening. She was getting worse. That was when we had to make the decision on whether to keep her alive or to put her down. It was a very hard decision. She had been with us for 19 years. She was a part of our family longer then I was. Although the decision was hard it was also obvious.

She was in pain and there was no way to keep her alive knowing that she was living in pain. So Sky Misty Dawn was put to rest on October 4th 2001.

Its been well over a year since she left us and every time I think about her all I do is cry because she is gone but I also smile because of all the great times we had together. We now have a wall full of framed pictures of her. Many people think that it is weird that we have a whole wall dedicated to her but to me and everyone that got the chance to meet her and know her we all think that the wall is a great thing because to all of us she is truly the greatest horse that ever lived. There will never be another Sky. She changed my life and I will never forget her.