Hurt horseman gets hand

It began during boyhood on the family farm on the western Minnesota plains, then continued through the years in the Air Force and a long second career in the farmlands outside Linda.

Wherever Duane Stueve has been, there have been horses - the muscular Clydesdales and Belgians he trained to pull plows on his oat fields, buggies at Christmastime parades and community events, and wagons on the 102-mile endurance races he loved and taught his children and grandchildren to take part in. For 23 years he has broken and trained draft horses on his 100-acre spread off North Beale Road, teaching the craft to his family and others - instilling not just a skill, but love and loyalty.

“He’s the kind of person to make an ugly person feel pretty,” said Mary Logan, one of his three adult daughters.

But a near-fatal accident last month brought all that to a halt, leaving the 72-year-old Stueve with serious brain injuries and a year or more of hard rehabilitation.

On Sunday, his family and friends sought to return a little of the love he had given them.

Fifteen people gathered under a fir tree off Lindhurst and Scales avenues, equipped with hoses and blue buckets and bottles of soap.

Duane Stueve’s daughters and grandchildren and friends were waving in passing cars - too many to count, they said - into the nearby parking lot. Their skin reddened by six hours under a cloudless sky, they still kept up their easy banter and humor, remembering for whom they had staged this fundraiser - the man depicted in the “GET WELL” poster leaning on the tree, a white-bearded man in a wide-brimmed hat at home with the draft horses and the wagons they pulled.

But the horses that were Stueve’s career and passion were what badly injured him on May 29 while he assisted a friend in Stagecoach, Nev., with his own horse team. According to his relatives, the two were preparing for a race in Winnemucca when the animals panicked and bolted, sending the attached wagon out of control. A heave in the ground overturned the wagon and flung Stueve to the ground, where he struck his head.

Stueve was taken to a Reno hospital with serious brain injuries that left him in a coma for two weeks. In recent days his consciousness has slowly begun to return, his family says, but the damage has left him facing a grueling and expensive road to recovery, perhaps lasting a year or more.

“We’re just giving this over to the Lord,” Odette, his wife of 48 years, said Sunday night from Tahoe Pacific Hospitals Meadows in Reno, where Stueve is expected to stay for at least another month. “I know my kids are worried down there.”

“We’ve never been through anything like this, (but) I think he’ll pull himself out of this.”

As the Stueve clan prepared to load the buckets and houses into their vehicles and head home, they kept trading pleasant memories of Duane - in seeming defiance of the odds facing their father, grandfather and friend. “He’ll ride again,” a couple of them said firmly, thinking less of the injured man in a hospital bed in Reno and more of the man they knew, the one in the poster - a man for whom they still held faith he would return to his horses and his family.

“I can’t wait for you to meet him,” Mary Logan said as the fundraiser wound down. “You’ll like him. He’ll take you for a ride on his wagon.”

Appeal-Democrat reporter Howard Yune can be reached at 749-4708. You may e-mail him at hyune@appealdemocrat.com.