For his part, Holder plays the bass guitar during the jam sessions, a natural fit for a guy who spends his days working with his hands. The light blue Wranglers he wears are held up by one of his handmade belts. He carries a pistol tucked into a leather holster—he made the holster too. In fact, some 25 percent of his time is spent cutting and tooling custom leather pieces. Another quarter is devoted to cobbling old cowboy boots back to nearly new condition. But the backbone of his business is saddles.
“I’ve been working on saddles since ’73,” Holder said as he lifted one from among the several surrounding him. “This one here’s a barrel saddle. I’m building it for a girl. One of these days, she might get to the National Finals Rodeo. If she does, she’ll be riding
this saddle.”
“Everybody kind of thinks this is a dying art, which in some respects it might be, but there’s still a lot of guys around making saddles.”
Holder was born in New Mexico, graduated high school in the panhandle of Oklahoma, and learned how to build saddles in the Texas Panhandle. A veteran cowhand named Junior Gray taught him the craft after they had met while cowboying together at the Reynolds Cattle Company near Dalhart. But Holder didn’t go into saddlemaking full-time. Among other gigs, he spent 10 years at Mississippi State University helping farmers write agricultural grants and later served as the county extension agent for Reeves and Loving counties.
Throughout his various careers, working on saddles remained a reliable source of extra income—and a rewarding hobby. Some guys tinker under the hoods of cars. Holder likes assembling saddles from scratch. Eight years ago, he finally decided to open his own saddlery. He moved his tools out of his barn and into a retail space in downtown Pecos, right across the street from the West of the Pecos Museum, which chronicles local history from Old West gunslingers to the modern-day oil boom.
Today, Holder’s workspace is what Santa’s shop might look like if all kids dreamed of becoming barrel racers, bronc riders, or steer ropers. There are mounds of tiny tools, both small and industrial-size sewing machines, two finishing machines for grinding and burnishing boots, and scraps of leather ranging from 1-inch strips to massive hides. Customers browsing the store’s racks of straw hats or the wall of nylon ropes can watch Holder foxing new leather onto worn-out boots, measuring a new saddle’s fenders—the leather pieces that shield a horse from the rider’s legs and connect to the stirrups—or carefully tooling acorns or floral patterns onto a belt or holster.