Haviland trains reining cow horses, which compete under the auspices of the National Reining Cow Horse Association, performing skills such as cutting cows out of a herd and reining and herding exercises. "Basically, what we train them to do in the show world is what was — and is — needed for ranching."

Both Glen Thompson and Marla Brindley Trowbridge also found their passion early in life. Thompson makes saddles, and Trowbridge does harness work.

"I got interested when I was in high school," said Thompson, "so I went to a leather company and asked for a job. I found out they had an internship program through the state, so I signed on."

His custom-made saddles start with a wood-and-leather saddle tree, but all the rest of the work is pretty much done by hand. It takes a full cowhide and a full sheepskin to make a saddle, Thompson explained. But you really only have two things to do, he said: "Take pride in your work and satisfy the customer."

Trowbridge was working for USU and got sent to Colorado to do a grazing study when she got so bored she started making some of her own equipment. She eventually met a man who owned a harness shop and went to work for him, learning how to make harnesses and pull teams.

Harnesses require fewer tools than saddle-making, she said, but they involve a complicated set-up in order to allow drivers to maneuver and stop, particularly with multi-horse teams. The secret, she said, is in the horse's collar. "That's where the pull in a pull harness comes from."

The northern Utah landscape is dotted with other reminders of the connection to the land that is still prevalent in the area: barns, irrigation canals, haystacks, Lombardy poplars. "Even mailbox supports have a vernacular connection to the lifestyle," said Williams.

That connection is also found at stores, such as Smithfield Implement, which has been serving cowboys, farmers, housewives and everyone else for 90 years. The motto here is "stack it deep and sell it cheap."

"We don't use computers, there's no Web site, we still inventory everything by hand," said Ralph Roylance, who runs the store with help from his son, Bart. "But we get customers from all over the region."

Perhaps some of the equipment that you find at Marble Park in Bothwell, just down the road from Tremonton, originally came from the Imp — and from everywhere else Boyd Marble could find it when he began collecting farm machinery.