Dox Miss N Reno, who emerged on her sport’s biggest stage as the National Cutting Horse Association (NCHA) Futurity champion in 1992, died on Wednesday.
The mare by Miss N Cash and out of Doc Quixote mare Paloma Quixote was 31.
“She decided it was her time. She laid down and that was it,” said Lynne Warren, who with husband Stan purchased “Reno” as a yearling at the Oxbow Ranch sale in 1990. “The night before, she was going up and down the pasture with the other horses.”
Reno won the 31st NCHA Futurity at the Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum in Fort Worth with Idaho trainer Russ Miller astride. The duo’s 219 in front of a crowd of 5,200 was a half-point better than Reserve Little Badger Dulce and Pete Branch.
The triumph was worth $105,000 to the winners.
“It was probably the most exciting night we’ve ever had” in cutting horses, said Lynne Warren from her home in Delco, Idaho. “She was the fifth to go, I think. Seemed like we had 13 other horses to wait through. Every time one would go, this gentleman from Tennessee would pat me on the leg and say, ‘you’re still ahead.’
“We knew she was great, but it was amazing to win. It was a wonderful night.”
Said Miller, then a mid-30-something who was a former bull rider and had been training cutting horses for only about five years: “I was just trying to tell myself to not make any mistakes because I was having a clean run. It just happened to work out.
Reno had an Equi-Stat record of $164,186, much of that won in her 3- and 4-year-old years. She and Miller returned to Will Rogers in 1993, advancing to the Derby finals at the NCHA Super Stakes and Summer Spectacular. Later that year, she won the Mebane Ranch Festival, then known as the Northwest Cutting Futurity. As a 5-year-old, she was again a finalist at the Super Stakes.
“She was just very, very consistent,” Miller said. “She was a trier. She tried hard. I knew when I went out there and put her down and went to work on her, she was going to give me all she had.”
Tom Ryan was the one who alerted Miller and the Warrens about a filly in the Oxbow sale.
“He said, ‘She’s really nice, bred well and pretty.’” Miller recalled. “She was just a little cow horse. She was a little tough to train in the aspect that she had a little mind of her own.
“She had so much respect for a cow. The cow was really important to her.”
As a dam, Reno produced 10 offspring performers with an Equi-Stat record of $68,011. Quanah O Reno, by Quanah O Leno, a stallion owned by the Warrens, was Reno’s top performer at $23,029.
Reno spent her final years in retirement in the pasture, “hanging out with some of her daughters and granddaughters,” Warren said. “She was pretty sweet, but she also had an attitude. She knew she was a good one and it showed … kind of the queen of the group. She was never mean or picked on the other horses, but they knew.”
