ITAWAMBA COUNTY – Nine-year-old Jordan Chatham has three small horses on his family farm, and Saturday he got a chance to see how the critters are saddle-broken.

“I learned something,” he said as the sweat dripped from his blond hair after Tim Edge spent more than an hour demonstrating how to train a horse to be ridden. “I just can’t remember what.”

Chatham, his 5-year-old brother Brennan and their grandmother, San McLeod, all of Fulton, spent the day at Clifford Jarrell’s farm 10 miles out from Fulton.

They were among the 200-plus who came out for National Cowboy Day, officially set the fourth Saturday of July. It’s Jarrell’s second year to host the event featuring horse-drawn carriage rides, greased-pig races, chicken chases and good-ole wholesome fun underneath a sweltering Northeast Mississippi sky.

“Thanks to my family and everybody for coming out,” Jarrell said from his front porch, where more than dozen musicians serenaded the barbecue dinner guests after the cowboy demonstrations concluded with Edge’s horse demonstration.

Earlier in the day, Craig McMillen of Fulton showed off his blacksmith skills by making horse shoes with a portable super-heated fire, a heavy hammer and an iron anvil.

Everybody but the two pink pigs were sweating and smiling at the free entertainment.

Jarrell, a retired Church of Christ minister, said the program started last year by the Itawamba County Horse Association, and this year’s attendance was more than twice last time’s.

One man, who was heading home, stopped to thank Jarrell for the family-friendly activity and complimented him on his 57-plus acre spread.

“It belongs to the Lord,” Jarrell noted. “He’s just letting me have it for a while.”

Before dinner, Edge’s horse-training demonstration drew a big crowd. For the better part of an hour, he showed the audience how he worked to help the unbroken horse grow familiar and comfortable with what he was trying to train her to do.

After much coaxing and swatting, soft words and horse-learning, Edge placed the blanket, then the saddle on the light-brown horse and raised himself up on it.

“It’s a learning process,” he told the crowd of young and old, sitting on benches made from felled trees. “If I can’t get control of her body on the ground, I won’t have any control when I get on her back.”

Edge won a round of applause when the process ended and he was on the horse, which didn’t appear very pleased to have been taken under his control, but he said he thought she’d think about what had happened overnight and make more progress later on.

Contact Patsy R. Brumfield at (662) 687-1596 or patsy.brumfield@djournal.com.