Only one horse was rideable. Her name was Mosa, and she was a nice reliable riding horse. Most of the others had never been handled and none had been ridden. I had never trained a horse before but I had done a fair amount of riding. My school friends and I "trained" all the horses over a period of two years, or at least got them rideable. We had no saddles and we used little bits and pieces of bridles that we found hanging in Ashelman's barn. And we would have to stop working with them so they could have babies. All the mares had foals every year for a period of six years until eventually there were a lot of youngsters. Many were not gaited because Valur, the sire was a three-gaited horse. Ashelman had been told that no gaited stallions were allowed out of the Iceland at that time.
It was difficult for me to learn about Icelandic horses. I had a few conversations with Gunar Bjarnnasson, and that was helpful, but I wanted to learn everything there was to know. I had this idea that I could just go down to the Library of Congress and get all the books about Icelandic horses and then I could just sit there and read all about them. I lived in Washington D.C., not far from the Library of Congress and at that time they had a strict rule about not letting kids in. I was quite tall for my age, though not very mature-looking, so I borrowed some of my mother's grown-up clothes and bicylcled down there and got in without any trouble. I found about 25 titles of articles, books, pamphlets, etc. about Icelandics. I wrote down all their numbers and waited with great anticipation as a boy went down to the "stacks" to get them for me. Imagine my chagrin when they were brought to me and all of them were in Icelandic, German, Dutch and two titles in English. Only two titles in the English language in the year 1960 in a collection of what is supposed to be everything in print! What a long way we have come with computers and Google and all our resources!
