ArizonaRealCountry.com 23 April 2018 Johnnie once said in an interview, “Doing these four years, you are bound to get on a lot of bucking horses. You count these horses, and the horses I rode on the range, in the Wild West Shows, in the rodeos, add all these together and I don’t believe anybody alive has ridden any more horses than I have.” Willard Porter reiterated the sentiment, writing, “(Johnnie Mullins) rode more broncs in a lifetime than any other human being.” After leaving the arena life, Mullins spent the balance of his years doing what he was born to do—be a cowboy. He worked on ranches and rode daily till he was almost ninety-years of age! Before retiring in 1971, he had worked seventeen years for the Green Cattle Company northwest of Prescott, Arizona. In 1969, the Prescott Evening Courier did an article on Johnnie, touting him as “among the last of the great American cowboys.” and that “at 85, he was still working on a ranch and was on horseback daily.” Johnnie Mullins was inducted into the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Hall of Fame in 1975. He was one of only four persons ever inducted while still living. In an interview, he said, “I guess they got tired of waiting on me to die.” Like all of us will at some point, he did pass. The life-long cowboy died in 1978 after only being officially retired for a few years. He was ninety-three. His saddle and spurs were sent to the Cowboy Hall of Fame. It is easy to see why spur manufacturers wanted to associate their spurs with the great Johnnie Mullins, a cowboy who had a top-hand reputation in many fields of cowboying— anywhere he went. Perhaps he actually designed the spurs bearing his name and shared the design with the various makers? Who knows for sure? There are a lot of opinions out there, but no concrete evidence I could find. The research was not readily available on this subject. What we do know is that his name will forever live on as long as there are cowboy historians and spur collectors out there.