Nancy Martiny didn’t know what she was doing when she made her first saddle. It took her almost a year of stolen afternoons — between ranching, rodeoing and raising three children in rural Idaho — to complete it. But because she did it under the guidance of a renowned saddlemaker, Dale Harwood, that first saddle turned out well.
And because she was a real-life cowgirl who rode in that saddle while producing rodeos and working cattle, people trusted her — even though she was a woman in a field dominated by men. “I was out amongst my customers,” Martiny said. “And that gives a man the confidence that I know what I’m talking about.
” The orders started rolling in. And for more than three decades, they haven’t stopped. Martiny, 65, wears pearl-snap shirts tucked into jeans, and speaks deliberately, with dashes of dry humor.
She lives with her rancher husband in a log cabin in May, Idaho, in a seemingly endless valley surrounded by bulky green mountains that resemble sleeping dinosaurs. It was here, in her home workshop, that Martiny recently made her 500th saddle. The wait time for a new “Nancy saddle” is now around six years, despite the fact that she closed her order book in 2022.
(Last year, she made a saddle for a customer who put his name on the list nearly two decades ago.) When Martiny first started out, she charged around $1,100 for a saddle. Now, her base price is $5,000 — but that’s “one of those theoretical prices,” she said, because no.