NARRATOR: At the end of one of Oregon's most rural highways, past the one-cafe town of Jordan Valley, there's a 28-mile stretch of dirt road that leads to Frankie Dougal's house.

Are you gonna bring your horses out?

How do you get any light in there, without electricity, kid?

You're shoeing in the dark!

NARRATOR: Frankie is 98 years old.

She keeps her life simple.

HOST: No electricity out here, huh?

FRANKIE: Nope.

Only when I create ourselves with the generators.

NARRATOR: Frankie has lived her whole life without TV, cell service, and internet too.

What she does have are her horses.

Her name is Oly.

Yes, Oly is a good little mare, uh huh.

NARRATOR: Now, the reason we stopped to see Frankie is because a lifetime in the saddle has given Frankie a talent for making these.

This is a horse hair McCarty, 22-feet long.

NARRATOR: Frankie makes McCarty ropes like this by hand, and using horse hair, something very few people do anymore.

And what is a McCarty?

Well, it goes with a hackamore, and to feel like a city slicker, all you have to do is ask what that is.

Well, it's used to guide the horse with.

That's what it's used for.

That's what you wanna know?

This, right here, is the hackamore.

You turn her this way, she goes that way.

And you can use this rein to turn her this way.

Okay?

NARRATOR: Now, the feel of a McCarty matters a lot to anyone who spends all day in the saddle.

And style matters too.

Frankie sticks to simple patterns and colors in use in the Jordan Valley as far back as the 1850s.

HOST: How old is that one?

Could be over 100 years old.

HOST: Terrific shape.

Uh huh, it is, but we've used it a lot.

We've used that rope a lot.

NARRATOR: Frankie has actually made McCartys out of horse hair as well as human hair.

HOST: Do you like working with that?

FRANKIE: Mmhmm, I do.

I love to.

NARRATOR: But cheap synthetics have no place in Frankie's world.

HOST: What's different about these?

Why can't I pick these up in a Walmart?

[laughing] Oh my cow!

There is no way in the world.

No way.

NARRATOR: Making McCarty's starts in what Frankie calls her hair house.

Frankie first collects hair that's been cut or roached from either living or dead horses.

FRANKIE: So this is the way the hair is when you roach it off from the horse.

Just like that.

NARRATOR: Then with the help of a generator Frankie fires up a contraption that detangles the hair.

Now my husband and I built this, that old ringer come out a washing machine.

The other part is the air cooler out of an old trailer house.

And then he built the rest of this.

You wanna watch it pick some hair?

HOST: I'd love to.

Would ya?

So when you pick your hair, it looks like this.

That's picked hair right there.

And then you start spinning it from an end.

NARRATOR: Now, before we met Frankie we assumed making McCartys was how Frankie spent her days.

But it's actually just one more thing she does, in addition to feeding ranch hands, looking after a small herd of cattle, all on a sprawling 3,200-acre ranch.

And mind you, she does all this at 98 years old.

FRANKIE: I had a sister, passed away.

She is 102.

I told her I wouldn't live that damn long.

Now you wanna see me spin that?

HOST: So what is this?

It's to make ropes with, my dear!

To make horse hair McCartys.

NARRATOR: In Frankie's world, such technology is as obvious as an iPhone.

I love to get out here early in the mornings.

The air's beautiful and the it's wonderful.

HOST: So how many of these will you do over a year?

God, that's a question, isn't' it?

NARRATOR: Making of a McCarty is actually fairly straightforward.

Four pounds of hair are spun into eight strands.

And those strands are then twisted into colorful combinations like this.

All these colors are natural.

All come from horses.

This here's got three grays and one white.

NARRATOR: Frankie then finishes up with a signature knot or tassel that all but says this is a Frankie Dougal McCarty.

I was about nine years old.

I started making ropes.

My mother taught me, taught my sister and I how to make ropes.

Mmhmm.

NARRATOR: The family craft is so prized that it earned Frankie a trip to the Smithsonian.

FRANKIE: It was a lot of fun, for an old hillbilly like me go back to Washington D.C. Can you imagine that one?

Raised in a canyon, and go back to Washington D.C.?

Oh my gosh.

NARRATOR: Even though her McCartys are sold around the world, Frankie doesn't see her McCartys as art.

She makes them for people to use.

Because where she grew up, if you didn't have what you needed, you made it.

And if you didn't make it, you lived without.

This is the five-bar from the Owyhee River where I was born and raised.

Born in 1918, taken in there when I was three weeks old.

Was probably a good 16 mile to the nearest neighbor.

Uh huh, then we went horseback, of course.

It wasn't a hard life.

It was an easy life.

A lot better than it is nowadays.

Microwaves, oh my god!

No, I don't go for that kinda stuff.

Yeah.

Cooked on a wood stove all my life.

One of my husband's nieces come from San Diego.

One time she stepped in my house and she says, oh my, what peculiar designs you have on your cupboards.

Well, you're in the West, my dear.

That's all irons from the cows, the different ranchers around here.

And there's a kerosene light sitting on the table.

"May I ask what that is?"

Kerosene lights, my electricity.

Oh my lands, she says.

Didn't know what a kerosene light was.

I spin the string for her, but I don't do the cinches.

NARRATOR: Frankie has passed down her old ways to daughter Charlene, and great-grandson Russell.

Both use techniques and tools that haven't changed in a century.

This is to hold your saddle under your horse's belly.

So you don't turn over it.

My grandpa taught my dad and my dad taught me how to do it.

And my mother taught me to make the cinch strings for 'em.

Right?

CHARLENE: Yep.

That's right.

NARRATOR: Here on a ranch that seems one long dirt road away from the 21st century, there's just no reason to change a good thing.

I think people nowadays don't have time for this.

Different lifestyle altogether.

I couldn't live anywhere else.

Other than a tent, maybe, I'd live in a tent.

[laughs]