PENDLETON — Joe Bergevin rarely strayed far from horses.

He rode a variety of them as a competitive roper, winning calf roping at the 1956 Pendleton Round-Up at age 20 and steer roping in 1959. Bergevin’s rodeo winnings financed veterinary school, and in his 50-plus years at a vet, he doctored thousands of horses.

“Dr. B.” was laid to rest last week in his boyhood town of Walla Walla, Washington. Those who knew him described Bergevin as an innovative lover of horses, people, rodeo and equine medicine. He died in his sleep on Oct. 12 in Washington at age 84.

Bergevin garnered a reputation of an inventive, gregarious problem solver who rarely took vacations. Horses were almost always on his mind.

Pendleton veterinarian Christine Mitchell called Bergevin a mentor. She spent 10 months prior to vet school working as his assistant, sleeping in a 23-foot camp trailer tucked into his barn in Woodinville. During the workday, she rode along on farm calls absorbing Bergevin’s techniques and horse sense and helping him with surgeries. She jotted down his ideas, usually for the next day, and gathered needed supplies.

“He gave me a pager,” Mitchell recalled. “If he had an idea in the middle of the night, he called. He had so much restless energy.”

She told about one day when Bergevin operated on a colicky horse in his surgery room. Afterward, the patient lay unconscious in a padded recovery stall until it finally roused, rose woozily to its feet and suddenly got spooked.

“The horse freaked out and crashed down on Dr. B,” Mitchell said. “He said, ‘Let’s get some X-rays.’” Bergevin’s X-ray machine showed his right leg was broken in two places. When the ambulance arrived, the EMTs found him lying on his hydraulic operating table studying the X-rays of his own broken limb.

“Two days later, he was back working with crutches and a cast,” she said. “He had buckets and twitches and who knows what else hanging from them.”

Mitchell returned to Bergevin’s Seattle-area practice in her senior year of veterinarian school for an internship.

Bergevin competed in area rodeos for 50-plus years. The roper loved the Pendleton Round-Up best, partially because it matched his style, said Jeremy Bergevin, the youngest of Joe’s six sons. Because Pendleton ropers get three runs, a steady roper who rarely misses has something of an edge. “His strategy was to get ’em caught and tied down and maybe end up on top,” Jeremy said. “Others would hurry and make stupid mistakes.”

Tom Bergevin said his older brother learned to ride at an early age and did a roping exhibition at the Walla Walla rodeo at age 9. He spent hours practicing his roping in the family arena and got some of his horse whispering skills by helping their father round up wild horses each spring on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in the late 1940s and early ’50s. Their father, Damase, produced bucking stock for rodeos. Joe helped his father break the horses.

When his father got frustrated after losing, Jeremy said, he’d return to fundamentals. After one disappointing showing at a rodeo, he shut himself in the barn for a couple of hours each night to work on basics. The next season, he was back on track, roping his first 49 out of 50 calves and steers.

Dr. Roger McClellan, who lived next door to Joe in a Washington State University dormitory, wrote that he discovered his friend training in his dorm room sans horses or steers after hearing a racket coming from Joe’s room and rushing to open the door.

“There was Joe with a (tie-down rope) in his teeth bent over a wooden calf with spring loaded legs,” recalled McCllellan. “He responded, ‘I gotta get my practice in even if I don’t have my horse here.’”

Bergevin passed on his love of roping to his sons and other family members, including grandson and namesake Joey Bergevin, a veterinarian in Ellensburg who currently team ropes in the Columbia River Circuit, nephew Tom Sorey, who won the 1996 and 1999 steer roping event at the Pendleton Round-Up, and great-nephew Trent Sorey, winner of the 2019 Oregon State High School Rodeo finals title.

As a veterinarian, the sought-after Bergevin tended to a variety of equine patients from rodeo, dressage, horse show and racing circles while practicing in Salinas, California, Kirkland, Washington, and Woodinville. He was known for refining, reworking and re-inventing tools and procedures and pioneered some new methods in equine abdominal and arthroscopic surgery. In 2002 he was honored with an Excellence in Veterinary Practice award by Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine. The school foundation also raises funds for the Dr. Joseph Bergevin Memorial Scholarship in Equine Medicine at foundation.wsu.edu.

Tom said his brother, the first in his family to attend college, loved research.

“He would invent different ways to do different procedures on horses. If a horse wasn’t getting well, he would buy them for a dollar and try a new procedure,” Tom said. “Joe dedicated his life to horses.”

Mitchell won’t soon forget her mentor. The dozens of sticky notes he thumbtacked all over his pickup’s dashboard. The TV tray he hauled around as a place to put his instruments. The warp speed at which he navigated life. She’ll miss her conversations in the stands watching slack at Round-Up or calling him to consult about difficult cases.

Joe’s sister, Trish Sorey, of Pendleton, said horses captivated him.

“Joe had horses on his mind all his life,” she said.

Jeremy, who serves as a minister in Mongolia, said his dad rarely took a vacation except traveling to rodeos or short forays to a fly fishing stream. He once “tried to go to Hawaii,” but fell ill on the way over. Jeremy will miss his dad’s big personality, sense of humor, “intolerance for nonsense or malarky” and his unbreakable bond with horses.

“One of his favorite words was ‘fever’ and he definitely had it,” Jeremy said. “Horse fever.”