gothcowboy

That's Western Saddlery's mark. (I have one from about 1968 that's two tone antique with square skirts.) A lot of times they were also marked on the fender. Many of their designs incorporated horseheads carved on the fenders, as well. I found a bunch of these in a pile of old Western Horseman magazines from about '66 through the early 70s. They were basically an economy saddle with a lot of the identical features of the Big Horns, particularly the modified elephant ear cantle design.

Looks late 50s - early 60s, mostly due to the fork, horn style, and the rigging. You'll find saddles of that style from the 40s on up, though. The cantle binding is an older style. Is the rigging aluminum, or zinc plated?

I've restored several tooled saddles from the 60s and 70s, and have to say I haven't found a better gadget to get tooling completely clean than a super soft children's toothbrush. I use Bickmore's Bick 1 cleaner, get in there with the toothbrush, and rinse with a spray bottle of water as I go. That Bick 1 cleaner really cuts through the sludge of years and years of bar soaps and oil, but you'll need to condition it afterwards. I use Bick 4 conditioner, and then buff it to a shine. It's simple, but the system really works. Think of dirty saddles like dirty hair - you shampoo, rinse thoroughly, then condition. (You wouldn't leave shampoo in your wet dirty hair, would you?) The problems you see with people using bar/paste saddle soap or glycerine-based sprays is they never remove the dirt, they just get the dirt wet and sticky. That stuff dries, year after year, until you have a gooey crust. That goo loves to take up residence in the tooling. Unfortunately, I haven't found any shortcuts to cleaning them that gave satisfactory results. This toothbrush/cleaner/spray bottle method is one of those 'do a little at a time' kind of jobs, usually over the course of a few days. It takes me about a week to clean it, let it dry, then go back through and condition it.

IIRC back in the 70's Longhorn, I believe, had a few Larry Mahan models. However, the swell treatment looks distinctly vintage Big Horn, and the fact it's on a Ralide faux cutter type tree, the cantle, and the stamping, leads me to believe it would have been a lower end production saddle i.e. Big Horn or even a Simco. I'm thinking more Big Horn because Simco didn't typically lace their swells in that style - Simco's Little Wonder and cutter swells were typically a sewn split.

I don't know how long Dakota Saddlery has been in business, but that's definitely their fork, horn, double wide fenders, and pancake-flat seat cut. If the artificial fleece is really thin and cheap, that's another calling card. They're also fans of rather haphazardly placed Montana Silver for their 'show' and 'equitation' models. A lot of these low end semi-custom makers have virtually identical patterns, so it may have been in use by another company before Dakota, or been made as a private label saddle for someone else. A lot of those Chattanooga, TN/Alabama saddles are so similar it's practically incestuous.