Natalie Sun lives on a family ranch 50 miles west of Casper, Wyoming, and takes her daily responsibilities and chores very seriously.
Her ranch chores include dropping salt licks and moving hay bales, sometimes from the seat of an ATV and other times behind the wheel of a three-quarter-ton Dodge Ram truck.
She does the work with a smile on her face and has no complaints, except for one: It's hard to see over the steering wheel.
That’s because Natalie Sun is 6 years old. She’s also been behind the wheel of some type of vehicle learning how to be a Wyoming rancher.
Of course, she’s not operating a full-size pickup alone, not least because her feet won’t reach the pedals. Rather, she sits in her father’s lap. He governs the speed, she pilots the course.
“I like to drive the ranch truck on the oil field road,” Natalie Sun told the Cowboy State Daily.
It’s a common thing in rural Wyoming, where necessity along with the relative safety of wide-open space create the right environment for learning to drive early in life, said Brett Moline, policy director for the Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation, who believes that the tradition of underage driving makes Wyoming's roadways safer.
Although for Jeffery Sun, Natalie's father, it's mostly for kicks and tradition.
“It’s just fun. I did it when I was her age, and she wants to be out there helping and doing what she can on the ranch,” he said. “So, I have her sit on my lap and we do all the ranch things. We laugh and joke and goof around.
“It’s really just something fun to do with her,” he added with a key caveat. “It's always safe. We don't do anything unless we're safe. Please put that in your article.”
Hardship Licence
Sun family enjoyment notwithstanding, the practice of underage driving in Wyoming is born of a very real need.
Jim Magagna, 82, grew up on a sheep ranch in Sublette County, and he recalls back to 1954 when as 12-year-old he bounced along lumpy two-track roads in a red Willys Jeep truck.
Even before becoming a teenager, Magagna said he was an indispensable cox of the ranch’s operations, and he needed a set of wheels to get the work done.
It would have struck jealousy in the hearts of city boys everywhere, but to him the experience was neither a thrill nor a privilege. It was standard operating procedure — and it was work.
“Back then, it was just what you did. It was just the natural and normal thing to be doing on a ranch,” said Magagna, vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. “I didn't think of driving in the context of driving as much as I thought of it in terms of what I was contributing to the operation of the ranch,”
Underage driving in rural America is as old as the automobile itself. Although in strictly legal terms, 12-year-old Magagna may have been jumping the gun.
The restricted “hardship” license was legalized in Wyoming in the mid-20th century and has for decades afforded rural teens driving privileges beginning at the age 14 — provided they can prove to the Highway Patrol that not driving would result in “extreme inconvenience.”
While common in the last century, as rural populations declined and safety stipulations increased, many states have stopped issuing them all together. Today they are legal in nine states.
In Wyoming, however, the practice of hardship licensing is running well-tuned.
All About School
Carson Hornecker is an eighth grader at the Saint Anthony School in Casper and lives on a cattle ranch 20 miles west of town.
This year he’s got more exam preparation than his classmates because his goal is to drive himself to school before the academic year is out.
“I think it'd be pretty cool .. when I drive in and then the teachers might say, ‘Whose is that car out there?’ And I’m, like, 'Well, it’s mine.’ And not brag, but I wanna tell my classmates I can drive,” Hornecker told the Cowboy State Daily,
Then he concedes the point: “OK, I guess that is bragging.”
Like rural families all across Wyoming, Hornecker already has years of practice before getting his hardship license, said his father, Heath Hornecker.
“It's not like they hop into a vehicle heading down a road and they've never turned a steering wheel or practiced fender judgment or haven’t learned how to brake,” he said. “By then, they've been driving some form of equipment for 10 years of their life.”
Carson Hornecker is partial to the family’s New Holland tractor. He enjoys lifting and shifting the bucket, the challenge of the clutch and the feel of the hydraulics in action.
He’s also spent a lot of time at the wheel of his father’s Silverado, which he uses to drop steer feed and check fencelines.
The purpose of the hardship license is to ensure rural families can operate, Moline said.
“Primarily, it’s to get kids from rural areas into the town to go to school, or even just to get them to the school bus,” he said. “That was the main impetus behind it, because there was a big inconvenience for rural families.”
At the end of the day, Carson Hornecker feels similar to Magagna. Driving underage is standard operating procedure.
“In some ways it feels cool, but really it's whatever for me,” he said. “Rural kids could always do it anyway. My classmates might be a little jealous, but they'll get it someday too.”
Besides, while it’s cool early on to drive a vehicle around, there’s always a catch — there’s a chore at the end of the drive.
Carson Hornecker, 14, operates a tractor on his family's Wyoming ranch. (Courtesy Heath Hornecker) 
Natalie Sun, seen here at the age of 4, gets an early start behind the wheel of a truck. (Courtesy Jeff Sun)
‘Absolute Necessity’
Ron Rabou is a fifth-generation Laramie County rancher who said the hardship license for rural families is as critical today as it was when he grew up.
“It was an absolute necessity because [my father] didn't have any other help,” he told Cowboy State Daily, reflecting on his rural upbringing. “As a result of that, everyone had to get involved. You just did what you needed to do — drive tractors, combines and swathers and the whole works.”
In this way, Rabou came to feel proficient operating heavy vehicles even before he had his hardship licence.
“When you're driving a tractor, you're going 3 or 4 or 5 mph, but you learn how engines sound, you learn how clutches and brakes work, and you learn how throttles work, and you learn how to steer, how to back up with something hooked on the back, so by the time you get in a vehicle, you have a pretty good understanding of the functionality of everything that's in that vehicle,” he said.
His own children, too, followed in this vein, although their license preparation was even more methodical.
Rabou set up driving courses on his property where he trained his children to drive between cones at certain speeds. They learned to parallel park both with and without a trailer. They were taught to back trailers up using rearview mirrors as well as over their shoulders.
“I would not let them get their permits until they could do those things,” he said. “And they're extremely proficient. They can take a 30-foot trailer on a truck now, and they can parallel park it, and they could do that at 14.”
For reasons like this there’s a shared sense that ranch and farm kids are the safest ones on the road.
“I don't worry about my son driving on the public roads at all,” Heath Hornecker said. “I worry about other drivers.”
