The Last Roundup
Out in West Texas two ranches are fighting a new kind of range war that pits the helicopter against the horse, the fence against the open range, the working cowboy against the modern businessman.
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There was something else that Joel wanted to talk about. It sounded petty, and it probably was, but Clayton Williams had padlocked his gates again, forcing the 06 cowboys to go miles out of the way to reach their pastures in the top country. It was a perfect example of what was happening to one of the old traditions – neighboring. Ranchers had survived the hardships because they shared them with the past and with each other, and the sharing had been institutionalized into a system called neighboring. It worked for one because it worked for all. But the communal trust had been violated, or at least abridged, and that showed up in things like padlocked gates. In the old days nobody locked gates. It didn’t make sense to. Property lines were irregular and interlocked like clasped fingers; at the borders of a ranch you could never be certain, really, of whose ranch you were on. William’s Brangus ranch was horseshoe-shaped, surrounded on three sides by the 06; it was necessary to cross William’s ranch to get to the 06’s Willow Springs camp or to gain easy access to the top country, just as it was necessary to cross a part of the 06 to reach Williams’ ranch house. Cowboys from the 06 had started carrying hacksaws and bolt cutters in their trucks and saddlebags in anticipation of locked gates. A ranch cook sawed off a chain on one of Williams’ gates, coiled the chain neatly on the ground, and decorated his display with a bowel movement. “Clayton probably didn’t even know it was padlocked,” Joel said. “Of course, that’s his trouble.”
Williams had bought the old Henderson Flat Ranch, adjacent to the 06, eleven years ago, and there had been a running battle of philosophies ever since. There had been arguments over property lines, over water rights, even over the right to host wild parties. Some of the complaints were ludicrous, as when one Fort Davis merchant charged that the oilman raised black cows rather than the red Herefords that were traditional to the area. Williams had been blamed, too, for introducing helicopters to the serene highlands, but in fact the first helicopter in those parts was owned by a rancher named John Rice.
More serious was the quarrel over water. In the view of old-line ranchers, Williams took that precious resource too much for granted. Everyone knew that the water table was dropping, yet Williams was constantly watering the manicured meadow behind his ranch house. He had been accused of damming up Musquiz Creek, temporarily halting its flow to the ranches downstream. (Williams said the dam was there when he bought the ranch.) When Clayton and his wife, Modesta – Claytie and Desta to their friends – invited large numbers of guests to their ranch, as they did at least once a year for their annual party and cattle auction, tank trucks were sent out to water down the twelve miles of road between their house and the front gate.
Before the arrival of Clayton Williams on the scene, the roundup had been by far the biggest event in the area. Now there were two such events; Williams’ big bash, held every August, had become the second. It was the subject of much gossip and speculation and anticipation, but it was also the focus of much resentment. There was a sense among the old-style ranchers that Williams was using his party to rub their noses in his success. The party had become a kind of antisymbol to them, a crystallization of everything that was wrong with the newcomers’ approach to ranching. The idea of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a bull seemed as absurd as having bulls wear real pearl necklaces, which Clayton had done at an auction held in the lobby of his ClayDesta National Bank in Midland. The battle of lifestyles reached its peak when a group of ranchers and local politicians complained to the Texas Liquor Control Board about the all-night drinking, singing, and carrying-on at Williams’ party. There apparently was a technical violation: though Williams’ front gate was in wet Brewster County, the ranch house, where the party took place, was in dry Jeff Davis County. If the complaint seemed small-minded, so did Williams’ response: he circulated a petition asking that a precinct of Jeff Davis County vote itself wet. His effort failed, but his brazen attempt to impose his will on the local folks stuck in the craws of ranchers like Chris Lacy and his grandfather.
Most of the old-timers thought that Williams’ disregard for tradition would eventually settle the score in their favor; he would run out of grass or out of water or out of luck. Tradition had served the 06 well. In Lacy’s thirteen years as boss, his ranch had not failed to show a yearly profit. There had been lean times, of course, especially since the onset of the drought. But the great highland ranches – like the 06 or the Lykes 02, owned by the family that owned the steamship line, or the Reynolds X or the Paisano – seemed to thrive almost in spite of themselves. The land had been in the families for years, long ago bought and paid for, and so had the breed stock. Most ranches ran basic cow-calf operations. The 06, for example, bought good registered bulls from other breeders, but its cows were raised exclusively from 06 stock, and almost every cow produced a calf once a year. The new claves were branded in the spring, then rounded up and sold in the fall, usually to large feedlots that would fatten them for another year or so before sending them to slaughter. Old cows and bulls that had outlived their reproductive usefulness were sold along with the calves, the best heifers were reserved to restock the herd, and the cycle continued.
Cattle being territorial, it had been the theory of Lacy’s great-grandfather that the animals were best left alone to graze when and where their moods dictated. Despite the absence of cross-fencing, the same 06 cows were found, year after year, in the same 06 pastures. The first and last rule was, and still is, Let nature have her way. There was a reason it rained only fifteen inches a year. Native shrubs and grasses grew here for a reason. Nature understood conservation far better than man did, and it was the wise rancher who understood nature and bent to her will. Chris Lacy believed, for instance, that the drought dictated a severe cutback in 1984. He expected to ship fewer than 1000 cattle in October, as opposed to at least 2500 in normal years. But the cutback seemed vital; it would allow the range to recover.
“Basic cow-calf operations like ours take what they can get,” he said. “Thirty cents, sixty cents, seventy cents – whatever they’re bringing. Good years, we can make improvements. We’re not extravagant. Bad years, we have to cut back. My grandfather is very conservative. He owns the land and he owns the cattle. Otherwise it wouldn’t be possible to stay in business. This is a simple operation, a good operation, a safe operation.”
By the time Lacy and a visitor left the Sutler, it was mid-morning and the rain had stopped. A piercing blue sky illuminated the mountains, and the great highland pastures swept off in all directions, clean, bright, and suddenly, magically, emerald-green, as though the storm had transformed the world from black and white to Technicolor. Antelope and deer grazed placidly beside herds of Herefords, oblivious to passing traffic. “You’re seeing this country in its Sunday best,” Lacy said.
There was some irony in the 06’s resistance to change, because the Kokernot family had built its fortune during some of the most dramatic and violent changes in modern history. Originally from France, the Kokernots fled to Amsterdam at the time of the French Revolution. Herbert Senior’s grandfather David Kokernot migrated to New Orleans in 1817 and later served as a scout for Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto. David’s son Lee served with Terry’s Texas Rangers during the Civil War, and later Lee Kokernot and his brother John bought the 06 brand and started a cattle business in Gonzales. When the newly built Southern Pacific Railroad was extended to the high country in the 1880’s, Lee sent his son, Herbert Senior, to Alpine to buy, sell, and trade land. Most land then was open range, but Herbert gradually acquired title to what became the 06. Many of his holdings came from repossessions – he would rather have had the money, but the economics of the times got him into the cattle business. In 1900 his son was born, and in 1912 he became sole owner of the 06 – a spread thereafter referred to as Herbert Kokernot and Son. Another landmark event occurred about that time. Kokernot brought the English-bred Hereford to the ranch and helped pioneer its development in the region. The whiteface, now referred to locally as the highland Hereford was said to be ideally suited to the cool, rugged mountain climate. Newcomers to the highlands who have introduced Brangus and other breeds are looked on as fools, though the truth is that the case for the Hereford as opposed to any other breed is rooted as much in tradition as in cold, objective fact.
“A little Brahman would probably do good out here,” Chris Lacy admitted, turning his four-wheel-drive pickup off the highway. “But my grandfather says keep it one hundred per cent the same breed – and you know what breed he means.” Chris found a shallow place to cross Limpia Creek, hubcap-deep now and as clear and clean as its name suggested. The house where Chris and Diane Lacy and their two children lived was on high ground not far from the creek bank, flanked by barns, sheds, a trailer, and a corral. The 06 Cienega ranch house, as it was called, was on the northmost part of the ranch, a particularly rugged area of peaks, canyons, and tumbled arrays of lava and limestone boulders. Chris stopped at the house to pick up Diane and their nine-year-old son, Lance. Their eleven-year-old daughter, Kristin, was away at a girls’ camp.
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