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.
(Page 3 of 7)
Chris and Diane seemed an odd pair to be running one of the oldest and largest cattle operations in Texas. He had grown up in Waco, the son of a banker. But first and foremost he was the grandson of a Kokernot. He had spent every summer and most vacations at the 06 – he and his third cousin, Tom Beard, who now ran the Leoncita, learned to be real cowboys when other boys their age were still playing with stick horses. Chris played football and studied ranch management at Texas Christian University. There he met Diane, who had grown up in San Antonio. They married in 1971; she was a 21-year-old bride when they moved to Alpine and took charge of the 06. “I barely knew how to ride,” she recalled.
Chris wanted to check on some colts, so we drove toward Grapevine Canyon, along a rutty, muddy trail climbing above the floor of a vast valley of yellow, blue, and orange wildflowers. Diane pointed to a dull, dusty-green flower and identified it as locoweed. “It can poison and even kill cattle,” she said. “Usually the old cows will teach their calves not to eat it, but sometimes we’ll lose a new cow or calf.” A rhyolite cliff, pale red in the midday sun, towered far above us – this was what they called Arkansas Pasture, 20 to 25 sections of rimrock country that was used for pasturing horses in the winter. Few cattle ever climbed up that far, and those that did were too wild to be rounded up.
Near a windmill called Taylor Mill, and not far from the ruins of an old kiln where soldiers had fired the original bricks used at Fort Davis, we spotted four of the meandering colts. They looked up from their grazing as Chris stopped the truck and walked toward them. When they finally started to move, it was in our direction. Diane touched each one and called it by name.
In her thirteen years at the 06, Diane had learned not only to ride but also to cut calves from a herd, handle a branding iron, and do almost anything else a working cowboy did. “Out here your values change,” she said. “You come in contact with the real basics – the weather, the animals, yourself. You learn patience. You learn to think like an animal.” Diane had also, in that time, developed a few strong opinions about her neighbor Clayton Williams. “We’ve done a lot of things for him,” she said. “He had no antelope, so we helped him round up some of ours and put them in one of his pastures. He overgrazes, and he root-plows the native grasses and replants with hybrids from Texas A&M. His trouble is he has no feel for the land. Feel is everything. We don’t grow cattle – we grow grass. We don’t feel we own this land – we’re just leasing it during our lifetime. The land is fragile. It doesn’t take that long to use it up.”
Diane noticed that one of the colts had a nasty cut on his foreleg. She examined it tentatively. “Do you think it was a lion?” she asked.
Chris said he didn’t think so. “Likely got it scuffling with the other colts,” he said. “I’ll come back later and put something on it.”
The following morning, a Saturday, Mr. Kokernot, as Herbert Junior was always called, made one of his infrequent appearances. Though he had been a Jeff Davis County commissioner for 62 years – said to be the longest continuous tenure of any officeholder in Texas – he was otherwise rarely seen in public. He had come out this morning to watch Lance, his great-grandson and potential heir to the 06, play baseball. Diane and Chris, who coached the team, were extremely attentive to the old man’s needs and went out of their way to make him comfortable, but you could tell he would rather have been somewhere else. He was 84, bent and slender as a twig; he looked as though he might blow away with the next gust of wind. Hardly anyone recognized him in the crushed cowboy hat, necktie, brown slacks, and scuffed street shoes or realized that he was the virtual patrón of Alpine. Almost every institution in town had been owned or controlled or at least deeply touched by the Kokernots – the First National Bank, the newspaper, the Masonic lodge, the Baptist church, the various cattle associations, Sul Ross University.
The baseball field where the children were playing was once a part of the 06, as was Kokernot Field, which was adjacent to it and which had been the home field for the Alpine semipro team in the forties and fifties. For the last sixty years baseball and church had been the extent of Herbert Junior’s social life, and after he disbanded the team in the late fifties, baseball no longer interested him. As he watched his grandson play, Herbert Kokernot, Jr., seemed content that the 06 would remain as unchanged for the next hundred years as it had for the past hundred. “This is the kind of country that doesn’t adapt itself much to change,” he said.
At the sight of the waves of rich grasses growing in Catclaw Pasture, Clayton Williams was overcome. The opening bars of the Aggie War Hymn rattling from his lips, he slammed on the brakes and flew out of his Bronco, waving his arms and shouting, ‘Oh, man! I just gotta walk through this.”
So this was the enemy. He didn’t act like the character I had heard described, a man with wanton disregard for the land. He seemed to care. He seemed to care passionately. The pasture bristled with black, blue, and hairy grama grasses and tender young tumbleweed sprouts, all of which thrive naturally in the high country, and with Johnson and Klein grasses that Williams had introduced after root-plowing the pasture and replanting it to suit his purposes. The most amazing thing about Catclaw Pasture was that there wasn’t a catclaw in sight.
Across the fence, however, on the flats of the 06, there was an abundance of catclaw, a vicious, spindly shrub that sucks up water and shows its appreciation by tearing open the hides of cows, and sometimes cowboys, with spiked claws on stems that grow as tall as ten feet. There was mesquite too, and black brush and some scattered strands of gramas. Cowboys on the 06 shared a sort of masochistic fondness for catclaw and even asserted that some of their fattest cattle came from catclaw country, but Williams hated the shrub with an inordinate, almost demonic intensity. He called it the invader and had spent the better part of nine years eradicating it from this particular pasture. “When I die,” he said, “the catclaw of the world will hold the damnedest celebration you ever saw.”
To put it bluntly, Clayton Williams did not believe in bending to nature. He believed with every bone in his Aggie body that with the proper application of modern ranching techniques, you could make nature do the bending. Almost all the pastures on Clayton Williams’ Brangus ranch had been improved, either by root-plowing the native grasses and replanting with hybrids or, at the very least, by poisoning the catclaw and other brush. Some of the improved pastures were failures, in the sense that they hadn’t paid for themselves, and some had been plowed and replanted more than once. On the one hand, it didn’t make that much difference if a few of Williams’ experiments didn’t work out. He was, after all, a wealthy oilman, and though he didn’t admit it – perhaps not even to himself – that gave him a tremendous advantage over the old-style ranchers. Williams wasn’t dependent on the land for his livelihood the way they were. He could play by his own rules because he could afford to. If things didn’t work out, well, it wasn’t the end of the world. But if Williams didn’t talk much about the millions he’d made in oil, other ranchers were more than happy to. “What it amounts to,” one of them said, “is that he’s subsidizing beef with oil.”
On the other hand, Clayton Williams, unlike many of the other newcomers, was no dilettante. He took ranching seriously. His competitive business instincts pushed him to make his ranch operation profitable – and it was. The annual cattle auction alone brought in several million dollars a year, and while no one knew how much his commercial cattle operation brought, everyone knew it was plenty. According to Williams, his books proved that his modern techniques were making him money. By spending $10 an acre on improvements, he said, he could at least double the number of cattle that grazed there. He pointed to the Hill Pasture, where a fork in the road led to the 06’s Willow Springs camp, and explained, “This is one of the weakest pieces of land on my property, but for three years now I’ve been able to run forty-five cow units per section rather than the fifteen most people think is the limit.”
The grass had an intrinsic value too, beyond its traditional purpose of fattening cattle. Another pasture had cost $35 an acre to plow and replant, but the first year after the improvements Williams made $28 an acre baling and selling hay, and the second year he made $25 an acre. Bailing hay, much less selling it, was as foreign to the 06 operation as selling zebras – something else Clayton Williams had done. Cowboys hated plowed land, as they hated potted plants, artificial insemination, embryo genetics, and anything else not directly rooted in the past. Clayton Williams did not claim to be a cowboy, however, or even a rancher. “I’m a cattle entrepreneur,” he said. “Kokernot is at one extreme of the beef production business, and I’m crowding the other extreme.” Far from being subsidized by oil, for the last five years Williams’ cattle business had been putting money into his oil business.
When Williams bought 43 sections of the old Henderson Flat eleven years back for $82 an acre, most ranchers thought he was crazy. The land was considered poor and overused. Then he bought four more ranches in the Davis Mountains, three near San Antonio, and three in Wyoming – he also owned an old family property, an irrigated farm near Fort Stockton. All in all, his ranch holdings were considerable. He ran a cow-calf operation, though it was only a small part of the business. He bought yearling steers from other ranchers and fattened them either out on one of his ranches or, depending on market conditions and rainfall, in feedlots or on leased land. The most spectacular aspect of his ranching business was his registered Brangus business. “That’s another game,” he said. “It twirls up there by itself.” The jet-set ranchers, who attended his annual party and auction had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a small share of the semen rights to a single bull. Such prices made absolutely no sense to the traditional ranchers, but they made enormous sense to Clayton Williams.
My Library
