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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The Henderson Flat, the property next to the 06, was his showpiece. Although it was less than a quarter of the size of the 06, Williams ran two or three times as many head of cattle on it. “I have twelve thousand head on my Alpine operations this year,” he said. “Some years I have only two thousand. Some years I have none. I can move with the market, with the grass.” He went on: “A lot of ranchers like Kokernot are keeping their lights [steers under 350 pounds] to fatten them and wait for the market to jump. But smart guys like me are buying steers right now, today, instead of taking it like it is.”
From Williams’ vantage point, the drought was the best thing that could have happened. Williams was an eternal optimist, to be sure, but this was where his oil fortune came into play: while nature was compelling the less fortunate to sell, it was inspiring him to buy. “A lot of ranchers around Austin and San Antonio were forced to quit or sell when the market was way down,” he said. “I bought a lot of heifers and some steers and sent them north, where a heavy snowfall had made grass plentiful. I bought another fourteen thousand yearlings in South Texas and seven thousand in Mexico. I sent some to the Colorado cornfields and some to the Arizona desert and some more to Wyoming. Cattle cycles are supply and demand, pure and simple, When prices go up again, ranchers will be buying heifers to replenish their stock. I’ll be selling heifers back to some of the same people that sold them to me. I usually make about seven dollars an acre here, triple what most cow-calf operations make. This year I estimate I’ll make twenty dollars an acre. Next year, who knows? I might decide to let the grass grow.”
Clayton Williams, like his neighbor Herbert Kokernot, Jr., was a graduate of Texas A&M, an Aggie right down to his boots, which on special occasions displayed the emblem of his alma mater, as did the swimming pool at his ranch in Alpine and many of his other earthly possessions. Texas A&M was the central fact of his life: he prided himself on being the little Aggie who could. Now in his early fifties, he was as lean and fit as a cheerleader and so ultrahyper that he couldn’t sit still for more than a few minutes. His pet word for conditions was “hardscrabble,” taken from the title of John Graves’ book, which he talked about constantly. Graves wrote of a previous generation of God-fearing men from “the days of big grass,” men who used up the land and moved on, “without heed or knowledge of such soil-saving measures as contour plowing, crop rotation, … terracing, stripcropping.” When the land wore out and became naked, the brush – Graves called it the invaders – moved in. In Clayton’s view, that described what had happened to Herbert Kokernot and other ranchers. They had not tried “to mold the land into new forms of usefulness but [had molded] themselves to its shrunken possibilities.” The drought wasn’t the reason they were losing – the drought was their excuse.
It was a hot July day, and Clayton opened a can of beer from the cooler behind the seat and surveyed his ranch. Pride radiated from his face. “I paid eight-two dollars an acre for this,” he said. “The original Kokernot paid five dollars. He got a lot of it by repossessing land. The present Kokernot inherited his. To his credit, he didn’t lose it like a lot of them, but he hasn’t improved it much either. The fact is, it’s not like it was fifty years ago. They’re playing make-believe. Me, I’m very intense in my business. I like to make money.”
Clayton Williams grew up in hardscrabble, catclaw country. His father owned a ranch and an irrigated farm near Fort Stockton. He lost the ranch during the drought of the fifties, but Clayton recovered most of it after making his fortune in oil. “A big part of our ranch was converted to cotton farms,” he recalled. “This had been old, rough, used up ranchland, but because of government subsidies farmers were able to irrigate and grow some cotton. But it was marginal. The only reason there was a market at all was because of government subsidies. Farmers went broke anyway, because it was not economically feasible to farm cotton out there. The government created a false economy. The drought relief just let the farmers go deeper and deeper in debt and ruined the land too. The farmers kept taking government handouts and devoted the best, most productive years of their lives to … what? To chasing a false idol. They should have listened to nature. Nature tells us when it’s time to sell and get off the land.”
It didn’t take a psychiatrist to see that something didn’t square here; any old-time rancher would have been willing to point it out. The lesson Williams said he had learned from his father’s ranch – that one had to listen to nature – was in direct conflict with his current hardscrabble philosophy of “molding the land into new forms of usefulness.” Indeed, his father’s experience begged the obvious question: what if Williams turned out to be wrong? His operation was showing a handsome profit now, but he had been in the ranching business for only a decade, which in ranching terms was not very long at all. What if in the long run his hybrid grasses didn’t thrive? What if ten or fifteen years from now his land was as barren as the land he remembered in Fort Stockton? Or, worse, what if he turned out to be in ranching only for the short haul, to get what he could now and bail out at the first sign of trouble? What if he was the one who was chasing the false idol? In their heart of hearts, all the old-style ranchers believed that that was how things would play out before it was over. What they also knew, though, and what embittered them, was that even if Williams did turn out to be wrong in the end, as they all hoped, he would simply write off the experience and go somewhere else. The land would remain.
Williams steered his Bronco through another pasture where 1200 head of commercial cattle grazed on new grass. Most ranchers would have limited a pasture this size to a few dozen head, but most ranchers didn’t believe, as Williams did, in rotation grazing. “I’ll keep them here for thirty days, then I won’t use this pasture again until it’s been plowed and replanted,” he said. “I’m kind of radical, as are most people who love the land. That’s what ol’ Hardscrabble Graves and I have in common. Cowboys love cattle. They believe that only the tenderest grass is nutritious. But what’s best for cows is not necessarily best for grass in the balance of management. Grass needs time. It grows logarithmically. Leave it alone and in a month there will be ten times as much grass as before.”
Williams drove past some Hispanic workers who were terracing a section of pasture to catch runoff that otherwise would have disappeared into a ravine. Similar “spreaders” were located all over the ranch – the 06 also constructed spreaders, but there were fewer and they were not as well maintained. There were no windmills on Williams’ property. “I trust electricity more than I trust wind,” he said.
It surprised Williams that so few people understood what he saw as the basic economic facts of ranching. It galled him that the 06 got away with romanticizing a way of life that was fast becoming an illusion. Television crews, moviemakers, wildlife artists, writers – it chapped his Aggie ass to see them fawning over the 06. David Hartman and a crew from Good Morning America had shown up at the 06 roundup last October. The year before, it was a British movie outfit filming a piece called My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys. The documentary starred Waylon Jennings, who had just been released from a drug treatment center and could barely stand up, much less ride. “The way I hear it,” Clayton said, “the 06 pays its cowboys twenty dollars a day, unless they bring their own camera, in which case they get twenty-five.” Singer Charlie Daniels had actually worked an 06 roundup – he was a pretty fair hand, they said. Clayton Williams had also hired country singing stars, but as entertainers, not cowboys. Nothing romantic about that. It was just good business.
Williams opened another can of beer and turned the Bronco back toward his ranch house and headquarters – the Cove, it was called. A giant antelope buck (imported apparently from the 06) galloped parallel to the Bronco for a few hundred yards, then shifted gears and raced across our path and out of sight. On the hill above the Cove, just beyond the 06 property line, stood a massive sentinel of rimrock called Polk’s Peak. Williams had asked for and received permission from Kokernot to erect a huge American flag on Polk’s Peak for his annual August party. He described the party as “Woodstock without sex.” His guests were going to pay some fancy prices for cows, and Clayton wanted them to enjoy the experience.
THE WILLOW SPRINGS RANCH house, where Joel Nelson and his wife, Barney, lived, sat on a finger of land along Musquiz Creek, near the center of the 06 and yet isolated by Williams’ ranch from the 06’s Cienega camp far to the north and the 06’s Berrendo Flat camp well to the south. Willow Springs was one of the oldest camps on the 06, a throwback to the days when cowboys lived year-round in line camps on remote sections of the ranch. Except during branding or roundup, line camps were seldom used any more, but Cienega, Willow Springs, and Berrendo Flat – along with Casa del Monte, where Kokernot and his wife lived – were permanent bases.
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