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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Joel and Barney Nelson were themselves throwbacks, remnants of a distant past buffeted by the clamor and confusion of modern times. They appeared to be plain and simple people, a cowboy and his wife, but there was a certain grandeur in their style, a formality of manner and attitude nearly forgotten. Joel had a degree in forestry and range management from Stephen F. Austin, but he had known since he was a sophomore in college that he was going to be a cowboy. Barney was a photographer, an author, and a graduate of Sul Ross; she still worked full time in the university’s department of range animal science. The ranch house where they lived was a turn-of-the-century model of Western architecture and culture and an archive of cowboy paraphernalia: antique saddles, branding irons, hackamores, swivel rings, ropes. The house was supplied by the 06, as were utilities, long distance phone service, and all the beef they wanted. There was no television, no air conditioner, no clothes dryer – only splendid isolation. “This is the center of the earth to us,” Barney said. “This is what satisfies us.”
Sitting in their old-fashioned country kitchen one day in late July, eating steak and drinking iced tea out of tin cans, they talked about their life not as a means of accomplishment but as an end in itself, something done well for its own sake. Few people stood comfortably on tradition or felt inured to its timeless process. Few people cared enough about their job to make it their lives. The cowboy was a vanishing breed, but so were the things the cowboy stood for – humility, sensitivity, pride, reverence for what had gone before. Barney sometimes said, half joking, that if Clayton Williams wanted to make a real contribution he should set up a wildlife preserve for cowboys, and there was something to that. Ted Gray, an old cowboy survivor and ranch owner, had said it eloquently in a passage from Barney’s book, The Last Campfire: “If you talk to an old man sometimes, you can learn something it maybe took him forty years to learn. You might learn it in one minute.” That was the kind of sentiment the new breed of ranch owner would not understand, a romantic notion that flew in the face of technology and quantum leaps but that went to the heart of what Joel and Barney believed. Cowboys worked hard because they believed in the redemption of hard work. Barney said, “It’s the only job I know where you can turn a man loose and not see him for days at a time and know that he’s been up every morning before daylight, just waiting to get started again.” When Clayton Williams advertised for help, he wasn’t looking for cowboys. He was looking for pickup drivers, swimming pool maintainers, weed poisoners.
When Joel and Barney were first married, in 1971, Joel was making about $9 a day and he and Barney spent their free time dreaming of owning their own small spread. He was making considerably more than that now, but the dream had mostly vanished because of the influx of newcomers and the corresponding rise in land prices. “It’s not possible anymore,” Barney said. “We couldn’t even make the down payment.”
But the dream had not died completely. Joel had used the Texas Veterans’ Land Program to buy 20 acres near Fort Davis and had leased 640 acres in an adjacent state park, where he ran a herd of about eighteen cows, heifers, and steers. He owned another seven head that ran with the 06 cattle at Willow Springs. Though Joel was loyal to the highland Hereford, he wasn’t dogmatic about it. His cows were Herefords, but they ran with a mixed breed of steers. “Every breed association will tell you their breed is best and give you statistics to prove it,” he said.
I was curious as to how Joel and Barney felt about Clayton Williams’ annual bash. In a few weeks their splendid isolation would be shattered by several thousand jet-set ranchers, traveling past their front gate to pay ridiculous prices for cattle, stuff themselves with barbecue, and spend the night drinking and listening to top-dollar country music. “We usually go,” Barney said. “Clayton’s our neighbor.”
“I read that this year’s guests of honor are General MacArthur’s daughters,” I said. “I wasn’t aware the general had daughters.”
Joel laughed. “General MacArthur’s a bull,” he told me. “His daughters are embryo donor cows. That’s the big thing these days.”
“They get a million dollars and more for some of those bulls,” Barney said.
“There’s no way you can make money on beef cattle paying a million dollars for bulls,” Joel said. “There’s nothing in the world wrong with upgrading cattle, but you can’t put beef on the table running that kind of operation. We pay up to two thousand dollars for a good, practical range bull, but we’re not afraid to kick him out in the pasture and not see him for a couple of months. You can’t do that with a million-dollar bull.”
“That’s what’s hurting the ranch business,” Barney said. “People who don’t have to worry about making ends meet. Everybody is jumping on the bandwagon. Ranching is getting to be a business where people have less faith in experience than in new, untried methods. I guess they get tax write-offs. Clayton plows the ground and raises tumbleweeds. He hires people to run around and … I don’t know what.”
“It gives them a lot to talk about on the golf course and at the country club dance,” Joel said.
“You know what the difference is between a calf from a breed’s top line and a calf bred from average stock?” Barney asked. “About ten pounds.”
It rained again that night. Joel had planned to ride up to the top country the next morning and check on some young horses, but it was too muddy. Instead he decided to hitch a livestock trailer to his pickup and drive to his friend Jack Saunders’ ranch, south of Marfa. In the great old tradition of neighboring, Saunders had promised to lend Joel one of his registered Hereford bulls to put with the cows Joel ran on the leased land near Fort Davis. “Jack is short of grass,” Joel said. “Besides, it’s good advertising. I wouldn’t have seen his stock otherwise. He knows if I’m impressed I’ll encourage Chris to buy some of them.”
The bull that Joel was borrowing was big-boned, with a straight topline, a broad, well-muscled rear end, and huge shoulders – near-perfect conformations. “Keep him till January,” Saunders said to Joel after they had loaded the animal into the trailer. ”I don’t need him right now, and he’ll eat better at your place anyway.”
After Joel had delivered the bull to his pasture on the mountainside above Fort Davis, he drove into town, looking for Chris Lacy’s pickup. He spotted it outside Bob Dillard’s Union Trading Company. Lacy, Dillard, and Cotton Elliott, one of the 06 cowboys, were loitering in the parking lot between the store and the Limpia Hotel, killing time and talking about the rain. “Anytime you see bees close to the hive, it’s gonna rain,” Elliott said. “I drove by a hive that sounded like a machine gun. I think it’ll rain every day in July and August.” Chris didn’t comment on the possibility of more rain, but as he and Elliott were loading a lawn mower into one of the pickups, he shook his head and looked at it. “We haven’t needed this in a few years.”
“You want me to buy a thousand head of light calves while you’re gone on vacation?” Joel asked the boss of the 06.
Chris thought about it a moment. That old pessimism was creeping back into his eyes. “Better wait,” he said. “See if it ever rains again.”
Folks in fort davis didn’t need invitations to remind them that this was the weekend of Claytie and Desta’s big party. It was August 17, and there wasn’t a vacant motel room within miles of the Alpine-Marfa-Fort Davis triangle. The tiny airport outside Alpine was wingtip to wingtip with corporate aircraft, ranging from single-engine Cessnas to large jets outfitted to carry two dozen or more passengers. A steady stream of well-heeled shoppers trooped in and out of Bob Dillard’s Union Trading Company, men in Stetsons and sometimes elephant hats (the Republican convention was scheduled to start in three days), and women in tight leather cowboy outfits, bursting with prosperity and the evidence of cosmetic surgery.
Fort Davis was accustomed to tourists. It was the highest town in Texas and one of the most scenic; geology students, dude ranch fanciers, and explorers of the unbeaten path visited regularly and were always made welcome. There wasn’t much of what you call action in Fort Davis – no movies, no nightclubs, no public bars. People liked it that way. The town’s only doctor had died, and the only drugstore didn’t sell drugs, though it advertised “the best fountain Cokes in Texas.” The Union Trading Company, located in an old stone building that dated back to 1906, was a Fort Davis landmark and a sort of hangout for locals, who sometimes gathered there after business hours to drink beer and gossip. All the gossip this Friday concerned Clayton Williams.
“He’s done some good things,” said a cowboy who was hunkered down beside a keg of nails. “He got that operation for Ramon.” That was true, admitted Bob Dillard, who ran newspapers in Alpine and Marfa as well as running the Union Trading company. Williams had helped pay for an operation to repair the damaged knees of Roman Hartnett, an old cowboy who ran the chuck wagon for the 06 and cooked for various other ranchers, including Williams. He had also donated $100 to the sonic boom fund, a campaign to pressure the Air Force to abandon its practice of holding dogfight maneuvers over the Davis Mountains. “Some of the others gave a thousand,” Dillard pointed out.
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