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 Williams Brangus Production Sale, as the auction was called on the engraved invitation, didn’t start until 1 p.m. that Saturday, but by midmorning the twelve miles of dirt road running from the highway to ranch headquarters were clogged with buses, campers, and other vehicles. A tank truck sprinkled precious water to hold down the dust. Every mile or so there was an oasis – elaborately constructed Hollywood facades with cute names like Margaritaville, Fort ClayDesta, and Claytie’s Chicken Ranch – where neatly groomed young people in Western costumes dispensed beverages and tough-looking, heavily armed, off-duty lawmen checked credentials. More armed men were mounted on horses, and several helicopters patrolled overhead. Closer to ranch headquarters guests could hear the music of a Dixieland band and smell the smoke from various cook fires.
Clayton’s party had the pizzazz of a county fair. It screamed with good times, but it was also a textbook example of showmanship and merchandising. Three flatbed trucks were loaded with displays of alfalfa hay, Klein grass, pipe and drilling mud, all for sale. Plastic drinking cups advertised Clayton’s gas pipeline company, Clajon. A sign near the circus tent where the auction would take place proclaimed, “We Believe in God, Aggies and Brangus Cattle.” Clayton was every bit as dogmatic and outspoken about the Brangus as Mr. Kokernot was about the Hereford.
Clayton Williams, his maroon pants stuffed in his maroon and white boots, talked with a group of prospective buyers who were inspecting the pens of cattle near the auction tent. Clayton was a little nervous that I was there. I understood. His guests were mostly rich, important people: if the wife of, say, a bank president got smashed and fell in the swimming pool, she would just as soon not read about it. But nothing like that happened. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “If anybody gets drunk and falls in the swimming pool, it’ll probably be me.” Truth was, I’d seen wilder parties in my broom closet.
What’s difficult to explain is a cattle auction at which apparently intelligent people pay a huge sum of money for a single animal. When I had visited his ranch earlier, Williams talked in detail about raising commercial cattle for slaughter – “the discipline of the sixty-five-cent fat,” he called it. This sideshow had nothing to do with that discipline. “This is a separate world,” he told me. “I guess you would say the people here are reaching for the top – it’s like trying to win the Kentucky Derby – and yet there is a tie to the real world.” The cattle to be auctioned here were very special, prizewinning animals that were certain to command top dollar as breeders. It was something like buying the stud rights to Secretariat. Clayton Williams was making the profits today, but on some future day the buyer might look forward to his own profits – so long as there was someone else willing to buy. One old-line rancher called it brother-in-lawing.
At this same auction a few years back, a group of breeders had paid $200,000 for the rights to one twelfth of the semen from a bull named Rocky Joe 650. That fixed the animal’s value at $2.4 million. They didn’t actually buy (or even get possession of) the bull. Williams, who was also part of the group, maintained possession of the bull, as well as an interest in the semen. Once a week a specialist in such matters got to masturbate Rocky Joe 650. The semen was stored in straws, or ampules, that were frozen in liquid nitrogen until it was time to artificially inseminate some cow. Each ejaculation supplied between 60 and 250 ampules of sperm, and thus a bull that under natural conditions might service forty or fifty cows a year had the potential to service thousands.
Artificial insemination was nothing new; it had been practiced for about thirty years. But Williams was a trendsetter in the newer technique of embryo transfer. That was where the so-called supercows, the daughters of General MacArthur and other top-line bulls, came in. If the eggs of a supercow were transplanted into common recipient cows, each supercow was able to produce twenty to forty calves each year. Calves born of common recipient cows had the genes of both the supercow and the top-line bull. Only one bull was available at this auction – his name was Bob of Brinks, and a one-tenth share of his semen rights sold for $300,000, making him even more valuable than Rocky Joe 650. The cows, sold by lots, were themselves the results of embryo transfers. Some were recipients due to calve in a few months (they sold for an average of $39,000), others were pairs of bred cows with heifer calves (they sold for an average of $71,000), and still others were unbred cows (average price $30,000). Most expensive of all were the flushes (eggs) of supercows, whose average price was $137,000.
Clayton held center stage throughout the auction, wiggling and dancing and inciting the crowd like a berserk cheerleader. With the Aggie War Hymn blaring from the speakers, Clayton’s voice occasionally drowned out that of the auctioneer. “Larry, you son of a gun, you stole my heifer! You got performance built in. Look at the stretch and length of that female.” There were a lot of “Gig ‘em Aggies” and jokes about “what good-looking wives Brangus breeders have,” and at one point Clayton even took the microphone and sang a verse of “The Eyes of Texas.” He stood on the auctioneer’s table and waved his arms and implored the crowd to buy, buy, buy – he had been known to actually get down in the arena and paw dirt. When the auction ended, Clayton announced that the sales had totaled $2.73 million, then led the crowd in the singing of “God Bless America.”
As the partygoers began to move out of the tent and up the meadow where the food was being served, roadies for the two star entertainers, Janie Fricke and George Strait, assembled equipment and tested the sound. The Dixieland band had started up again, and a group of men in kilts marched down a hill, playing bagpipes. Claytie led Desta and other members of his family to the stage, said a prayer, did another chorus of “God Bless America,” and announced that there would be fireworks as soon as it was dark, followed by dancing and singing until daybreak, at which time breakfast would be served. From the top of Polk’s Peak Old Glory flapped in the hot August breeze. Then there was a thunderous roar, and a formation of corporate jets zoomed directly overhead and vanished over the tops of the mountains.
Thunderheads had been building up all afternoon, and the squall hit camp just after supper. At first it was light rain, then the rain came harder, then the wind hit full force, driving the rain in parallel sheets, then it started hailing. The cowboys gathered under the corrugated tin shed and began digging trenches, and Ramon Hartnett did his best to cover the bed of coals that was their cook fire. A bolt of lightning narrowly missed the shed. Ty Holland, one of the full-time 06 cowboys, put on a yellow slicker and ran toward the corrals, where a night horse, frightened and near panic, was tied beside a metal fence. Halfway through the month of October it had rained almost every night. It was business as usual at the 06’s annual fall roundup.
When the squall had passed, the cowboys examined the tepees, which were their individual shelters. All the tepees had weathered the storm, but some had leaked, and a few of the cowboys would spend the night in soggy bedrolls. That prospect didn’t seem to bother anyone. The cowboys got back to their twilight routine, cracking bullwhips, practicing roping, pitching horseshoes. When it was too dark to pitch horseshoes, some of them played cards and other gathered by the cook fire, drinking coffee and swapping stories. Obra Denton, who had cowboyed all over the West for the past forty years, remembered spending a winter alone in the high country of northern Arizona. His only shelter had been two pieces of tin and a strip of canvas. “I thought that was about the best life there was,” Obra said.
About half of the fifteen cowboys taking part in the roundup were drifters who followed the flow – Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, wherever there was work branding or gathering. Most of them were younger than Obra, and some had college educations, but they were cut from the same cloth; they were all willing to sacrifice anything for this archaic, ritualistic way of life. Most had been married at some time, but cowboying could take its toll on a marriage. Ron Goddard, a young cowboy from Montana, had been married when he worked at the 06 the past spring. He and his wife and another couple had built a wagon and put together a contract branding outfit, hiring out to dilettante ranchers who were willing to pay someone else to brand, castrate, dehorn, earmark, and vaccinate newborn calves, but now Goddard’s marriage was on the rocks and he had no idea where he would go from here.
Goddard and three others were generally referred to as the Montana cowboys, though only one of them, Bob Blackwell, was from Montana originally. They were as authentic as cowboys got. Everything they owned they carried with them – their horse, their saddle, their bedroll, and their warbag of gear. These were men who paid $400 for a pair of knee-length work boots and $40 for a pair of dress boots. These were men who thought heaven was life on horseback but would settle for $700 a month in a line camp forty miles from the nearest town. Some were tall and some were short, but they were uniformly lean, sported facial hair, and wore floppy black hats and vests under their ragged, dusty coats. When you looked at the Montana cowboys, standing together or individually, you thought of a Wanted poster.
This particular camp, called Number Nine, was the cowboys’ favorite. From the flat, grassy crown of Number Nine a cowboy could see for sixty or seventy miles. It was “on top,” high above the streams and trees and paved roads. Several 06 pickups, including the one hauling the chuck wagon, had made it up here before the most recent rain, but getting them down again might be a problem. Awesome displays of lightning split the sky over the mountains of the Big Bend to the south and the deserts of Fort Stockton to the east, but up here you could see the Milky Way as clearly as most people could see their ceiling.
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