February 1985
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.
Everyone had prayed for rain, but this was ridiculous. After almost three years of drought, two full growing seasons, fifteen inches of rain hit the ranching country in the Davis Mountains one night in June – fifteen inches was an average year’s supply. The rain hit with the force of a runaway train, washing out nearly every bridge across Limpia Creek and stranding families in the high country around Alpine and Fort Davis. The normally placid little creek raged like a river at flood tide, a hundred yards wide and sixteen feet deep in places, gobbling huge chunks of its bank, uprooting ancient cottonwood trees and utility poles and sections of Texas Highway 17.
Chris Lacy, the boss of the Kokernot 06, was awakened about three in the morning by thunder and rumbling so terrible that he thought it was a tornado. From the front porch of his ranch house he could see a tree as large as a bull elephant being dragged under and thrashed about like a toothpick. A lesser rain several days earlier had washed out the bridge leading from the 06 to the highway into Fort Davis, but that was nothing compared with what was happening now. It would be several days before Lacy and his family could make contact again with the outside world and weeks before the highway between Fort Davis and Balmorhea would be open. The worst storm in almost fifty years caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage – and still no one was ready to say the drought had ended.
Droughts did freaky things to ranchers. The emotional effects were sometimes deeper than the ecological effects on the land itself. Droughts drained the human spirit and opened it to the ravages of pessimism. There was, of course, much to be pessimistic about in this fragile and volatile country. Life here was a cycle of natural disasters, predator attacks, failing markets. The whole history of ranching out here was documented by tears and heartaches; droughts and flash floods were landmark events, the same as marriage and childbirth and death. Old-timers remembered the drought of the thirties, when cattle starved or died of thirst or disease in such numbers that finally, in desperation, government agents drove the survivors into a canyon and shot them. “It was a mercy killing,” recalled Hallie Stillwell, the 87-year-old matriarch of the Stillwell Ranch, south of Marathon. “Still, it was sad.” Natural disasters were part of this country’s fatal charm – part of a compromise and contract made more than a hundred years ago when men like Herbert Kokernot, Sr., began amassing the land to create their great West Texas ranches.
Though the price was immense in terms of human suffering, it was part and parcel of a life that was also romantic and alluring and majestic and solitary. That explained why most ranchers clung so tenaciously to their old and honored traditions – to their way of life. They regarded change as a betrayal, but whether they knew it or not, change was inevitable. In other areas of Texas many of the largest ranches had survived because of oil; the discovery of petroleum reserves on those ranches had, in effect, subsidized the cowboy traditions. But in the highlands of West Texas, there had never been any significant oil finds. High-country land wasn’t good for anything except ranching; the value of the land was still in what it could produce for the dinner table – beef. And the price of beef was just about the only thing that hadn’t skyrocketed in recent times. This year beef on the hoof would sell for about 65 cents a pound, the same as last year and the year before. Cowboys’ wages had tripled in the last decade, as had almost everything else the rancher needed to survive. At the same time, thanks to an influx of new, rich, mostly urban buyers, land values had gone out of sight, from $20 an acre as recently as the sixties to $80 an acre in the seventies to $200 an acre and more today. Traditional wisdom in the highlands had it that each cow required forty acres of range – each 640-acre section (ranchers out here always talked in terms of sections, not acres) would support no more than twenty head. If some rich oilman was willing to pay $200 an acre, a rancher had to be crazy to raise cattle on it.
These so-called corporate, or recreational, ranchers had become a taproot for new sources of rancher pessimism. It was a bitter irony: the high country still hadn’t discovered oil, but it had discovered oilmen. Oilmen – and bankers and lawyers and other urban creatures – bought land the way they bought objects of art. Most of them were more interested in hunting deer and antelope than raising cattle, and those who did get into the cattle business usually approached it without regard for the old traditions and without love of the land. They “modernized.” They “experimented.” They wanted to make money. Indeed, to them money was the whole point of the enterprise. Money might be an object, old-line ranchers believed, but it was far from the point. The point of ranching was ranching.
Chris Lacy, though only 36, was an old-style ranch boss who ran an old-style ranch – the 06 was one of the oldest brands in Texas. Lacy ran his operation well. The 06 made a healthy profit during good years and was stable enough to survive bad years. When Lacy and his cowboys talked about the loss of traditions and values and a way of life (and they talked about it constantly), they weren’t just talking in general terms. They saw an example of it next door. Their neighbor on the next ranch over was one of the newcomers. He was an Aggie and an oilman and a banker, a multimillionaire from Midland who represented in clear and stark terms all the things the old-liners had come to hate – the modernizations and experimentations and heightened concerns for the bottom line.
The neighbor’s name was Clayton Williams, and not only did he disdain the cumulative wisdom of ranching tradition but he was wildly successful while doing so.
After nearly a week of isolation, Chris Lacy and his family took an alternate route over the mountains and into Fort Davis. Thunderheads were building off to the west. The following morning, Lacy met Joel Nelson, one of his top cowboys, at Sutler’s Boarding House restaurant, where Nelson was drinking coffee and talking to a young bronc rider named Shot Branham. A student at Sul Ross, Branham was looking for part-time work breaking colts. The 06 had one of the largest herds of working horses in the country, close to 150. Because the terrain was so rugged, the cowboys did most of their work on horseback. “Frankly,” Lacy said, “we prefer it that way.”
Chris Lacy was the fourth generation of his family to manage the 06 brand. The brand was registered in Calhoun County about 1837 and had been in the Kokernot family since 1872. Chris had managed the ranch since 1971, when his grandfather Herbert Kokernot, Jr., stepped aside. Though the original 06 had been divided after the death of its founder, Herbert Kokernot, Sr., in 1949, it remained one of the most notable and massive spreads in Texas. Many of the great ranches had been broken up and distributed among offspring for tax purposes and because subsequent generations failed to see the romance of the cattle business. Before Herbert Senior’s death, the 06 sprawled over 450 sections – 288,000 acres of the best grazing land in the state. The 200 sections of high country west of the rim, which was still called the 06, went to Herbert Junior, and the 250 sections of less desirable low-country range, now called the Leoncita, went to one of Herbert Senior’s two daughters (the other daughter inherited enough money to buy her own ranch near San Antonio). Herbert Junior and his wife, Golda, continued to live at Casa del Monte, the original house at ranch headquarters, and the old man still set overall policy, but Chris made the day-to-day decisions and worked side by side with the cowboys.
The 06 was an awesome, spectacular spread. Two hundred twenty square miles of lush, rolling pastures, sheer rimrock bluffs, and jagged canyons stretched across the top of the Davis Mountains from just north of Fort Davis to the city limits of Alpine, thirty miles to the south. The native brush and grasses were as pristine now as they were in 1535 when Cabeza de Vaca camped here. Other than Chris and Joel, the 06 regularly employed only two or three full-time cowboys, but cowboys all over the country knew the ranch as one of the last holdouts for cowboy traditions. Modern electric pumps and elaborate systems of water pipes were largely disdained in favor of windmills and old-style concrete stock tanks. There was a minimum of cross-fencing (that is, fencing within the boundaries of the ranch); a cowboy could ride from dawn to dusk without encountering a fence. The 06 was one of the few ranches that still used a chuck wagon for spring branding and fall roundup, though in a rare concession to the twentieth century the wagon was now pulled by a pickup instead of a mule team. Calves were still roped and dragged to fire for branding. Cowboys from as far away as Montana and Idaho kept in touch with the 06 and were hired on when extra hands were needed for branding or roundup. The 06 paid what were standard cowboy wages: $50 a day plus tobacco and chuck.
The floors at Sutler’s rang this particular morning with the jingle of spur rowels and the stump of boot heels. It was too wet to work, but even during the drought there wasn’t a lot to do this time of year except get ready for roundup in October. Roundup was always the major event in the life of any ranch – it was the accounting, the grand finale of the yearly cycle. Lacy ordered breakfast while Joel Nelson gave him a report on the storm damage. Most of the water gaps would need replacing, but overall the rains had been a great asset. The drought wasn’t necessarily broken, Joel was quick to point out, but it was cracked for at least eight or nine months. “We’re in good shape for winter,” he said. “We got another year’s leeway.”
