Showdown at Waggoner Ranch
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Bucky and Gene run the operation from offices in the W. T. Waggoner Estate Building. They communicate by written memos, even though their offices are separated by only a few feet. When it is necessary for them to be in the same room, they let third parties do the talking. In a deposition filed with the court in 2001, Bucky acknowledged: “We do not meet face to face, just he and I. We always meet with our employees present, and nothing is really handled.” They have quarreled over which wells to cap or abandon, over control of the corporate airplane, over the purchase of bulls and the size of cow herds. Nothing is too trivial to spark an argument.
SOME PEOPLE THINK THAT THE LAST chance for a settlement died with Electra II. She was a genteel and educated woman, polished at Miss Wright’s finishing school at Bryn Mawr, a person who hated the details of ranching but respected and loved the tradition. Some people believe that she would never have permitted the sale of the Waggoner Ranch. But Gene and Helen seem determined to do just that. Gene has told people that the ranch would sell in no time, the whole 520,000 acres. Potential buyers include a group of Japanese investors, Ross Perot Jr., Boone Pickens, even the Mormon church—or so go the rumors. There is also a rumor that the Willinghams have already bought a home in Fort Worth.
After her husband died, Electra II did not keep up the pressure on Bucky, as John Biggs and Killen Moore had done. Moore resigned as trustee in the early eighties, at a critical moment for the estate. Originally, the trust was supposed to expire after twenty years, in 1943, but the terms of the trust allowed it to be routinely extended in twenty-year increments until 1983. With the trust on the verge of expiring, Bucky and Electra II agreed to extend it until March 31, 2003. At the same time, they amended the bylaws to allow either party to give “notice of termination” within certain windows of time—an amendment that would later prove crucial in the battle over the ranch. Things were working smoothly at that moment, but neither side believed the harmony would last. In the late eighties, as the oil revenue began to peter out, the new trustee of the Waggoner estate, Charles Prather, resigned. The two sides have never been able to agree on a replacement. Without a trustee to keep them at arm’s length, they set off on a collision course.
Two years after Prather’s resignation, Bucky gave notice of termination of the trust in a letter to Electra II’s family. This was probably a bluff. Bucky wanted to make it clear that he believed the situation was untenable. He didn’t want to sell the ranch, but he thought it could be divided, that a line could be drawn on a map so that each side would have a separate but equal share. “I’ll draw a line and you take first pick,” he offered. “Or you draw a line and I’ll take first pick.”
To Bucky’s surprise, the Biggs family responded by filing suit, asking the court to liquidate the estate. That’s the case that has been snaking through Judge Tom Neely’s Forty-sixth District Court, in Wilbarger County, for these past twelve years.
Bucky wanted the ranch to be divided, not liquidated. After the Biggses requested liquidation, he hired Hughes and Roberson to draw a map, splitting the ranch in a way that would be acceptable to both sides. The United States Department of Agriculture, as part of a conservation project, had surveyed every foot of ground on the ranch, and Roberson fed this information into a database. They gathered information on the value of individual pastures, with the help of foreman Jimmy Lee Smith. Another formula was used to calculate mineral rights, pipelines, cattle, horses, equipment, other assets. When they presented the map to Gene, they say, he asked for more details. When they supplied them, he fumed. “I didn’t ask for the nuts and bolts,” he said and walked away.
For several years there were no further attempts to settle. Then, in 1997, Bucky and Roberson drew another map, this time setting aside the two homesteads, and again offered Gene first choice. “We met in the boardroom at the Waggoner building,” Roberson told me. “Bucky and Gene and their lawyers were there. I was there. After a time everyone seemed in agreement on all except one point—maintenance of the dam at Santa Rosa Lake. The dam was right on the dividing line. Who was going to be responsible for it? Lonny Morrison [Gene’s attorney] said he knew an expert who could advise on that matter. He’d consult with him and get back to us. Then he left the meeting and that’s the last we heard. After that, negotiations were dead in the water.” Gene remembered it differently. In a January 2003 deposition, Gene said he sent Bucky his own draft of the map but never got a reply. “The last e-mail I got from him,” he testified, “[was] five years ago.”
At midnight, March 31, 2003, the clock ran out on the W. T. Waggoner trust. Now the fate of the ranch was up to the court. In May, Judge Neely heard the motion for partial summary judgment and made his ruling. The Waggoner Ranch was ordered liquidated. At least that’s what everyone outside the two families, their lawyers, and the judge believe happened. That’s how it was reported in nearly every newspaper in Texas, including the Dallas Morning News, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the Houston Chronicle.
But when I talked to Judge Neely in October, he told me, “No, that wasn’t my ruling.” The two sides had agreed to this wording: “An event has occurred [Bucky’s notice of termination] which requires the winding up of … the estate.” Judge Neely accepted this language.
So what does it all mean? Nobody’s sure. Apparently they just agreed to continue to disagree. Neither the Willinghams nor the Whartons have the funds to buy the other out. The assets of the estate have been estimated at $200 to $300 million, but it would surely fetch far less if liquidated. Moreover, a sale would be taxed and so would the distribution of the money. Maybe that’s why Judge Neely told me that he has no intention of setting a deadline. “My docket’s not that crowded,” he said. No one, it seems, wants to witness the breakup of a mythic Texas ranch—except the Waggoner heirs.
A FULL MOON HANGS OVER WEST Diving Board Pasture. But we are so far from the lights of town—any town—that half an hour before daylight it’s still pitch black. The cowboys are already waiting on horseback just outside the loading pens, cutting up like schoolboys awaiting the bell for recess. They have been up since three and have had a hefty cookhouse breakfast of eggs, sausage, bacon, potatoes, biscuits, and gravy. They can’t wait to get started. Yesterday a helicopter herded one hundred mother cows and their calves into a “trap”—a corner of the large pasture—and soon cowboys on horseback will be stripping the calves away from their mothers, herding them into separate pens and loading them onto trucks for transportation to other parts of the ranch.
“I guess you could say it’s traumatic, but in two or three days the calves will forget they ever had mamas,” Weldon Hawley says in response to my city-boy question. Hawley is the ranch manager, and I’m sitting in the passenger seat of his pickup, holding my third cup of coffee. Hawley has a cell phone handy, and the ranch radio under the dash crackles with voices from isolated posts miles away. As the sun begins to crawl over the horizon, Hawley marvels at the endless prairie. “Look out there! Some people don’t see it, but she’s beautiful. This is what she’s good at, raising cattle.” Hawley is 52 and has been at the ranch since 1972, working his way up from cowpuncher to straw boss to headquarters boss and finally to ranch manager. “This is the job I set my sights on,” he says. “G. L. Proctor was foreman when I got here, and I made him my model.”
The ranch has about thirty cowboys, many of them second- and third-generation Waggoner employees. They work six and sometimes seven days a week, from daylight until the job is done, often late at night. “The only time we don’t work,” Hawley tells me, “is when it’s raining and light-ning, or when it’s very hot. We try not to put stress on the livestock.”
While the last of the calves are being loaded onto the trucks, I talk to a 22-year-old cowboy named Shane Bone, a handsome young man in dusty brown chaps and a well-used cowboy hat. His daddy worked this ranch for fifteen years, and Shane grew up on Cowboy Row. Now he lives in the bunkhouse. “All I ever knew is the Waggoner Ranch,” he tells me. “I tried college in Vernon for a little while, but it wasn’t for me. No way I could live in the city.” He means Vernon (population: 12,000).
Cowboys are a different breed. Cowboying isn’t a profession, it’s a life, but if the Waggoner Ranch is broken up into pieces, that life will exist no more. The cattle will be sold, along with the trucks that haul them, and the vast pastures will be chopped up, and who knows what will replace them. This will still be ranchland, for that’s all it’s fit to be, but not ranching on the grand scale that allows men to be cowboys. It’s a trade that suits only a select few for whom the life satisfies rather than restricts. They still talk here of Paul Whitley, an unmarried cowboy who in 1950 rode his horse to Cedar Top, the most remote camp on the ranch, and lived alone in a primitive cabin until his final illness, in 2002. These are the men who made the ranch work while the Waggoners were off in Fort Worth or New York or Europe.
Back in town, I am introduced to 79-year-old G. L. Proctor, the old cowboy who Weldon Hawley has modeled himself after. Since his retirement, in 1991, Proctor has lived in Vernon, raising a few cows and tending his yard. “I can’t sit down, never could,” he tells me. Proctor, whose daddy was a Waggoner cowboy too, went to work for the ranch in 1937, at age thirteen. In 1965 he replaced Tony Hazelwood as foreman. In his entire life, he never drew a paycheck from anyone but the Waggoners. He sits across the table from me in his starched jeans and freshly shined boots, ramrod straight, his hat resting in his lap, his gray hair slicked down.
“What does it take to be a good cowboy?” I ask.
“Be alert all the time and ready to go,” he says in a strong, sure voice. “A good cowboy does what the foreman tells him and waits for his paycheck and for the sun to go down.”
Now the sun is going down on the Waggoner Ranch, perhaps forever. I ask him what he thinks of the family feud that threatens to end the way of life that he knew. “It doesn’t seem real to even think about it,” he says. “The only thing I can figure, it was give to them. Didn’t any of them have to work or suffer to get it. That’s the only reason anyone would want to sell.”
