Goode grew up on a ranch in Damon, where he now runs an artificial insemination business. He travels the country collecting DNA for a U.S. Department of Agriculture research project on mad cow disease.Back in the seventies, my dad learned to artificially inseminate cows by reading a book and using
The HISTORYIn 1876 salesman John W. Gates brought barbed wire to Texas when he wagered $1 million that he could build a fence that would capably contain cattle. Some incredulous gambler took the bet. Gates erected a fence in San Antonio’s Military Plaza and shocked a gathered crowd as a
The RationaleAsk a ranch hand how to tell if someone’s a good cowboy and he’ll say the proof is in his lassoing. The rope has always been “the long arm of the cowboy,” writes Midland native John R. Erickson in Catch Rope. Though roping began on the ranch as a
Garza was born and raised in Webb County. For the past fifteen years, he has been an inspector with the Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program, a mounted patrol started by the USDA in 1906.A tick rider patrols the border, the Rio Grande River, on horseback every day. Our job is
The RationaleWhy make a lasting impression on your cattle? To fend off cattle rustlers, whose pilfering of literal cash cows is hardly a defunct business (ranchers in the Southwest lost $6.2 million in livestock in 2005). “Think of branding as a license plate on your car, a means of identification,”
It’s the nation’s biggest spread within the confines of a single fence—more than eight hundred square miles extending across six counties. So it’s fitting that the family feud over its future is big too. And mythic.
Did Richard King cheat his partner's heirs out of a chunk of the King Ranch nearly 120 years ago? He may have—and if the Texas Supreme Court permits Chapman v. King Ranch, Inc., to go to trial, the past could come back to haunt the state's most storied spread.
Out of uniform, in his own words, Texas icon Nolan Ryan on baseball, ranching, values, and his love for his native state.
For the first time in its history, the world-famous King Ranch is being run by someone other than a descendant of its founder. Can the mythic institution survive a changing of the guard?
After thieves stole his daughter’s horse, deputy U.S. marshal Parnell McNamara didn’t make a federal case out of it. Instead, he rounded up a group of old-style lawmen and lit out after them.
Battles over the river’s precious waters are pulling in everyone from pecan growers in Central Texas to shrimpers in Matagorda Bay, not to mention thirsty cities like San Antonio and Corpus Christi. Who will be left high and dry?
THANKS TO PAUL BURKA AND photographer Andrew Yates for capturing the story of the Stoners [“Home on the Range,” by Paul Burka, October 1996] with compassion and respect. As a 57-year-old ranch wife trying to keep my ranch going with my son (the fifth generation farmer-rancher on our land)
The drought drives cattle ranchers online.
A final farewell to the Hill Country spread that for more than thirty years meant everything to me and my family.
Riding the rapids of Texas’ last major unpolluted river is dangerous enough. But trample the private property around it and you could really get hurt.
All across Texas, vandals are searching for ancient treasures by looting Indian campgrounds—including the one on my family’s ranch.
John L. Guldemann scorns claims that Longhorns damage the natural area.
Without these funky watering holes, where would we—much less our cattle and sheep—be today?
Tastes in livestock are as whimsical as tastes in fashion. This year petite is in.
The great Texas ranches and how they got that way.
“When the cowboys on the 06 ranch talked about losing a way of life, they often pointed to their neighbor, Clayton Williams, as an example of what they meant. He was a millionaire and an oilman, and he represented everything they hated.”
You may have played on one when you were a kid, but it’s no fun for cows.
These days it seems every five-acre ranchette flaunts a gate worthy of the XIT.
The stake is survival—for either the sheep and goat ranchers of West Texas or the smartest predator of all.
When this young man decided to go West, he made it as far as a dude ranch in Bandera.
Once you let a goat in your life, you can never get it out.
Living in the country is all you ever wanted—and probably more than you bargained for.
In today‘s tame, tame West, the cowboy seldom rides a horse and never carries a gun, but the cattle business is bigger than ever.
Old Glory is a long way from Madison Avenue, and Bigun Bradley probably knew it.
