Cowboy is a Verb: Notes from a Modern-day Rancher

Introduction

Cowboy Is a Verb is like the land itself, spreading out from Mount Wrightson on the west to the Mustangs and Whetstones on the east, Sonoita to Patagonia then south into Sonora, Mexico. If you don’t know where you are, it is hard to know who you are, to paraphrase Wendell Berry. From the big picture to the smallest details, these pages describe the geology, history, and interdependency of land, water, native and introduced plants. Animals, too, from coati mundi, white-tailed deer, bears, mountain lions to the piglike javelina that is really a relative of the dog, and even the exotic jaguar. Embedded in the land are the rancher, cowboy, and the local communities; people who live on the land next to Nature. The story is made up of many intertwining parts that work together with a natural synergy, growing and adapting to constant and accelerating change in the new millennium.

At first glance this book is a rancher’s autobiography, a collection of natural history essays, grass management, and southwestern history thrown in as required to tell the complex story of the modern-day lives of cowboys and ranchers. Even so there are also plenty of stories about quirky horses, cranky cow critters and bulls, cow dogs, and the people who use and care for them. The book begins when Diane and I started to put together the C6 Ranch in 1993 from a piece of magnificent land in the Canelo Hills near Sonoita and a neglected grazing allotment on the Coronado National Forest. Over the next two decades we grew, adding another ranch and took in our son Richard West as a partner. Ranching takes place within the context of local communities and neighbors. These are described with affection, humor, and some exasperation, especially when it came to dealing with the Coronado National Forest and the Endangered Species Act.

You will get to know some great people in this book, including T. N. Wegner, a professor of reproductive biology who specialized in keeping cows happy and in a family way. Dr. Jim Pickrell, a legendary veterinarian-jokester who never told the same joke twice and who would sit up all night to save a colicky horse. Rancher Tom Hunt who was my best cow consultant and a renowned water witch. Hardworking Manuel Murrietta, a cowboy and horseman who knew what the cow or horse was going to do before they did; a father/son partnership not unusual in this business but always heartwarming; Diane Collins who with her friends and neighbors built a Local History Matters Center at the Sonoita Fairgrounds and raised money for scholarships. This is not your typical ranch life memoir. Any time you find an ex-rodeo cowboy and rancher like me crawling around on the ground examining soils and grasses with university professors and Forest Service employees, you know you are in for some unexpected rides.

The battle over the endangered Gila topminnow in the Redrock Canyon watershed is a main event, and Cowboy Is a Verb is the story of how a group of ranchers and cowboys got together and formed the Canelo Hills Coalition to defend ourselves against lawsuit-happy activists and the Endangered Species Act administrators who sought to close down grazing. Instead of fighting in the court room, we worked with university range scientists, forest service conservationists, and several funding agencies to improve our ranches by increasing water and fencing, changing grazing patterns, and monitoring the health of the watershed. Using a common sense approach we convinced the Bureau of Reclamation not to build a useless dam across the canyon. After more than a decade, the watershed recovered and flourished and so did we. Other writers have noted that cowboys have lots of try. In the complex world of the twenty-first century we have to do more.

After decades of study with haystacks of data and the application of cowboy common sense, ranchers and most experts agree that grazing, properly managed, is not the enemy of wildlife and watersheds, and the real life example in Cowboy Is a Verb prove it. I also pose important questions facing the land conservation community today. Do we attempt to preserve all vanishing species everywhere they might be able to exist, or should we manage our watersheds for the overall ecological health?

Alamo Spring, Crittenden Pasture.

1

Alamo Spring

In 1990, after much searching, I found a long wedge of unspoiled rangeland located in the southern Arizona borderlands, thirty miles north of the Mexican border and fifty-five miles southeast of Tucson, Arizona. Sonoita, the closest town, lay three miles to the north. North to south, the property ran for three-quarters of a mile alongside a back country lane that meandered southward into the mile-high, oak-juniper woodland of the Canelo Hills. The west side bordered the Coronado National Forest and overlooked Alamo Canyon, a deep arroyo that sliced through the rhyolite and limestone hills.

Near the southwestern edge of the property, the canyon surged over a granite uplift and dropped ten feet into a pocket between a jumble of boulders. During the monsoon, the pocket was deep enough to swim. Even during dry season, it still contained enough water for wildlife. The first time Diane and I rode the canyon, a troop of coati mundi scampered up the yellow lichen-covered boulders, their long tails upright and curved at the tips. As they vanished into the oak brush one turned and stared at me with its quizzical black eyes, raccoon face, and long, upturned snout.

A few yards below the pocket, a smaller tributary joined the main canyon. Together, the two streams sustained a trickle of water between low banks of rocky soil and deer grass. Deer bones scattered in the brush marked the watering hole as an ambush site for mountain lions. Cottonwoods shaded the stream, giving the canyon its Spanish name, álamo. On that breezy morning, their shimmering leaves sounded like people whispering without words.

The most promising building site on the property nestled in a thicket of oaks and sloped gently in the direction of Mount Wrightson thirty miles to the west across the Sonoita Creek valley. To be sure that it was the right place, Diane and I camped out under the trees for a couple of days before we put our money down. At daybreak, a thin reef of clouds parted on a full moon that loomed over the massive peak just as the sun broke over the eastern horizon behind us. The dawn glow of Mount Wrightson clenched in a haphazard collage of cliffs and trees sealed the deal. Over that entire expanse, nothing man-made interrupted the natural contours. Living in Tucson’s clutter and crowds the year before had shrunk my outlook on life to that of a midge. Here on the high desert grasslands, life would not be so cramped and miserly.

Diane was not so certain. She loved her house in the suburbs, her close friends, the convenient shopping, and her work on the school board where Rich went to high school. But she also loved her horses. We had built up a band of fine broodmares and she managed their careers on the race tracks. An outgoing, energetic person, Diane charmed the best efforts out of the horse trainers and jockeys with her sunny disposition. And the ranch would be a better place to raise horses than in Tucson. When Rich graduated and loped off to college, we made the jump to Sonoita. Right away, Diane joined the Sonoita Cowbelles and also volunteered to help at the Elgin school. With her sparkling personality, she had a natural ability to produce some pleasantry and then light up the room with a sundial smile that made the remark mean a whole lot more than it would have otherwise.

Behind the house site one hundred feet south was a rounded knob, flat on top, perfectly situated for the horse barn with the breezeway facing east to the rising sun over the Mustang Mountains and west overlooking sunsets behind Mount Wrightson. Horses feel more secure when they are able to see long distances and the stunning panorama sure made it easy for me to ride out at dawn and eager to get home and watch the sunset from our back porch.

The back country lane ran due north and south, while Alamo Canyon veered northwest from the waterfall toward the main stem of Sonoita Creek. Between the canyon and the lane, the topography was level and had good soil structure for the rooting of oak and juniper, bear grass and cliff rose, as well as a cozy house site for our ranch headquarters. On the downside, a porous limestone formed the geological underpinning of the land that sequestered its water in deep, isolated pockets. We had few neighbors because domestic wells in the area were scarce and the Coronado National Forest surrounded us on two sides.

As a condition of my purchase, the seller had to drill a well that pumped at least ten gallons a minute. That task fell to Tom Hunt, a veteran cattleman who worked for the seller. Tom was into his sixties when I first met him, but he still stood tall and lanky with a straw hat shading lamb blue eyes and a face creased by a mischievous grin as if he had just heard a good joke and wanted to pass it on. He was also locally renowned as Santa Cruz County’s best water witch.

Tom was also part owner with the seller, an Austrian banker of some nobility who at the time lived in Europe, and both were keen to consummate our deal. Tom’s technique for dowsing a promising well site involved walking over the land with a bent coat hanger held waist high with the hook pointed straight out, level to the ground. The coat hanger (or Tom’s hands) allegedly had an affinity for deep water, in addition to a mind of its own. Where the hook jumped down from Tom’s gnarly fists, he tied a strip of white cloth to a nearby bush. After three weeks of triangulating back and forth to locate the strongest signals more precisely, our potential new property looked like a tattered quilt.

I’m drilling here, Tom finally decided. He took a two-by-four stake and hammered it in the ground with a sledge. We’ll hit water below 250 feet, and pump at least twenty gallons a minute, he stated confidently.

Let me try, I said, taking the coat hanger. I walked back and forth across the drill site with the wire in hand.

I don’t feel a damn thing, Tom, I said. This looks like a lot of hooey to me. Tom’s grin collapsed into a pained expression, like I had just insulted his best bull. It don’t work for a skeptic, he said crossly. You got to believe. A few days later, the driller hit a strong vein of water at two hundred and fifty-seven feet. When Bailey Foster, the local well man, installed the test pump, the well yielded a steady sixty-five gallons a minute. And this in an area where dry holes nine hundred feet deep were not uncommon, and five gallons a minute was considered a blessing. Tom’s water witching seemed more like a lucky draw to an inside four card straight. Even so, I’ve drilled several other wells since that first one and Tom Hunt witched them all just for insurance.

Bailey and Tom were two characters that I came to appreciate and rely on. The quick parts of their brains had to do with ranchcraft: the husbandry of livestock and the land and the finding and bringing forth of water. Their lives came at the expense of hands and elbows of hard work. Bailey’s dad worked for the Kern County Land Company’s renowned Little Boquillas Ranch on the San Pedro River. One of five children, Bailey and his siblings grew up like free range chickens as Dad was seldom home. As the one cowboy at the ranch’s Wolf Camp, he was responsible for all livestock and livestock waters on several thousand acres. Bailey remembered shinning up windmills to help his Dad a time long before he turned a teenager.

Tom was born in 1924 on the IV Bar family ranch near Douglas, Arizona. His pioneer lineage included sister Dorothy Hunt Finley, cowgirl, teacher, philanthropist, and purveyor of Coors cowboy beer. Tom cowboyed in his early years, then became ranch manager, and dabbled in the real estate business. In WWII, the army turned him into a diesel mechanic, a skill that served him well on the Rail X Ranch. His boss, Count Ferdinand von Galen, collected old army vehicles, mostly of American make. Tom rose early and supervised the ranch work in the morning. In the afternoons, he pored over United States Army service manuals and tinkered on the count’s toys in the Rail X’s well-equipped