“You’re a good cattle rancher,” Joe said.
“I’m not so sure I want to invest in any more cattle. Right now I’m running a total of four thousand cows. That might be putting too much risk in one place.”
“You’ll think of something,” said Joe.
We pulled into Nenzel and I promised to call him within two days.
I climbed in my pickup and swallowed some cold coffee, hoping it would restore my senses. I had my arms wrapped around the old Arnold Ranch in a big bear hug and I couldn’t let go. But this overwhelming desire to own the ranch was totally illogical. It bucked the core principles that guided me in business. I knew that unprofitable, troubled ranches should be avoided like melting ice on a pond. My dad had ingrained that lesson in me before I even broke my first horse, and his dad had ingrained it in him.
Furthermore, it was a family mantra never to invest in unneeded property. I currently co-owned and managed two ranches: the Lazy B, a 198,000-acre chunk of high desert straddling southern Arizona and New Mexico, and the Rex Ranch, a 45,000-acre parcel of prairie nestled in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. My Cessna was getting worn out arcing between the Southwest and the Midwest. For certain, my life did not need this ranch. Plus, I only took calculated risks. Too many times I had seen cattle prices bounce like a rubber ball on asphalt, watched miserly rain clouds disperse drops that barely dented the sand, and felt the slap of governmental regulations that gummed up well-oiled ranching practices. Excessive risk is like a saddlebag stuffed with fool’s gold; it weighs the horse down and doesn’t pay off. So why gamble? Because I sensed that within the boundaries of the old Arnold Ranch lay something special. A journey? A destiny? A fate? My soul needed to know.
That night I made a series of phone calls. First, I gushed to my wife, Sue, who was back in Arizona. During my absences, she was my eyes and ears at Lazy B.
“I think that pen is already in your hand ready to sign an offer,” she said. “I’m already looking forward to seeing the place when the time is right.”
It was a green light, but I needed a different kind of green. I phoned each of my business partners. Beautiful, incredible, productive, I repeated over and over. My enthusiasm must have swayed them, because all five agreed to go deeper into debt. Forty-eight hours later, I made a conservative offer on the old Arnold Ranch. That beautiful, beat-up, bankrupt ranch. It was like rolling a little white marble counterclockwise in the groove of the spinning roulette wheel. I’m pretty certain my dad and granddad did flips in their graves that day and not from joy. The offer did not include the forty head of cattle running on the property, but it did include every machine and building, as well as the big house, home to the Pitkin family.
How was I going to staff the old Arnold Ranch? The question nudged me from a deep sleep one night. Less than a week had passed since Joe Nutter submitted my offer to the bank and already my mind was grappling with management issues. I would need to hire a foreman. I had a fabulous one on Lazy B and a cantankerous one on the Rex Ranch. Joe had spoken highly of John Pitkin. If he equaled his reputation, the job search might end before it began. Regardless, I owed this Pitkin fellow a visit since his future was in my hands and he was probably suffering a bit of anxiety wondering what was in store for him and his family. A call to the Pitkins would be the first order of business in the morning. I punched the pillow, rolled over, and tried to still my thoughts.
Two days later Debbie Pitkin and I sat on the south porch of the big house, glasses of ice tea sweating in our hands. She was telling me what grades her four kids were in when a screen door slammed at the back of the house.
“Here comes John,” said Debbie.
Heavy footsteps echoed inside and a tall man wearing cowboy boots walked through the doorway. “John Pitkin,” he said, extending a hand. He was a handsome man, dark haired, square jawed, with a smile that made him look about eighteen.
Debbie went to refill our glasses, leaving John and me to chat about seasonal rain levels and temperatures and how the hay was growing in the meadows. He asked what it was like in Arizona this time of year. I described the dry, hot climate and the scant grass that poked up through the desert pastures.
“Not sure I could handle days over a hundred,” he said. “Guess I’m acclimated to this country.”
“How long have you lived on the ranch?” I said.
“We moved here about six years ago. I was working for Don Raymond at the time, down near North Platte. Debbie and I both grew up in the Platte River Valley. Don owned a small feedlot and I started working for him when I was a teenager. Over time, I had a chance to wear all sorts of hats—mechanic, farmer, cowboy, vet, truck driver.”
“Which did you like best?”
“Oh, I always preferred working with the cattle and horses. That’s why I wanted to tag along when Raymond bought this ranch. He planned to run a thousand head on it, and I thought it would be a good way to learn more about ranching. First time I came up here, I fell in love with the place. Don has four daughters and I’m the closest thing he has to a son, so I didn’t have to twist his arm to let me join him. We had a couple of good years at the start, but then the drinking got the best of him. The last few years haven’t been too much fun. He sold several bunches of cattle at the bar when he was too drunk to make a good deal. I’ve spent more time keeping creditors at bay than I have ranching.” John and Debbie exchanged a commiserating look.
“I can teach you good ranching practices,” I said. John leaned forward like he was ready for class to begin right now. “I’ve always been a hands-on rancher and that’s what I intend to keep doing. I’m not coming in here as a mere investor. Though I do need someone to teach me in return.” John looked a bit surprised. “Having done most of my ranching in Arizona, I’m not expert on what grasses are native to this ranch or how to handle livestock during a blizzard. I spent only one winter on the Rex Ranch and it was mild.” John nodded in understanding.
We continued talking for well over an hour. John had an aura that commanded attention and openly shared his frustrations and accomplishments. It didn’t seem to bother him that I didn’t have a specific game plan for the ranch. As long as he could work the land and the livestock, he would be happy.
The ice tea had long disappeared when I decided it was time to take my leave. “It’s been a real treat to sit here and talk to both of you. I have a pretty strong feeling that my offer will be accepted and I’ll become the owner of this place. At least I hope so. I’d like you to stay on as foreman if you’re interested, John. We can work out the details, but I promise you two things. I won’t fall in the bottle and your family can continue living in this house.”
I could almost hear John and Debbie’s joint sigh of relief.
“That’s the best plan I’ve heard in some time,” said John, and we shook on a future together.
With the property in escrow and the Pitkin family in place, I faced the facts that now stood staring me down. Talk about a holy shit moment. I had persuaded the bank to lend me money to buy the ranch, which meant I had two monthly mortgages but only one ranch, the Rex Ranch, generating income; Lazy B belonged to my family and its profits were off-limits. I found myself waking up in the middle of the night lost in an arithmetic jungle, counting the number of calves I needed to sell in order to cover those mortgages. I felt uneasy about running cattle on a third ranch lest the market nosedive and no profits cross the finish line for anyone. Finally, weary from sleep deprivation, I shifted my anxious mind into creative mode and tried to think of a different way to generate income on the new ranch. That’s when the roulette wheel came to a stop and the little white marble dropped to its destiny.
2.
Opportunity Walks In
“If you move your cattle between pastures regularly—and that might be every two to three weeks or even two to three days depending on your system—you’ll be able to run more cattle because you have more grass. This is one of the tremendous advantages of timed grazing. And it works with animals of all kinds—goats, sheep, even horses.” I paused to gauge the reaction of the hundred people in front of me. Eyebrows scrunched. “I know it may sound strange to move your cattle so often,” I said, noticing a giant of a man slip into the back of the conference room. “But this grazing system works.”
The stranger started waving at me, then mouthing something like “I need to talk to you.” For a moment I lost my concentration. I pointed at him and nodded my head. Members of the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association turned in their seats to look at the distraction. Despite the cowboy hat, anyone could see that this fellow, dressed as he was in a Pendleton shirt and khakis, was no southwestern rancher. I took a sip of water and attempted to step back in stride with my keynote address.
After the questions and the blue-jeaned crowd thinned, I was left standing face to face with the stranger who had demanded my attention. He looked to be about six -foot four and at least ten years older than I, with a craggy face that bespoke years spent in sun, wind, and adventure.
“Alan Day, I’m Dayton Hyde,” he said. A slight western drawl draped across his words. “But my friends call me Hawk.”
So this was Dayton Hyde. He had a reputation within the ranching community as an enthusiastic not-quite-born-in-the-saddle cowboy, a fellow horse lover, an outdoorsman, a talented writer, and a dreamer.
“Pleased to meet you, Dayton. I’ve heard your name bantered around these parts.” Our hands met in a firm grip. “I appreciate you waiting. Looked like you had something on your mind.”
“Well, sir, I do. I’m mighty glad to catch up with you.” He leaned in closer and lowered his voice a notch. “There’s a real important issue that I want to discuss with you. Thought after all that talking up there you might need a drink. Can I buy you one?”
He clapped my shoulder like we had already agreed, but in such a friendly way and with such a big old grin that I could hardly say no.
We headed toward the hotel bar and took up residence at a quiet corner table. A waitress appeared to take our orders of scotch and water.
Dayton briefly filled me in on the ranch he owned in Oregon where his wife, Gerta, his son, and his pet wolf resided. Seriously, I said, a pet wolf? He laughed and explained that when things got a little prickly in the house his wolf never picked on him. He had spent the better part of the last fifteen years building a big dam on his ranch and creating what he claimed was the best trout stream in North America, but now he was spending more time on a new ranch in South Dakota, a hilly, five-thousand-acre slice of heaven. I was just going to tell him about the offer I had made a month ago on the Arnold Ranch when the waitress returned. Ice chinked against glass as she set drinks and napkins on the table.
Dayton shifted in his chair and extended a pair of long legs. Before I could utter a word, he said, “So, my friend, how familiar are you with the wild horse fiasco in this country?”
His question caught me off guard. As a rancher, horses had been part of my life forever but I had never taken much interest in government-owned wild horses. “I know there’s controversy,” I said, trying to recall what I had read recently. “I’m thinking it’s similar to the stir we had in Arizona over the wild burros. The Bureau of Land Management determined there were too many inhabiting the Grand Canyon and went and hauled them out on slings beneath helicopters.”
Dayton nodded. “Heard about that. Hope it didn’t frighten those poor devils to death.” A hint of a frown dipped his mouth.
“As I understand the wild horse situation,” I said, “everyone is pretty pissed off. The ranchers. The
BLM
. The wild horse lovers. But I admit to being a bit removed from the details.”
“You’re right, it extends further,” said Dayton. A little mountain peaked between his eyebrows. “Let me give you the down and dirty.”
Roughly forty thousand wild mustangs roamed and grazed federal lands, too many for the square miles assigned to them. To prevent entire herds from starving, the
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rounded up horses in a given area and moved them to holding facilities. Cowboys on horseback and in helicopters descended on unsuspecting mustangs. Sometimes the deafening choppers chased the horses for miles down canyons and over hills. Older horses might be injured while frantically trying to escape. Mothers became separated from babies, families torn apart. Once gathered in makeshift corrals, the horses were shipped to facilities around the country. The main sorting facility was located at Palomino Valley in Nevada.
Dayton’s cloud of disgust hovered over us. I didn’t like to hear stories about cruelty to horses, any horses, and I could feel the seeds of discomfort begin to sprout.
“Once captured,” he continued, “the mustangs get sorted. Adoptables, including colts and fillies, go one way; unadoptables, including most of the mothers, go another. Some get turned back on the range. As you can imagine, the adoptables are pretty as the pictures in a coffee-table book. Sleek, trim, shiny haired. I’ve seen palominos, red roans, black, brown, you name it. Gorgeous creatures. The most desired of all are the Pryors.”
I knew horse people who drooled over the mustangs gathered in the Pryor Mountains of Montana, animals descended directly from horses ridden by the Spanish conquistadors. They are some of the finest, strongest, most regal horses. Most often they are duns, lighter brown, with a stripe running down the back, a dorsal stripe on their shoulder, and distinctive leg stripes. If you get one, it’s kind of like finding a ’57 Thunderbird that’s never been driven.
“But not every wild horse is adoptable. There’s the crippled. The one-eyed. The thin. The shaggy. The old.” He ticked off each description on a finger. “Who wants those horses? Nobody. So the government’s stuck with them. And do they know what to do? Hell, no!” Dayton sliced his hand through the air. “Those horses are warehoused in holding pens where ‘long-term’ turns out to be forever. A lifelong horse prison.”
I knew the
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gathered horses, though I didn’t know the details of how, and even knew a couple of people who had adopted a wild mustang. But I had never wondered what happened to the extras. The unadoptables. The unloved.
“They’re bored, Alan. So bored they eat each other’s manes and tails. Yeah, that’s the same look I had. Didn’t believe it. So I took a little road trip down to the facility in Mule Shoe, Texas, and I’ll be damned, those animals—the revered icons of the West,” he added with a fist bang on the table, “were stuck in corrals. It’s one big bureaucratic mess where the solution doesn’t fit the problem. What’s more, it’s costing the government $2.65 per head per day to fund this stupidity. Hell, these beautiful animals aren’t meant to live in jail. They’re meant to run on the open prairie, run with the wind whipping through their manes.” His arms spread open like the wings of a large bird. “Sure, they need grass to live on, and grass might be scant, but you know what else they need?” He shifted his legs under his chair and leaned his elbows on the table. “Freedom. They need freedom.”
I felt like I was listening to a John Wayne soliloquy, perched on the edge of my seat, too engrossed to eat the popcorn the waitress had set in the middle of the table. I asked if they were abused, and he waffled. The horses weren’t starved. They had good flesh and nice coats, but they weren’t happy.
“Imagine a hundred professional athletes,” he said, “crowded into a building with no rooms big enough to exercise in. To add to their misery, you tell them they can never get out and run again, they are destined to live in this one cinder block building. No matter what you feed those athletes, they remain downtrodden, frustrated, angry people. Wild horses are born to run across miles of open land, just like athletes. That’s what they do. Over the prairie, across the hills, through canyons, they can track miles and miles each day. So even though they’re being fed and physically cared for, prohibiting them from doing what nature intended could be considered abuse.”
Wild horses couldn’t be slaughtered, that much I knew. Wild Horse Annie had seen to that. Velma B. Johnston made national news for almost two decades starting in the 1950s after driving behind a truck loaded with captured mustangs. She noticed blood dripping onto the highway. Careful not to be seen, she followed the truck to a rendering plant where she watched men unload the horses. A yearling fell and was trampled to death by the other frightened mustangs. The event incited her to launch a grassroots campaign to get Congress to pass legislation protecting the wild horses, which it finally did in the early seventies.
“So what do you propose to do?” I asked.
He swirled his glass as if watching words melt off the ice. In a somber tone he said, “It’s my goal to take these unwanted, unloved horses and put them on good range where they can roam again. Roam and be cared for. Not live in those goddamn foolish feedlots. And we can do it for less than half the cost the government now pays the feedlots.”
Interesting idea, but how did any of this pertain to me? Come on, wild horses? I was a cattle rancher. Yes, I loved my horses. Alongside the soil flowing in my blood was a river of love for my horses. They had been a part of my extended family as much as the cowboys who helped raise me and spent their lifetime on Lazy B. Chico, Little Joe, Saber, Aunt Jemima, Blackberry, Little Charlie Brown, and so many others. We had shared cowboying adventures of the unbelievable kind. But my connection to herds of wild horses? Nil.
“Here’s what I propose.” Dayton held his hands up as if framing the idea. “I want to establish a wild horse sanctuary. It’s never been done before but I’ve given it a lot of thought and I believe if it’s set up correctly, it could work. We need the government’s approval and support, of course. And we need land.”
At that moment the scotch, or maybe something on a grander scale, shifted my brain into a new gear. A panoramic vision of the lush prairie grass on the South Dakota ranch spread across my mind’s eye. I had been hoping to find a use for the land other than running cattle. Might it be suitable range for a herd of mustangs?
“How many unadoptables are we talking about in the holding pens?”
“Almost two thousand,” Dayton replied.
I just about had to scoop my jaw off the table. Trying to envision that many horses on the ranch was a ballbuster. I’d run more head of cattle than that before, but horses? I had no clue how much fifty horses ate, much less two thousand. Or what their grazing patterns would be. I wouldn’t bet my next drink on the number that could thrive on the South Dakota ranch. The thought of managing a ranch full of two-thousand-pound animals that have had minimal experience with humans, and that mostly negative, evoked more than a little trepidation. It was like going from being a pilot of a little Cessna to a pilot of a 747 jetliner without lessons.
Yet, if I took a deep breath and dove below the fear, something felt possible here. Perhaps the government’s coffers could support such a venture. Perhaps the land could too. Good luck had stuffed itself in my pocket long ago, and adventure had been my friend since I was old enough to scramble on the back of Chico and head out on the range, trying my five-year-old darnedest to keep up with the big cowboys. Usually I was contemplating adventures that involved animals I knew—ranch horses, cattle. But with this I could very well be stepping in over my Stetson.
Dayton continued. “The idea of a wild horse sanctuary has never occurred to the
BLM
, or if it has they haven’t gotten around to trying it. Most likely they need persuading that it’s a sensible, solid game plan to contract with and pay a private landowner to care for two thousand animals nobody wants.”
I had been working with the tightfisted
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all my professional life. They would need persuading all right, bales of it.
“The reason that I contacted you, Alan, is because you have an in with the
BLM
folks. All your ranching buddies tell me that the
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thinks you walk on water.”
I shook my head. “Not sure that I’d go that far. They don’t exactly send me birthday cards.”
“Okay, well, let’s just say you can hook and catch their attention and reel them in. They don’t know me from the next wrangler and would brush me off faster than a biting fly.”
Dayton was right on one thing. The
BLM
and I had a good rapport. When they needed rancher input on land and grazing issues, they often asked me to participate on boards and panels. They had designated me a steward of the land for my work in grass management on Lazy B. Most crusty cowboys considered the
BLM
their enemy. But that attitude only made their lives miserable. I chose not to walk down that road. Over time, I inadvertently became the point man for other ranchers. I would relay their issues to the
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, go to bat for those boys, and try to hollow out common ground that allowed bureaucrats to be bureaucrats and ranchers to be ranchers. We didn’t always agree, sometimes we were miles apart on our stances, but other times we could carve out a compromise acceptable to both sides. And if we didn’t agree, we’d keep talking.
I took a sip of scotch and tried to visualize the South Dakota ranch with horses on it. For a moment, I saw myself sitting on Aunt Jemima. We stood on the top of a hill, the prairie below sloping down toward the Little White River. Horses young and old, a spectrum of browns, blacks, and whites, grazed before us. Healthy, thick grass beckoned. Something inside of me was waking up, warming to the idea. A little voice said the mustangs would thrive on that windswept prairie.
But then another vision hightailed it in. The horses shivered in a blizzard. Could we shelter them from the killing wind? Would we have enough hay and could we get it to them, or would they have to slip across ice, paw through snow, and graze the dead grass? Would older horses survive winter’s grip? The ranch was tuned to caring for cattle during tough winters, but horses might tow a different set of challenges.