Home on Range in the Lonesome Cowboy State

NEVADA PALACE RANCH, Wyo. —  Perspiration poured from the young cowboy as he kept the 450- to 500-pound yearling heifers separated in the long chute leading to the squeeze where the animals were being spayed.

He wore a black, dirt-splattered hat, chaps, spurs. His face was burnt bright red from the scorching sun. His lips and teeth were smeared with chewing tobacco.

“It’s spring. Time of no sleep,” Ken Trigg, 21, muttered. “We’re underpaid, overworked. Haven’t been to town in two months. I can’t wait to get to Casper to chase the girls. . . .”

He allowed as how a person has to have one heck of a sense of humor to be a cowboy, quickly adding: “I wouldn’t trade this life for any other on a bet.”

All of Wyoming is range land. From Cheyenne to Cody. From Sundance to Rock Springs.

“Best grassland on God’s green earth,” the cowboys say.

Cattle, Sheep Country

Wyoming is cattle, 1.5 million head. Wyoming is sheep, more than a million of the wooly critters. About 460,000 people. Only Alaska has a smaller population.

Ed Herschler, Democratic governor the last 10 years, is a rancher. Half the governors in the state’s history have been cowboys.

Wyoming is the cowboy state. Its license plate for more than 50 years has been a cowboy on a bucking horse. It’s a state where everyone wears boots. Where beef and lamb are the main dishes. Where people turn up their noses at the mention of chicken and fish. No poultry farms here.

Nevada Palace is one of seven ranches spilling over 200,000 acres owned and operated by Webb Stoddard, 74, and his three sons, Bob, 42, Paul, 38 and J. R., 34. They run 5,000 head of cattle, 600 sheep.

Like ranchers throughout the nation, the Stoddards are having a tough time making ends meet because of agricultural economics. Beef consumption has declined 25% in the last decade and Wyoming land prices have plummeted.

Two months ago, Stoddard lost a finger when a horse threw him into a barbed wire fence. “Man takes his life in his own hands out here,” the rancher laughed.

Stoddard was standing by the squeeze, which held a heifer that was being spayed by “Doc” Rich Johnson, 41. When Stoddard released the squeeze, the heifer did not budge. “Get ‘em, Rooster,” Stoddard shouted to his Australian cattle dog. The dog darted over and nipped the yearling on a leg. The spayed cow bolted from the squeeze.

Rooster ran around the squeeze and guided the heifer toward the animals huddled in the corral. The dog ran on three legs. One leg was crippled from a steer falling on it.

“People don’t know what a rough life ranching is. They think it’s all peaches and cream and glamour. They think all ranchers are wealthy. I can assure you that isn’t true. We’re barely surviving in today’s tight economic crunch,” Stoddard said. “It’s up before dawn and working into the late hours of the night. Skimping here and there to keep this outfit going.”

It’s springtime in the Rockies.

Wyoming is alive with newborn lambs and calves. As far as you can see from one end of the state to the other, from the endless grasslands to the high mountain pastures, there are bands of ewes with lambs, herds of cows with calves. The creeks are bubbling over with runoff from melting snow. Wild flowers are everywhere. The music in the air is a delightful dissonance of baa’s and moo’s.

Wyoming is America’s lonesome state. Mile after mile of open spaces. Highways and byways with hardly a car. Ranches 30, 40 and 50 miles from the nearest town, and the nearest towns aren’t much--a handful of people, a few stores, a couple of bars.

Towns like Bill, Buffalo, Chugwater and Horse Creek, Jay Em, Kaycee and Lightning Flat, Lost Cabin, Medicine Bow, Moose, Pitchfork, Spotted Horse and Ten Sleep.

Lost Springs claims to be the smallest incorporated town in the nation--pop. 5. Incorporated in 1911, it has never gone out of business, even though at one time it was down to three residents.

Leda Price, 38, is mayor, paid $3 a year, and is up for election every four years. She has been mayor 10 years. The three members of the town council--Postmaster Clara Stringham, 58; her husband, Bob, 61, a cowboy, and the mayor’s mother, Edith Droster, 70, receive $10 a month for attending the monthly council meetings in the Town Hall. The mayor’s husband, Vincent Price, 61, is town clerk, a job that doesn’t pay anything.

Postmaster Stringham is also the town mechanic and runs the Lost Springs General Store that boasts a billboard with a big sign that proclaims: “Just Because Everything Is Different Doesn’t Mean Anything Has Changed.”

Seven Vacuum Cleaners

The store is stocked with a few shelves of groceries, fan belts and other auto parts, over-the-counter medicine, a refrigerator full of soft drinks, and seven vacuum cleaners on the floor near the front door. “A couple of years ago I bought eight vacuum cleaners. I thought some of the ranchers around here might need one,” explained Clara. Three months ago she sold her first vacuum cleaner.

Cowboy ballads are about all you hear on Wyoming radio stations--songs like “City Girl and Country Boy,” “I’m a Lonesome Cowboy,” “I Don’t Need a Four Leaf Clover” and “Black Days and Blue Nights.”

Last summer Bob Cardwell and his wife wrote the Carbon County School District in Rawlins from their ranch in the Shirley Mountains requesting that the board consider establishing a school for their daughter, Brenda.

“They live in an extremely isolated area reached by a rutted, rough road 60 miles from the nearest school,” explained Robert Randall, superintendent of the school district, “on a ranch completely cut off from the outside world each winter. No way could that child get out to go to school, so we brought the school to the child.”

Since last September Cardwell Elementary School has been a one-student, one-teacher school in Wyoming’s outback. It’s the smallest school in Wyoming, maybe in America.

The Cardwells provided the school district with a three-bedroom home for the teacher, Anita Kaessenger, 23, on her first assignment since graduating from the University of Wyoming.

One of her bedrooms has been converted into the schoolhouse with a desk for the teacher, a desk for Brenda, and a chalkboard. Brenda is 6 years old and a first grader.

Buck Holmes’ 8,000-acre registered purebred bull ranch is on Little Bear Creek down the road from the town of Chugwater. Holmes, 44, a rugged 6-foot, 200-pound cowboy, lost a leg when his horse threw him against a gatepost. He was 17.

“It kept me out of Vietnam. Maybe if I’d been in Vietnam I’d have had my head blown off,” mused Holmes over a bull steak dinner with his daughters, Britt, 5, Heather, 10, and his wife, Eva Jeanne, who teaches a business course at “L Triple C”--that’s what everybody calls Laramie County Community College.

Three Holmes families operate Holmes Herefords: Keith Holmes, 75, his son, Buck, and son-in-law Dick Drake, 48. They run 200 head of highly sought after breeder bulls.

“We’re going to make it,” Buck said. “We’ve been very conservative. We didn’t go heavily into debt like so many others. We’ve always put a pencil to everything we needed. If we couldn’t afford it, we didn’t get it. Our newest tractor is a ’72 model. Cost us $7,500. A new one costs $50,000 today.”

Hasn’t ‘Gone Broke Yet’

Buck has a degree in animal science from the University of Wyoming. “I always knew I was going to come back to the ranch after school. I haven’t gone broke yet. It would blow my ego if we went broke,” he said. Many ranches have gone under in recent months in Wyoming.

“It’s a good life. Sure we miss out on some things being so far out in the country,” he continued. “You know the price ranchers get for their beef is half what it was six years ago. Yet the price of steak in the store is still just as high as ever. Explain that.”

His wife said they cannot imagine living anywhere else. “It is so peaceful and quiet out here. The fresh air. The deer and the antelope. So good for the girls to grow up in the country.”

On her third birthday, each girl was given a female calf. Those calves and their progeny will pay Britt and Heather’s way through college.

Heather already has sold two bulls, one for $1,200, another for $1,000, and calves at $300 each--all offsprings of the calf she got when she was 3.

Ranchers from as far away as Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado and Utah come to the Holmes’ Ranch each summer for the family’s bull auction. They come to buy bulls that will upgrade their herds. The Holmes women spend two weeks preparing food for a lunch for those attending the auction, dinner for those who buy the bulls.

Ranch Women’s Tasks

Ranch women are kept busy as homemakers, getting the children ready for school and often transporting them several miles over four-wheel-drive roads every morning and night, to and from a school bus. They cook for cowboys during calving and branding time, vaccinate animals, care for newborn, young and sick livestock, and join their husbands on horseback on long cattle drives.

More than 1,000 Wyoming women are Cowbelles, members of a national organization of 11,000 ranch women in 38 states who promote beef consumption, publish cookbooks with favorite beef recipes, and lobby for legislation benefiting ranchers on both state and national levels.

The American National Cowbelles, headquartered in Denver, sponsor a National Beef Cookoff each year, publishing the award-winning recipes in a popular cookbook. President-elect of the national organization is Betty Bergner, 66, owner-operator with her husband of the 35,000-acre Cross H Ranch in Buffalo, Wyo.

Novels about the Old West relate countless stories about wars between sheepmen and cattlemen, especially in Wyoming during the late 1800s. There are many recorded instances of animosity and bloodshed between the two groups.

On Green River in 1880, masked cowboys tied up sheep herders and clubbed to death 8,000 sheep. Cattlemen at the time mapped out a 55-mile long, 28-mile-wide stretch, a million acres of public land, and ordered sheepmen to stay out.

Today the majority of Wyoming ranchers runs both sheep and cattle. John Etchepare, 46, his brother Paul Jr., 39, and their father, Paul, 74, run 5,000 cattle and 25,000 sheep on 200,000 acres of land north of Cheyenne.

Numerous Battles

“In the old days it was cattlemen against cattlemen, sheepmen against sheepmen and cattlemen fighting sheepmen, all scrambling for range land. It just happened the sheepmen versus cowboys got played up more than the others,” John Etchepare, riding in one of his ranch’s lambulances , said.

The lambulance is a specially rigged pickup truck used to retrieve newborn lambs and the mothers from the range. Etchepare drove his lambulance back and forth throughout the day, carrying newborns and mothers from a herd of 1,400 pregnant ewes to a sheep shed at a nearby sheep camp. Lambs and mothers are closely watched in the sheds for several days before being returned to the range.

“We Wyoming ranchers do so much better utilizing our forage with a diversified operation--sheep and cattle,” explained Etchepare. “One market may be up. The other may be down. In today’s market we’re losing our shirts with cattle, making a little money with sheep from which we get two crops, wool and meat.”

Etchepare’s grandfather, a Basque, came from France in the late 1800s as a sheepherder. He was paid in sheep instead of money. When his numbers of sheep were big enough he started an outfit of his own. Land was free. First come, first served.

Costly Blizzard

Grayce Miller’s 25,000-acre ranch is headquartered at Crazy Woman Creek. “Incidentally, it was not named after me although many swear it was,” laughed the 65-year-old rancher. In the worst blizzard to hit the state in years, during April, 1984, Miller lost 2,500 ewes and lambs, animals that froze to death or were smothered by snow. More than 250,000 sheep were lost in that blizzard in Wyoming. She also lost 300 head of cattle in the storm.

Her father, also a Basque, came from the Pyrenees when in 1890 he was 17. When he first came to America, he, too, took sheep instead of money when he worked as a sheepherder. At the time of his death, he owned the 100,000-acre Esponda Ranch.

“My father always told me to run horses for pleasure, cattle for prestige and sheep to pay the bills. I go right along with that theory,” Miller said.

Jim Magana, 42, runs 8,000 sheep on the Paddy McCamm Ranch out of Rock Springs. He has a law degree from Stanford but gave up law to run sheep with his father. He is president of the 1,000-member Wyoming Woolgrowers. He just returned from a trip to the Middle East to sell Wyoming sheep to several Arab nations.

In the eastern part of the state coyotes have been devastating sheep herds in recent years. Ed Bonner, 58, owner of a ranch at Redbird, reported that 2,000 of his 8,000 sheep were killed by coyotes two years ago. He has reduced his herd to 2,500 to maintain better control.

Problem of Predators

“Predators are forcing many sheepmen to shut down or reduce their numbers,” said John Etchepare, former president of the Woolgrowers and an officer in the 2,000-member, 113-year-old Wyoming Stock Growers Assn. “You can’t make money on sheep unless you have at least an 80 to 85% lamb crop. Some ranches are losing as much as half their sheep to coyotes.”

He criticizes governmental environmental regulations against the use of a poison known as 1080, which kills coyotes.

“Yet,” he said, “we have stiff competition from foreign imports, from countries where control products such as the 1080 poison banned in the United States are permitted.”

Robert W. (Bob) Budd, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers, said the poor market for beef, the high cost of interest rates, and the predator problem with sheep all combined to make ranching today in Wyoming as critical as it was during the Great Depression.

“There are 5,000 ranches in the state for sale. Every ranch in the state,” he said. “That’s a reality. I’m not kidding. They can’t afford to stay in it. But nobody’s buying. They would be in the same fix.”

When will it turn around?

“When people start eating beef like they used to instead of eating all that fish, chicken and tofu they’re eating now. They talk about beef being heavy in fats and calories . . . my great grandmother lived on a Wyoming ranch, ate beef three times a day and lived to be 104.”

At the Nevada Palace Ranch, Bob Stoddard’s daughter Stacy, 19, is marrying cowboy Clay Jenne, 23, on Saturday. “I’m glad that Stacy wants to stay here. It’s a better way of life. Those two young people are going to start out with 600 to 700 cows and calves on a ranch that’s been in my family four generations,” said Stoddard.

“We’ve got to keep these long-time family operations going. If we don’t the big corporations will take over all the family outfits, phase out the Wyoming way of life and Wyoming will never be the same again.”