Caudillo from Texas

In his 37th year in Paraguay's remote Chaco, Texas-born George Lohman was slowing up a bit. His doctors had warned him about his heart and blood pressure, and had told him to stop riding. Last week, 59-year-old Ranchero Lohman was bossing his 960,000-acre cattle empire, Red Wells, from a veranda rocker.

Neighbors, white and Indian, streamed up to the mud-floored ranch house to tell him their troubles, ask him for money and advice. An army major flew in to buy 350 steers for his garrison, and Lohman ordered a couple of Indians to ride north with them on the trail. A mud-spattered Gaucho galloped up with a report from a 100,000-acre pasture 35 miles away. The boss put down his gourd of mate, pulled out a notebook and wrote: "1,250 calves branded this week." That brought the year's total to more than 23,000.

Dream in the Swamp. With more land than any other man in Paraguay and with more cattle than he can count (about 80,000, he guesses), Georgie Lohman had made a Texas ranch boy's dream come true 5,000 miles from home. In 1912, when Fight Promoter Tex Rickard advertised that he needed cowhands for a Paraguayan ranching venture, young Lohman went south. Rickard soon quit but Lohman, with a $1,000 stake from Rickard, stayed. He bought 600 head of cattle and 50,000 acres, and started ranching at Red Wells, no miles west of Concepcion.

"There was nobody out here but me and the Indians," Lohman says. He rode hard and long, took personal charge of branding and altering calves, and every couple of years made the ten-day bullock-cart trip to Concepcion for supplies. He lived through the Chaco war (though the Bolivians bombed his ranch house) and Paraguay's innumerable revolutions.

More important, he won the trust and loyalty of some 350 Lengua Indians. He fed, clothed and protected them, in return got their cheap and sometimes skillful labor. With some 40 Paraguayan Gauchos Lohman and the Indians wrangled horses, fenced the Chaco's deadly brackish swamps, found sweet water for the cattle, and did their best to keep rustlers away. By last year, Lohman was selling 20,000 steers a year at $15 a head.

Jaguar in a Cage. Despite his cattle wealth, Lohman lives like a frontiersman. His ranch house is surrounded by a palm-log stockade, has no running water, no plumbing. Screening for the bedrooms is his one concession to comfort in the mosquito-infested Chaco.

Behind the ranch house compound, where a caged jaguar howls nightly, are stables and corrals. Close by is the dirty village where the Indian workers live.

Mrs. Lohman, a Paraguayan who used to cook at a Concepcion hotel, runs the Red Wells ranch house, has become adept at buckwheat cakes, fried chicken and hot biscuits. Of Lohman's nine children, only 3 1/2-year-old Juancito is still at Red Wells.

Early this year, Lohman considered selling out and going back to Texas. But nothing came of the idea. Last week, caudillo-like, he was holding court at Red Wells--now promising a young Indian more corn for his squaw, now buying 30 cattle from a small rancher so that the man could pay for his wedding. "I think my place is right here in the Chaco," he said. "That's where I belong."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.