Don't Fence Us In

By Hugh Sidey

There's a predator stalking the plains

Who removes any reasonable doubt

That the government is bound and determined

To drive every cattleman out.

-- Baxter Black, cowboy poet

Western ranchers came streaming into Washington last week, string ties hoisted, hats as wide as the plains, boots gleaming. But they were jumpy and angry. And in the shadowy halls of the Capitol and the Interior and Agriculture Departments, they listened and argued about Bill Clinton's proposal to raise prices on government land and resources.

Wright Dickinson, 32, fourth-generation cattleman, lean as a post, had one troubled eye on the weather reports of storms tumbling over his family's land along the Green River in Wyoming and Colorado, the other on news accounts of plans to raise the $1.86 grazing fee (a cow and her calf for a month) to $3 or maybe $5 or even $10. Away from the floodlit Capitol dome, he said quietly, "We are standing on the edge of an abyss. It's scary. Unless we can find some basis for a rational discussion, we could lose it all." He held out hope that Clinton could adopt a discount rate for the smaller ranchers.

Sheep rancher Nick Theos, all of his 72 years in the rugged rangeland of Colorado and Utah written on his face, was not as restrained. "If that fee goes up to $2 or $3 we are broke, out of business," he said with the sweep of a giant, scarred hand. By the weekend, Theos was back out in his sheep camps and Dickinson was in a wind chill near zero with his two sisters, brother and parents, all getting ready for the new calves that will begin arriving in a couple of weeks. "That's one of the problems," he said. "We've got to be here, and our future is being debated there."

Behind the statistics and new policies so shrewdly written up in the great, gray Washington buildings are people and families and the small cultures of communities that have gone on for four or five generations. It is particularly poignant with the family ranchers, not the King Ranch of almost 1 million oil- rich Texas acres or the Mormon church's Deseret Ranch in Florida, which runs 34,000 head of cattle. The big combines will survive. But the little guys are in jeopardy, a thin denim line of about 250,000 from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, leasing in varying amounts about 280 million acres of mountain and high desert range from the U.S. government.

Like the family farms before them, and small towns and their merchants, this group is caught in political and economic and social upheaval and threatened with extinction. "They are under siege," claims Kathleen Jo Ryan, photographer and producer of the book Ranching Traditions, a spectacular look at the haunting beauty and challenges of range life. "They are an endangered species," she says. These ranchers, she insists, not only supply a vital link of the food chain but also carry with them the cowboy heritage that is so much a part of American history. They are the fragile fabric of Western society that occupies the vast spaces and holds them together. "Reluctant heroes," Ryan calls them, a breed that stayed and endured rather than running off to the promises of suburbia.

For Ryan and others, the ultimate danger is that the consequences of a major wave of small-rancher bankruptcies would be more corporate ranches, water rights taken over by thirsty cities, choice areas broken up for more resorts and 20-acre ranchettes.

The government is not the only adversary. Ranchers may be second only to politicians as the most questioned and criticized group in the U.S. today. Environmentalists and animal-rights advocates charge ranchers with overgrazing land, wasting water, destroying wildlife and, of late, plugging up American arteries with too much red meat. And as most people know, there is a fierce attack even on the cowboy legend, suggesting they were not always the taciturn heroes portrayed by Hollywood but were on occasion grasping predators and gunmen.

The ranchers brought some of the problems on themselves. They did overgraze and abuse the land, and still do in some instances. And they often sulked in their lonely splendor when new ideas about grazing were offered. But that appears to be changing. The young ranchers are deeply involved in range science, which is only about 30 years old. "Rangelands today are improving," insists Frederick Obermiller, range economist at Oregon State University. "It is not right to single out ranchers as villains."

Wayne Burkhardt, professor of range management at the University of Nevada, Reno, speaks out against those who so casually condemn cattle as unnatural intruders into the Western environment, a favorite chant of extremists like Jeremy Rifkin, author of the cow-bashing book Beyond Beef. Declares Burkhardt: "Man didn't invent grazing. It is the base of the world's food chain. We need to keep improving our management. But to do away with the last natural biological process in food production, where excessive fossil and chemical energy and water input is not required, is ridiculous."

"Urban America is now so far from its old rural roots it does not understand what we do and why," says Ben Love, who raises cattle on 43,000 acres up against Big Bend National Park in Texas. "The old abuses are being corrected because we know more and we have to," he says. The sheer dimensions of ranching may produce wonder and doubt. Space the size of Love's calls up delusions of wealth and grandeur. It may take 25 or even 50 acres to support one cow in the arid regions. Love lives 40 miles from the nearest town, 70 miles from a doctor, 225 miles from a shopping center. His three daughters were educated in their early years in his house because no school was close enough. It is so easy in today's urban crowding to covet the rancher's space without thinking of the hardship that it takes to live on it.

There are corporate ranches of great wealth, and those of the dilettantes like broadcasting mogul Ted Turner, where profit is not crucial. Most of the family ranches, however, are close-run affairs, with slender profit eked out in good years, debt the usual condition. "Come on out and see poverty," says the irrepressible sheepman Theos. Young Dickinson explains that while his family has use of half a million acres, there are seven to nine other families that also use that land. A rule of the cattle thumb is that you need 500 head to make a minimal living ranching. The Dickinson family is below that level for each member.

Richard Hamilton of Fort Bridger, Wyoming, studied to be an English teacher, but ranching ran too strong in his blood. He is the fourth generation of a family that did some business with Jim Bridger, perhaps the most famous of the old mountain men who really opened up the West.

After college Hamilton began the tedious task of assembling patches of land. For his 550 cows, he has a few acres of his own. He leases more from the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. He has leases on private land and is partners with other ranches and buys the use of more from old railroad grants.

His domain is a checkerboard that runs 50 miles up into the Unita Mountains. Why does he do it? "When you produce something good, when you come through hardship, it makes you proud."

It is a curious part of this story that when we were a young nation and the distances were so daunting, there was a bond between city and range, East and West. But now as we press in on each other, doubt and separateness grow. Linda Davis went to Ethel Walker School in Connecticut and then on to Cornell University, the school of her father Albert Mitchell, a prominent New Mexico rancher. She went back home, married Leslie Davis, Philadelphian, Dartmouth '41, who had joined his uncle Ed Springer on the family ranch in the Cimarron River Valley.

They were part of a seamless America in 1953 when they moved into the old adobe ranch home they still occupy. But when Les went to Dartmouth for his 50th reunion and pondered the question in the class survey on whether he would attend Dartmouth again, he answered, "Probably not." His world had changed. His six children were mostly educated in New Mexico, in animal sciences, land management, marketing and law.

Not long ago, Linda Davis, winner last year of the industry's Golden Spur Award for ranching excellence, climbed off her horse in the midst of her valley of breathless beauty. She pointed with pride to the traces of the Santa Fe Trail that cut through her land. She stooped to examine the grama grass and then cast a glance at the distant horizon. "It gets harder," she said about running the Davis ranch. "The children make far less here than others with similar education. My main concern is keeping the family together." And that just may be the heart of the new struggle on the Western range.

There are those who firmly believe that this is only one more storm that the tough ranchers will survive. Not the least of these is Baxter Black.

Some say they're endangered species

Destined to fade into footnotes

like ropes that never got throwed.

To that I reply, "Bull Feces!"

They're just hard to see from the road.