Cow Boys and Arizona

Our perception of the era of cowboys is that it lasted for a long, long time.  Well, it did last longer than the Pony Express ( http://thetravelerstwo.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-pony-express-and-split-rock-wyoming.html ), but not much longer.  In reality the aftermath of America's Civil War is what created the big cattle drives and therefore the cowboy persona.

Northern Arizona's cowboys got started a bit earlier in ranching than in the lower part of Arizona, and it differed from Texas ranching in so much as individual Texas ranchers owned thousands upon thousands of acres, and other state's land belonged to the Federal government who would only lease grazing rights.  (How'd they do that?  That's like kings in Europe and emperors in Asia, and that's un-American!)

Pappo (Momma's daddy) was a rancher and farmer in west Texas.  His brother owned land right next to him.  His son, Pappo's nephew, ran that operation.  One summer when we were visiting our grandparents, Twin invited us kids to come over and help (watch) brand some of the cattle.  Woohoo!!  Would we ever!  and we flew out the door into the bed of his pickup truck.  This had to be around 1962.  Twin was always on the cutting edge of technology, and he had converted his truck to run on propane because the price of gasoline was so insanely high (almost forty cents a gallon!!)  At least that's what he told us.  I think it was because he could unscrew the lid of the propane tank he had mounted in the bed of the truck behind the cab, and he could hold a can of beer in the propane for about five seconds and, ta-ta!, have a frosty cold beer anywhere, any time!

But back to branding the cattle...  We sat on the propane tank while Twin bounced and bumped over the fields.  His cowhands were already hard at work.  But where were the horses?  Where were the lassos and the branding irons heating in campfires?  None of that for the Twin!  The branding iron was heating over a propane burner.  (That was a way to prevent range fires.)  He had the cattle in a corral and would move the cows into a chute.  The gate at the end of the chute allowed the cow to stick its head out and a lever that, when pulled, squeezed the chute in to hold the cow still.  While one cowboy was branding it's hip another was spraying a medicine in and around its eyes to prevent pink eye.  Then the cow was vaccinated for hoof and mouth disease and released.  Well, it wasn't as thrilling as we had imagined, but I did manage to completely trash the new white sandals Momma had just bought me the day before.

So it was around 1865-1870 that the big cattle drives began.  By the 1880's cattle was being transported by rail, and so there were only small cattle drives from ranches out in the counties over to the rail lines.  The cattle was then loaded up and taken to centrally located towns like Abilene, Kansas for processing or live transport back east.

Another difference between Texas ranching and Arizona ranching is that Arizona really and truly is the desert southwest.  In 1885 a major drought struck Arizona.  Between that and the overgrazing of the desert scrub, when the rains came what topsoil had been there was washed away.  The drought ended in the 1890's, and the cattle industry made a painstakingly slow comeback.

The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 ended free-range grazing.  The good news here is that fencing was required.  That meant that the ranchers would have to control where the cattle hung out if they wanted to be granted those precious grazing rights.  The Act required ranchers to dig wells, build dams, and control natural watering areas by spreading cattle out to prevent over grazing around watering holes.

Grazing fees are based on AUM (another piece of governmental alphabetization: "Animal Unit Month") which is the amount of forage it takes to feed one cow or cow/calf pair for one month.  By Congressional formula, the fee cannot fall below $1.35 per AUM and cannot increase more than 25% over the previous year's level.

The bonus to the government and the general public is that the ranchers are paying attention to what's going on over millions of acres of remote land.  They report range fires, poaching of wildlife, and vandalism of ancient historic sites and rare plant life.

Have you ever wondered why the price of beef and other livestock keeps going up?  Try this list of old and new troubles:

Drought
Predators
Government regulations (barbed wire ain't cheap when you have thousands of acres to fence, and finding water and drilling absolutely isn't cheap!)
Capricious markets
Environmentalists
Real Estate developers (lobbying for government land to go to them instead of ranchers)
and us homeowners taking that government land, too.

And so the cattle industry in Arizona seems to have had about a 100 year run.  Starting in the 1970's, ranching has been on a steady decline.  In 1996, due to a lack of forage on the grazing land, one Arizona rancher had to sell his cattle, taking a $100,000 loss.  However, the rancher continues to pump water on the land that he had rights to so that the wildlife can be sustained.  (Thank you, Mr. Rancher!!)