They Sure Look Like American Cowboys

GERMANS ARE WINNING THE AMERICAN WEST

Sometimes, strange things involving time and place occur at Grapevine Canyon Ranch. People at the comfortable little guest ranch in the afternoon shadow of the jagged Dragoon Mountains occasionally have to remind themselves that they are near Tombstone in southeastern Arizona in the late 20th century. “Just the other day, I walked into the dining room, and I felt I was someplace else,” recalled Eve Searle, who owns the combination cattle and guest(LEFT) Wide-open range and dramatic vistas are special attractions for Germans and other Europeans at Grapevine Canyon Ranch in southern Arizona. (ABOVE) Photographs of the German Tombstone Vigilantes illustrate the ranch's guest book.

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Photographs

by Christine Keith

ranch with husband, Gerry. “I thought I was in Germany. I was the only one speaking English.”After a quick double take, the 20-year Arizona resident realized she was in the right place, and all those Germans sitting in her dining room were the incongruous ones. There they were, smelling and looking just like happy trail hands, but saying things like, “Ich möchte gern mehr Kartoffeln, bitte.” (“I would like more potatoes, please.”) Indeed it was difficult to tell by looking that these sunburned doctors, engineers, opera singers, and bus drivers were anything but fourth-generation Arizonans. They were dressed in the proper denim jeans, plaid shirts, boots, and cowboy hats.

Half of the hundreds of guests who come to Grapevine Canyon Ranch each year are

20 October 1994

From Europe, where riding horseback all day without stopping for a fence is just a dream. Grapevine guests can ramble the ranch's 10,000 acres plus an adjacent 64,000 acres of the Coronado National Forest. Adding to the Europeans' unaccustomed feeling of grand openness is the bonus that they are traipsing through country once occupied by the most tenacious Indians in American history: the Chiricahua Apaches.

For centuries this band of Apaches freely roamed the Chiricahua Mountains to the east and the Dragoon Mountains to the west, as well as the 40-mile-wide Sulphur Springs Valley in between. Whenever dangerger - in the form of other Indians or the U.S. Cavalry became too great, they would quickly cut through the Arizona oaks, manzanita, and mesquite trees in Grapevine Canyon and take refuge in the Dragoons and especially at Cochise Stronghold.

The Stronghold area was named for Cochise, the famous Chiricahua leader. Located high in the Dragoon Mountains, the Stronghold was a labyrinth of granite spires, narrow canyons, high cliffs, and hidden crevices perfect for hiding and setting ambushes. Once secured in the rocky hideout, Cochise and his band survived on the many springs in the area and the natural foods the mountains provided: piñon nuts, mesquite beans, acorns, juniper berries, and rabbits.

Cochise, who was never defeated in battle, is said to be buried at the Stronghold. Legend says that his braves rode their ponies back and forth over the grave to conceal it from white men who might want to steal his body. While the ploy ap-parently worked, ranch guests occasionally stumble upon other forms of physical ev-idence of the Apaches and even prehistoric Indians.

This is just the kind of serendipity that appeals to European guests, especially Germans, who have been avid readers of Western novels for a century and began forming cowboy and Indian clubs before World War II. Eve, who manages the dude ranch while Gerry tends the cattle, says that for every 10 German guests she may have three or four guests from all the other countries of Europe.

GERMANS ARE WINNING THE AMERICAN WEST

Most of the Germans learn about the ranch through slick picture books that are distributed to travel agents in their country. One of the most popular American West travel books is published by Marlboro Reisen (Philip Morris Germany), which is part of the Philip Morris Tobacco Co. Each year, the company not only distributes its Marlboro Country book, but also sends many German travel agents and journalists on free tours to inspect featured destinations. Germans, who love to travel and usually have six weeks of vacation annually, can thumb through the book, point to a page, and the travel agent does the rest. Grapevine is one of the Arizona ranches included in such books, explaining its high percentage of European guests.

Eve figures that at least 42 percent of the visitors at the ranch, which has been open to guests for only 10 years, are repeat customers.

Michael Haag, a nursing-home administraTor, and his buddy Manfred Meisberger, an auto-insurance agent, both from Namborn, Germany, have been to the United States five times, three times with the same tour group. The group had stayed at a dude ranch in Texas, where the two young men rode horses for the first time. They liked it and decided they wanted a whole week at a dude ranch

during their next trip to the States. The tour agent gave them a picture book, and they picked Grapevine Canyon Ranch because it fit their itinerary.

"This is so much better," Mike said. "The ranch in Texas was too big. Busloads of people would arrive at the same time. You would go into the dining room, and you wouldn't know anyone on your right or your left."

Grapevine never has more than 24 guests. All are housed in cabins and casitas sprinkled in secluded nooks in the 90-acre ranch compound. Meals are served family-style at five round tables in the ranch house dining room.

Guests not only meet each other, they become friends with the horses.

Michael, a big man who took riding lessons in Germany before arriving at Grapevine, was assigned a proportionately large horse named, what else, Peewee. Manny, a true greenhorn, was assigned the mild-mannered Goose.

During the morning saddle-up time, Claus Mayer from near Stuttgart left his spirited mount at the hitching rail to hug the big black head of Stormy, who rivals Goose for the title of most docile horse on the ranch.

"Stormy was my first teacher," Claus explained as he caressed the animal's shiny dark neck.

Claus and his wife, Gisela, have been to Grapevine three times. Gisela has ridden English-style for many years, but Stormy gave Claus his first horseback ride. Now husband and wife ride with the advanced group, which may stay out all day, alternating between rough terrain and distance riding.

The kind of riding you can do in the west is almost nonexistent in Europe, and all the German guests said that was their main reason for being at the ranch.

"In the morning here at Grapevine, I get up at six and listen to the birds around our cabin," Gisela said. (There are an estimated 65 species of birds in the canyon.) "Claus was up earlier to take pictures of the sunrise over the Chiricahuas. Then we have breakfast and ride. You can choose the kind of ride you want. You can even go to Fort Bowie or Chiricahua National Monument."

Fort Bowie, built in the 1860s to protect Apache Pass and the Butterfield Stage that traveled through the pass, was abandoned by the Army in 1894. Chiricahua National Monument is a little-known but spectacular canyon filled with tall, thin red-rock spires fashioned by the wind. Both sites are about an hour's drive away with a pickup and horse trailer.

Next trip, Gisela said, they may come during one of Grapevine's May or November cattle roundups. During those times, only seasoned riders are allowed to ride. They become true ranch hands, rounding up and counting cattle, branding, mending fences. Roundups are booked up more than a year in advance. Even the lean, suntanned Gerry agrees that their city slicker guests can become good roundup hands.

One of the regulars at roundup is Gisbert Rillox of Munich, who has been to the ranch at least a half dozen times. Bert likes to joke about his first trip when he couldn't speak English and no one else spoke German. On another trip, he was caught by a tree branch, knocked out of the saddle, and ended up in a Willcox hospital with several broken ribs.

As the guests began their day, Bert, Claus, Gisela, and Fritz Kolkmann, a professor of medicine from Stuttgart, rode off with a wrangler for an all-day trip to Cochise Stronghold.

Eve saddled her paint, Comanche, and rode out with the novices. Along the way,

GERMANS ARE WINNING THE AMERICAN WEST

Eve saddled her paint, Comanche, and rode out with the novices. Along the way, the slim woman with no-nonsense blond hair told the group that she and Gerry live in a house in nearby Noonan Canyon, named for an early rancher killed by Apaches. "When we ride home, we take the trail beside the mountain, past the place where Mike Noonan had his cabin," she said with a straight face. "The horses always shy there. Yesterday, right there on the trail, I saw a flower pot with a yellow flower planted in it. I thought I was seeing things, but Annie, one of our wranglers, said she saw it, too. Today, it was gone. Just disappeared."

Günther Lehmann, 71, didn't listen to Eve's ghost story as the horses crossed a sunny field of yellow and purple wildflowers. He was one of the few guests who spoke no English. Still, except for Gerry, the tall, stately man looked more like a cowboy than anyone else for 50 miles around. He should. The retired bus driver from Bremen has been visiting Arizona dude ranches for more than a decade. Günther took the half-day ride with the novices and spent the afternoon in the shade of an Arizona oak behind the ranch house. As he talked and smoked unfiltered cigarettes, he was suddenly transported back 50 years to the harbor in Bremen in northern Germany.

The war was ending, and he was a young German sailor on a ship returning from Norway. Americans were bombing the Bremen harbor, so he and the others were ordered off the ship and into bomb shelters on land. When they returned to the ship, it was destroyed, half under water, nose down. So they started marching out of the area. Günther soon discovered a further complication: German SS troops were moving toward them and behind the SS were Canadians. Figuring he would have better luck with the Allies than the SS, Günther sneaked past his countrymen during the night and surrendered to the Canadians. He was right. The Canadians sent him home a couple of days later. Eve also has memories of World War II.

One evening while sitting alone in the ranch house living room, she stared into the cold fireplace and was back in her native Czechoslovakia. She was a child during the war. Her family fled to Australia in 1946, just as the Iron Curtain was descending on Eastern Europe.

She remembers her ambivalent feelings about her first German guest. "Then I realized that they are just people," she said.M