My Favorite Outlaw

I did not know that such a cow range still existed in this year of 1927. From Austin, Texas, I rode a thousand miles through cow country to get to it. I might have ridden another thousand miles northwest without leaving it. But in all that 2,000-mile stretch, the Double Circle Ranch of Arizona stands in my memory as unique. Not another outfit produces modern cattle in such a hard-riding, freehanded, ropeswinging, old-time, open-range way. There are other ranches over the West as big: the Chiricahua Cattle Company, the Bar F Bar, the JUL, the Bar P Bar, the Cross S, but the Double Circle has fewer fences and more mavericks, longer trails, and wider works than any of them.

From Clifton, Arizona, on the San Francisco River to Double Circle headquarters on Eagle Creek is 54 miles, the road climbing and writhing over mountains and above giddy canyons. Now one can drive a car from Clifton clear to the ranch house - but no farther. The ranch has neither telephone nor radio. Headquarters are on the extreme eastern edge of the Circle range.

It was on the 4th of September, 1927, that, mounted on a horse named White Jess, I rode out of the Double Circle corrals, following the lead of A.T. Crocker and Asa Jones. Crocker is general manager of the Double Circle Cattle Company. Asa Jones is a Texas cowman. On this September day, Jones was going out to look at 500 cows the Circles had gathered into a small holding pasture and were offering for sale.

When we had trailed Indian file for about 20 miles, we came to Willow Creek trap, or holding pasture. Here "Heifer" Jones, as the Circle cowboys called him, got his first view of the heifers he had bought and of the cows he was to trade for on the morrow. At dusk we turned toward camp at Point of Pines six miles away.

The next morning at a parley with Crocker, Jones, and J.H. Willis, boss of the Double Circle, I learned their plans. The cow crowd had already been gathering cattle for six weeks, throwing cows and heifers into Willow Creek trap and steers into Point of Pines trap. The steers were contracted to California men.

After working five more days, Joe Filiman, foreman of the cow crowd, would trail the steer herd out for delivery on the Gila River.

He would have about 2,000 head and would need most of his men to drive them. The 1,000 heifers and 500 cows would follow a day or two behind Filiman. Willis would have charge of this herd, but an extra crew of men must be rustled to drive it.

Crocker would get the hands - Apache Indians and would return to us in time to help shape up the two herds. Jones had to return to Texas at once, but two weeks thence would meet us at the Gila River to receive his cattle. A second delivery of two more herds would be made in November.

My own plan was to ride Circle horses and eat Circle beef and live a free life, first on the range and then over the trail to the Gila.

The Double Circle Ranch is an old ranch, but the land is dated beyond any record of man now extant. Within its confines are the unexplored holes of a cliff dwellers' village. Anywhere on the range almost, a horseman may pick up a flint arrowhead or a tomahawk fashioned from malpais rock. From a hundred mounds one may dig ollas and other pots. Yesterday this was Geronimo's homestead, and the cow trails of today were the passes of his warriors.

Along about 1880, a squaw man named George Stevens started the Double Circle brand. The rock corrals he built for protection of his horses against his wife's kinsmen are still being used at Double Circle headquarters.

Some time later, Joe Hampson bought out Stevens and then started to expand. These were the genuinely wild days for Arizona ranches. Train robbers used to take out what horses they wanted from the Circle remuda. Gunmen loafed in camp all winter. At times half the cowboys in his outfit had no names. Finally Hampson sold to the Drumm Commission Company.

They owned one section of land on which the ranch house is situated and controlled about 600 sections carved out of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation.

Across the northern half of the range cuts Black River, walled in by mountains. Through the southern half cuts Cienega Canyon, likewise walled in by mountains. Eagle Creek makes the eastern boundary, and strung along it are some squatters.

Natanes Mountain, a plateau perhaps 50 miles long, rims the western curve. Willow Creek, Jimmie Lamb with its Dry Prong and Middle Prong and West Prong, Stone Canyon, Clover Creek, Squaw Creek, Saw Mill Creek, Bill Jacks' Springs, Point of Pines Springs, Prairie Lake, and other natural waterings so furnish the range that there is not a pump or a dirt tank on it.

There are mountains all around and mountain-size hills in the middle, but the dark sides of those malpais peaks in late summer and early fall are green and brown with long-stemmed, heavily seeded grama grass and wild rye and wild oats.

CATTLE DRIVE

Over the wide and varied Double Circle Range, cow work is carried on essentially as it was done before barbed wire. Every season these range hands, equipped with a rope and a little running iron, burn Circle's brand on the sides of 500 or 600 calves and mavericks. But even after such continuous and assiduous labor to get the cattle all branded, scores of mavericks are left....