The Last Run

It is a country as fresh and new as “when the Old Master made it,” a country in which a man may yet expect to meet any-thing. A gray-bearded prospector prowling through the country confided to me that the fabulous Lost Adams Diggings are in this same Warm Springs Canyon. The Gila country does not tell what lost fortunes and lost men it hides.

Over the wide and varied Double Circle range, where waterings are uncontrolled and where rock and timber provide refuge for wild cattle on every hand, cow work is carried on essentially as it was done before barbed wire. For a few days, the Circle out-fit, generally around 20 men, works in one part of the range, rounding up here today and there tomorrow, branding, holding cat-tle to be sold, catching strays. Then it moves to another part of the range, in the course of time making a circuit.

The cattle cannot, of course, be counted, and no man connected with the outfit could guess within a thousand of their cor-rect number. Some years the Company sells 7,000 or 8,000 cattle; other years the ex-port runs as low as 4,000; the average is between 5,000 and 6,000 head.

Here the procedure is to let bulls located on the range live there until they die. Some old cows are sold, but the vast majority of them die a natural death on their native soil.

Spring branding lasts until the September deliveries of cattle are made. Then comes fall branding. After fall branding the outfit breaks up for scattered work. Six of the men are paired off to ride all winter range branding. 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 . . . hundreds of mature steers hiding out in the brushy breaks. Old “Cienega Spot” who has been roped and necked and lost a half dozen times is still guarding his liberty.

If any man is under the delusion that high-bred Herefords cannot get just about as wild as old-time Texas longhorns, all he needs to do is follow Joe Filiman's crowd for a spell. He will see those cowboys run through malpais rocks down a mountainside with a 45-degree slope, roping cows on ground that horses raised farther east could not stand on. Then after roping a wild animal, instead of necking it to a lead ox, the Circle hands snub it up short to the saddle horn and lead it in. They also catch a good many wild cattle in cleverly devised trap-pens bait-ed with salt.

Mountain lions and wolves infest the country and no doubt help make the cattle wild. During the course of a year, they pull down thousands of dollars worth of stock on the Double Circle range alone. During winter months government trappers thin them out, and they are gradually being exterminated, but as yet they are far from becoming rare.

Above all else, the Double Circle men prefer saddle horses and pack mules to automobiles. They figure that automobile roads over the ranch would be uneconomic, and they do not want them anyway.

“As it is,” said Crocker and Willis, “we live next to our cattle, our grass, and our men. We had rather spend 10 hours in the saddle right in the midst of ranch business than three hours skimming over the country in a car and then seven hours squatted on our heels pretending to be busy. Trails are cheaper than roads, and horses are cheaper than automobiles. We have to spend our time anyhow. There never was a ranchman who wanted his country being run over and hunted over by the public. As long as we have no roads for the public to run over and enter through, we are free from that nuisance.” One aspect of the open range, however, the Circles would like to be rid of is the men outside the law. Most of the nesters along Eagle Creek, just outside the Circle range, have little bunches of cattle that graze on Forest Reserve lands to the east. Now here and there among these nesters are cattle rustlers. Their natural field of operations is the wide maverick-sprinkled Double Circle country.

Let one experience of Circle men with cattle rustlers suggest a hundred other experi-ences. One late after-noon, Crocker set out from the ranch for Point of Pines camp 25 miles away. Long before he had covered half the dis-tance, night came with a clear, full moon. In that clear-aired country you can on a bright moon-light night see mountains three miles away and cattle a half mile away.

About 10 miles from camp, Crocker was surprised at meeting a little bunch of cattle silently driven by two men. He thought he recognized the men. They certainly recognized him, for they gave the cattle a scare in one di-rection and “left for Cheyenne” in another.

Crocker had no gun. He rode on. When he got to camp, he found in bed the two men he had employed to stay there and brand Circle mavericks. The next morning he saw two very stiff and sweat-caked horses not a hundred yards away from the sad-dles. He said nothing, but he spent the day trailing two horses from where he had seen them the night before.

Then he learned that only two weeks pre-vious the maverickers had sold 20 yearlings worth $40 to an Eagle Creek nester for $10 a head. The nester had scattered them through his little herd. The evidence was somewhat circumstantial, and the courts did nothing. The courts generally do nothing for big outfits in a country where the electorate is made up of squatters and mining laborers.

No impeachment of the Double Circle cow-boys is implied. Generally they are as loyal and hardy a bunch as jingle spurs anywhere. Among them are eager lads just learning.

Among them also are veteran riders who for half a century have known little else than the life of womanless camps. Bowlegged, stove-up inside and out, these shaggy horseback travelers of trails plowed under have flavor about them that no time-clock puncher ever attains.

George Stacy, one of the old bachelors, rides fence rather than the range. I doubt if he ever breaks a trot. He has more experi-ence with being knocked down and having his horse knocked down by lightning than any other man I ever knew.

Old Man Moore has never married, and he is 65 if a day old. He lives alone out in the Horse Camp. He has the softest voice and the kindliest smile that I have met in many a day. When I saw him his pipe had been cold for nearly a week, and how a can of tobacco cheered him!

Dick Miller is not so old, but he has seen life. He was born in Texas and has chased cows all over the country from the Guada-lupes on the Texas-New Mexico line to the Grand Canyon. In 1919 he was offered $60,000 cash for his cattle and horses. In the windup, he had two saddle horses left and cheerfully took back his old job of riding the Circle range at $50 a month and found.

The "buttons" - the young cowboys draw $45 a month. Joe Filiman, foreman and a better all-around cowman and cowboy never straddled a horse gets $100. He is married, and one evening I was surprised to see his wife in camp. She had not seen him for many weeks and had ridden 30 miles with her brother, who was coming after some stray cattle, to pay him a visit.

Apart from the cow crowd, one of the men who give the Double Circle Ranch its character is John Slator, packer and salter. He knows not only the 25 or 30 salt licks on the Circle range but most of the licks in Arizona for a hundred miles around. He learned to pack burros while he was a prospector in Colorado. After nearly freezing in the Klondike, he came back to the burros. He traps every winter with a pack burro for company. The Circle boys call him "Honest John." He is past 60, has never been married, and would not feel at home in any habitation more complicated than a cabin or a canvas tent. He is one of the most intelligent and best-mannered men I have ever known.

Bill Jackson, remudero, has been wrangling Circle horses for nearly 30 years. They say that he is the best wrangler in Arizona. Rolled around his neck is a great black handkerchief a style no longer in vogue - for Bill clings to the old ways. He has saved his money so that he can end his years in peace. (Some years that he spent in Texas a generation ago were not so peaceful, I understand.) By daybreak every morning Jackson's remuda is inside the rope corral. Then Joe Filiman and his brother, who is straw boss under him, enter with their ropes. The other men stand at the line with bridles in hand yelling out the names of whatever horses they want.

Each cowboy has a string of six horses, which he rides for a month or so. Then the whole outfit goes to the Horse Camp, takes shoes off the horses that have been ridden, turns them loose, catches out of the other main remuda another string of six horses to the man, shoes them, and leaves again for range or trail work.

All of the men look forward to those three days at the Horse Camp. It's the nearest approach to Sunday that they get.

On the date set, Joe Filiman pulled out from Point of Pines camp with his 2,000 steers. The evening before, eight Apache Indian cowboys and an extra cook with burros and grub-laden kiaks (pack boxes made of rawhide on wooden frames) had showed up for duty. Including Willis and myself there were four white hands. We rounded up our herd of 1,500 cows and heifers in Willow Creek pasture, cut them, and got to Point of Pines trap with them just about sundown, a clean herd ready to travel on the morrow.

We were already wet from a shower. It was Cloudy in the west and looking like rain With the damned old slickers in the wagon again.

And we did our best to beat a driving rain that was headed for the cook's pots. We did not beat it far, but water and brimstone from heaven could not stay the appetites of a gang of men who were cold and wet and had not eaten since daylight. As we were sloshing about with our horses in the darkness after supper, I heard a lad cheerfully singing an old cattle-driving song.

Oh, the cowboy's life is a dreary old life All in the rain and the snow. When wintertime comes, he begins to think Where the summer wages go.