cowboys

TOP HAND OF THE HASHKNIFE Ma ack Hughes was fidgety, as always. He twisted his bowed legs one way as

He slumped into his chair, then he rolled over on the opposite hip and straightened his bent body as much as he could.

"Sure a man wears out if he's used hard. A horse wears out, so I don't see why a man don't, too," Mack said.

He was speaking of his father, Pat Hughes, who Mack said died because, at 77, "He was just worn out."

Between Pat and Mack Hughes, you could just about write the history of northern Arizona cowboys and ranches, including the great Hashknife outfit, the biggest ranch in the state.

Hard work and a hard life hammered and tempered both father and son. It was all part of being rough string cowboys, the top hands who rode the rankest horses, roped and threw 1,200-pound wild cattle, and worked and slept outdoors in freezing winter storms and blistering summers.

They spent their entire lives working "for the other man," giving their unflinching loyalty to the foreman or the ranch owner in exchange for danger, hardship, and bacon and beans wages.

And neither Mack nor his father would have had it any other way.

Mack, in his 80s, is getting pretty worn out, too. The rough life he spent on the Winslow prairies and the timbered canyons along the Mogollon Rim and San Carlos Indian Reservation is telling on him, although you won't hear him complain except for a grimace now and then when an arthritic shoulder or hip bothers him.

But if he feels a little frazzled, he has plenty of reasons.

He broke the same leg twice at the age of 13 in two separate spills while trying to round up the family cow for milking; broke his neck in another horse wreck; lost parts of two fingers on his right hand when he got tangled in his lariat while roping a wild horse; caught a mule's hoof with his face, breaking his jaw and teeth; and, in other horse accidents, cracked his collar bone and smashed a knee.

But the worst hurt was the time on the San Carlos reservation. While Mack was checking the water level in a steel tank, his rickety wooden ladder broke, sending him crashing through the rungs and pulling loose and breaking all his ribs on one side as well as his breastbone.

Yet he's still working as a cowboy, managing a neighboring cattle ranch in the remote, rugged Eagle Creek area of eastern Arizona. Now, as I faced him across the living room of his home, Mack squirmed and jerked about, unable to sit still after a lifetime offeeding cookfires and doing camp chores.

He bounced to his feet and clumped out, his worn black cowboy boots rumpling the Navajo rugs on the floor. In minutes he was back, his 145-pound frame of rawhide muscle bent under the weight of firewood he cut and split himself.

Mack threw another log into the fireplace, nudged at the wood with a soot-stained poker that could double as a branding iron, and then sagged back into his chair.

"Mack's pretty tough, as you can see," said his wife, Stella. "Why, the way that man has had to work, hard work, all his life, you'd think he'd sit still for a while.

"But he's always been like that. Up before 4 A.M. and in the saddle, riding up that mountain across the road to Point of Pines. He'd be in the saddle all day, often till it was too dark to see, and he'd be on the range every day for weeks at a time," she said.

Mack was the boss of the Indian Department tribal herd of the San Carlos Apaches for 29 years. It was a job right out of Western history.

Every year Mack led two roundups: a fairly easy one in spring when newborn calves were branded on the 225,000-acre ranch; and the other in the fall when after weeks of hard riding in the rugged high country, they gathered up the adult cattle and trailed them for 80 miles to the corrals and railhead at Calva along U.S. Route 70.

It was an epic trail ride, five to seven days of dusty, sometimes hazardous work as Mack and his Indian cowboys moved a restless, bawling herd of thousands of cattle across wild, roadless terrain stretching from the high mountains to the desert.

You won't see its likes again. That was the last of the long cattle drives to take place in the West. (See Arizona Highways, April '95.) When Mack quit the job in 1974, the tribe never repeated the drive, preferring to truck the cattle over newly paved roads.

While not nearly as long as the early cattle drives like those of the 1870s and 1880s, the San Carlos drive had its share of dangers and hardships.

"There were bears and mountain lions to contend with," said Mack. "We lost a lot of cattle and horses, especially colts, to them. And when I first started managing the herd for the Apaches, there were still some wolves around."

But the biggest danger for man and horse was wild cattle, eightto 12-year-old mavericks that had never felt a rope or branding iron.

"They'd hide, just like wild animals," said Stella. "Once I was riding with Mack and he said, 'Shhh, look over there.' "I looked and there in the brush was this big maverick bull, stretched out with its head on the ground, looking at us. A regular cow would get up and try to run off when she saw riders. But not wild bulls. They stayed hid, and not even our cow dogs were able to smell them," she said.

Big mavericks were dangerous to horses and riders because they had no fear of humans and would charge at close quarters.

"We had lots of horses gored and disemboweled," said Stella. "Mack would doctor those he could, sew up their stomachs with a needle and thread.

Talking with Mack and Stella, I found, was an adventure.

Mack was quiet. He doesn't like to talk and will not talk unless he has something he wants to say. It is, he said, the way his father brought him up: A man kept his mouth shut and his thoughts to himself.

Stella, on the other hand, will talk your head off. Like a lot of long-married couples, they know each other's mind. Ask Mack a question, and Stella will give you the answer.

Sometimes they speak at the same time, each telling a different story that is equally interesting while I, trying to follow both conversations and still take notes, want desperately to yell, 'Whoa, just one person talk at a time!' Stella wrote Hashknife Cowboy, Mack's story of his early life around Winslow, by putting a tape recorder behind Mack's chair and asking him questions. The book (University of Arizona Press, 1984), with illustrations by Western artist Joe Beeler, is a classic and now in its fourth printing.

Mack started cowboying for the Hashknife, a million-acre ranch that stretched from Flagstaff to the New Mexico line and from the Mogollon Rim to the Navajo Indian Reservation, in 1922 when he was 12 years old.

He drew an adult's wages - $30 a month - and it went to support the large Hughes family of eight kids. There was never enough money, and all seven boys had to work as soon as they were able. Even Pat Hughes, restless and footloose, never made more than $65 a month although drawing top wages as a bronc peeler, or horse breaker.

Death and injury were always close companions.

In Stella's book, Mack tells how a boyhood friend was killed when his horse fell on him. Mack almost lost his life near West Sunset Pass when, chasing a wild horse at a full gallop, he suddenly came to a great crack in the ground. His horse made a gallant try at leaping the chasm, landing on the other side with its front legs on the level ground, but its hind quarters hanging in space. Mack was thrown over the horse's head to safety.

Mack said he tried to save the horse by pulling on the reins, but was unable to hold on as the animal slipped backward and fell to its death.

When Mack had the roping accident, part of one finger was completely severed, and hung by a shred of skin. A cattle dog rushed up and ate the severed finger, much to the amusement of its owner, one of Mack's cowboy friends.

Then, trying to use some moonshine whiskey on the injured hand as an antiseptic and in the stomach as a painkiller, the two cowboys drunkenly and slowly made their way to Winslow to see a doctor.

The doctor snipped off the finger hanging by the sliver of skin and put it on a tray. Immediately the doctor's cat, a castrated tomcat called Romeo, pounced on the finger and ate that part, too.

The doctor laughed and said, "Heck, Mack. You'd be surprised at how many different cuts of meat that old cat gets in a day."

Mack and Stella were married in 1938. She was 22 and he was 29. She came from a Southern California horse ranching family and met Mack when her father took her to Arizona on a horse-buying trip.

Stella and her father stayed in Babe Haught's house, which was next to the Zane Grey cabin northeast of Payson. The Haughts, a large and important family in pioneer Arizona, were related by marriage to the Hughes clan and friends introduced Stella to Mack.

By coincidence, Pat Hughes was the original owner of the homestead where Zane Grey built his cabin. In 1922 Grey, who wanted to live in Arizona while writing his Western novels, gave Mack's dad $1,000 for the spread.

Much to the dismay of Mack's mother, Oneta, the family pulled up stakes once more and moved to Winslow, where Pat had an offer of a job with the Hashknife outfit.

Both the Haught home and the Zane Grey cabin burned in the huge Dude forest fire that claimed six lives in 1990.

After leaving the Apaches' tribal herd in the mid-'70s, Mack and Stella used their meager savings to make a down payment on their home beside Eagle Creek, a community of eight households and 22 registered voters between the San Carlos reservation and the New Mexico state line. It's a beautiful place, but so isolated there are no telephones or electricity.

Mack continued working, getting cowboy jobs at nearby ranches. Stella said she haunted cattle auctions, buying orphan calves, bottle-feeding them until they could graze, and then selling them when grown.

"We didn't have enough to retire on. Mack had to keep on working, and with (ABOVE) In a current portrait, Mack and Stella Hughes are flanked by photographs of his father, Pat Hughes, taken by cowboy writer and photographer Dane Coolidge in the 1930s. On the floor sit two oil paintings of Mack by Tim Cox, and a pen and ink sketch of Pat Hughes and 12-year-old Mack by Joe Beeler. Stella holds a copy of her biography of Mack, Hashknife Cowboy.

the money I made writing and raising orphan calves, that's how we paid for this place," she said.

Mack and Stella's two children, a boy and girl, plus an Apache girl they raised, are all grown, married, and with children of their own.

Mack, however, hasn't much time to enjoy the grandkids. The next morning, after a breakfast of bacon, fried eggs, and sour-dough pancakes, he bid me good-bye and left to check on the cattle.

There's an Old West term for a man like Mack. He's called "a rimmer," a man who gets out on the range early, comes home late, and is a "pure-dee" cowboy.