The Cowboys of Santa Cruz County

COWBOYS OF SANTA Cruz COUNTY Portraits in Time

Sometimes you hear them before you see them. On a working day - and all their days are work days the jangle of their spurs announces their arrival in the small restaurants and stores of Sonoita. Take a look, history is passing through. The cowboys of Santa Cruz County have come to town. Young, old; wearing hats, jeans, work shirts buttoned to the neck, they present the image of an American icon. They also present a hard-line portrait of the life they live in Arizona's smallest county. "It's not that glamorous," says Bob Hudson of the cow-boy life. He manages the Vaca Ranch down in the county's San Rafael Valley. And what does today's cowboy do?

"Working cows, shoeing horses, fixing fences," he counts off. "That's what this one does."

Kate Ladson has spent 30 years of her life living and working ranches in Arizona, including 17 on the big Vera Earl west of Sonoita.

"I love Santa Cruz County," she says. "I love the terrain here. I love the heritage. I love the stories." She has a few of her own to tell.

"I've broken all my ribs. I've broken vertebrae in my back. I've got steel in one leg," she says of the years she has spent on and off a horse.

Norman Hale recites a shorter list.

"Three years ago, I had to have a new hip put in. Kinda slowed me down."

Hale, whose ranch is 14 miles from the border with Mexico, has cowboyed most of his life in Santa Cruz County. He still rides on occasion.

"When you get up to 85, you're kinda dragging your feet," he admits. Tough always came with the job and

Signposts here may list the names of ranches rather than streets, but the isolation once offered by the great expanses of land no longer exists.

in the territory. For three centuries, since the days of the Spanish Empire, cattle have grazed in Santa Cruz County. The first 200 years proved a bit rough. Time and time again settlers would give up and move out in the face of relentless Apache raids.

The last decades of the 19th century saw an end to the hostilities, and a growing national population with a taste for beef and cattle byproducts. Add the arrival of the rail-roads for easy shipping, and ranching had good reason finally to lock onto the land.

And, what a land. The county hugs the Mexican border. Grassland rolls like a yellow sea toward oakand man-zanita-speckled hills, then wanders into the canyons and up the peaks of the Sonoita and Patagonia mountains. Homesteaders moved in for their piece of the American dream. Investors and absentee owners bought into the cattle business. Ranchers used not only their land but the empty surrounding land for their herds. And the cow-boys went to work.

“It’s bred in you,” says Clay Howell, whose family pioneered New Mexico then Arizona. His mother’s family homesteaded in the Chiricahuas. Howell has spent most of his life, minus the years he served with the U.S. Navy, on the ranches of Santa Cruz County. Now retired, he lives with his wife, Mary, in a home surrounded by the open land west of Sonoita.

“They were independent, hard-headed, self-sufficient,” says Mary of old-time cow-boys. “Proud,” she says. “Real proud.” “They haven’t changed,” states Clay. “The world around us has,” Mary adds. A cowboy’s lot has always been a dirty, backbreaking, “aint-no-retirement-package-at-the-end-of-this-trail, bub” kind of job. The romantic cowboy legend grew from the trail-riding heyday, 1865 to the 1880s.

In reality, those cowboys were eating dust 18 hours a day. The hours haven’t necessarily improved all that much. “We would average 14 hours a day, seven days a week,” cowboy Jim McManus recalls of his experience on one ranch in another county.

In his 20s, McManus started cowboying as a teenager and did a stint on the Vera Earl. Bruce Andre manages that ranch, and began his work as a cowboy in 1970.

“I thought a cowboy was just what I saw every Saturday morning when I put on my Roy Rogers hat and my Roy Rogers guns and watched Roy Rogers on TV,” Andre says. “Then I started to see it wasn’t quite Roy Rogers.” He has a big ranch to run. Don’t ask how big. Questions about the size of a ranch or a rancher’s herd raise eye-brows and hackles in cow country. Consider it the same as asking the amount of money one has in the bank.

Suffice it to say, the big ranches in Santa Cruz County stretch out on both sides of the highways and roads and head for the horizon. But don’t expect bunkhouses over-flowing with yee-hawing cowboys. Andre has a cattle business to deal with, 100 miles of fence to tend and one cowboy to help. Bob Hudson has the same amount of support on the big Vaca. And both of them face Mary Howell’s changing world.

“The reality is we’re struggling to hang on,” states Andre. “We’re beginning to lose ground here,” echoes cowboy Joe Quiroga over on the Diamond C. Born, bred and committed to the ranch life, he worries about the future. "None," is how he sees it. Bud Bercich joins him in pessimistic predictions. Bercich runs the ranch his grandparents homesteaded in 1885.

"You better click your cameras fast," he advises of the old cowboy and ranching life, "because it's all over." Signposts here may list the names of ranches rather than streets, but the isolation once offered by the great expanses of land no longer exists.

For one thing, the general public has its own claim to the land. The Coronado National Forest borders many of the local ranches. Anyone can hike that forest, camp under its trees, enjoy the great outdoors.

Hale's place may seem to be somewhere between Nowhere and I'm Lost, but on a holiday weekend, Katy, bar the gate. The forest up the road plays host to campers, RV enthusiasts, 4-wheelers and dune buggy lovers, all within shouting distance of the ranch.

The small ranchers of the county have long depended on and paid for grazing rights to the public land. Government agencies have their own opinions on how the land should be grazed, where, when and by how many head. Not only do the ranchers disagree with those decisions, they see their very survival threatened by them. Says Hale, "Small ranchers, such as we, are becoming extinct."

Environmentalists have joined the mix, concerned about the impact of cattle on public and private land and on wildlife. Hold it, say the cattle people, they have the same concern.

"To me, taking care of the land is my number one priority of life," states Quiroga. "We are the environmentalists out here."

A new kind of homesteading has brought further change to the use and the look of the land. Ranchettes dot the grasslands surrounding Sonoita. Subdividing has arrived.

'I'm still ranching and I don't want to quit.' “You can't blame them,” Scott Martin says of those who want a piece of the West. Martin ranches east of Sonoita. His sons Harley, 16, and Dustin, 11, give him a hand.

“I don't think we're going to go away that soon,” he says of the ranching life of Santa Cruz County.

Discussions about the balancing of recreational interests, environmental interests and new residents' interests with ranching interests go on around the kitchen tables of this county.

“I don't know,” says John Donaldson of the hope of any kind of compromise that would serve all parties. He began cowboying in 1946 and holds leases to the Empire, a ranch with land in both Santa Cruz and Pima counties. Once privately, then corporate-owned, the ranch and its future now belong to the Bureau of Land Management and the state of Arizona. The cattle belong to Donaldson.

“I'm still ranching and I don't want to quit. And I want to leave something to my son.” Other offspring of Santa Cruz cattle families have made the same choice.

Mary Hale, daughter of Norman and Ruth Hale, now runs the family ranch. And Clay Howell proudly reports he has one son and “two out of three grandsons” in the ranching life. They know the reality of the life and the payoffs.

“Outdoor life,” says Ruth Hale, raised on one ranch, married to another, “spaces and freedom.” Jim McManus has also made his decision.

He wants to make a living wage. “I'm at the point now where I'm going to have to work as a carpenter or a welder,” he says. He will stay available for day work on the ranches in Santa Cruz County. The work pays $50 for a dawn-to-dark shift.

Still, as he sits in Cafe Sonoita, his brown felt hat pulled low over a face that carries all the openness and promise of the Old West, McManus sees a cowboy's future. He's going to buy some land over in the San Rafael Valley. “This is the most beautiful country I can imagine living in,” he says.

The elder rancher, Donaldson, sits across the table from him, his hand cupping his chin. “It really is unique,” he agrees.

They talk of the land, the ranches and ranchers they know, and of the continuing impact of people and that thing called progress.

“That's just the way it goes,” says the young cowboy, as the cars and trucks roll by outside. Yup, that's just the way it goes. AH ADDITIONAL READING: Many of the images that appear here come from the 1996 book Cowboys of Santa Cruz County, by Dodie and Carter Allen. It may be purchased through Arizona Highways at its two retail stores or by calling (602) 712-2000 or toll-free (800) 543-5432.