In the year 1938, Roy Adams, Herb Cunningham and Wirt Bowman were partners with Viv Brown in the ABC Cattle Co. of Nogales. Viv Brown was my pappy. I was 8 years old, and the ABCs offered me a wage to cowboy for them. One day after school, as an advance against my pay, Viv took me to Bracker’s department store in Nogales and outfitted me with a hat, boots, canvas trousers and a work shirt. That spring, my duty would be to help the ABCs drive steers from the railroad pens in Nogales, Sonora, to the Baca Float Ranch on the Arizona side of the border. 

The next Saturday, my granny, Maude Sorrells, and I returned to our home on the Tucson Road from a double-feature movie in Nogales and found my horse, Pancho, had been returned to his pasture. I’d left him in the remuda of Cabezon Woodell’s cowboys in the Sierra de San Juan of Mexico when my pappy brought me home from there to put me back in school. 

Pancho had grown into much of a horse. My mom told me that Uncle Buster Sorrells had met the remuda in Nogales, Sonora, and hauled him with a supply of hay and grain back...