A Cowhands Song Transcript
- ♪ Riding down the canyon ♪
♪ To watch the sun go down ♪
♪ A picture that no artist e'er could paint ♪
♪ Cactus plants are blooming ♪
♪ Sage brush everywhere ♪
♪ Granite spires standing all around ♪
♪ I'll tell you folks it's heaven ♪
♪ To be riding down the trail ♪
♪ To watch the desert sun go down ♪
- [Narrator] Back in the frontier days, hundreds of thousands of cattle grazed the Western ranges. Once the West was settled, each year on the open range brought more fences and fewer cattle, but one thing hasn't changed. There's a range war on these lands. It's a 20th century range war, where the weapons are words, not guns. And the battle is being fought in court rooms and conference rooms all over the country, rather than on the range itself.
- Contrary to a lot of this talk they put up now, these ranchers didn't try to destroy this range that is their livelihood. They tried to protect it.
- The fact is that our ranges, publicly owned ranges today, are not in good condition.
- The public lands can be compared to a pie that can only be cut up into so many pieces.
- If, in fact, we're the ones picked to be reduced by... Our livestock numbers on the range to be reduced by 50 or 60%, we wouldn't be here next year.
- It's a cow country, and it's hay and grain. And there isn't really much here except cows. An awful lot of cattle running around out in this valley. Good cows, good crossbred cows, raise lots of calves. It's a pretty damn nice place.
- [Male Voice] You know, some of the trails we drive cattle on now are the same one the 49ers use when they come through. After that, the big cow outfits, they used this country like it was their own. Then little homesteads cropped up all over, but the homesteaders couldn't make a living here. The dry years was too dry, and wet years, there just wasn't enough of 'em. Now most of this country is owned by Uncle Sam. Half of California and 87% of Nevada is owned by the federal government.
- [Narrator] There was a time when anyone tough enough to claim a piece of the public lands could use them. In those days, most of this country's beef was raised in the West, but since the 1930s, when the Federal Bureau of Land Management took over these lands, the number of cattle on the range has been steadily reduced. Until today, little of the beef Americans eat comes from the public lands. Even so, the cattle that run the range still provide the economic base for the small towns in the desert West.
- [Male Voice] For a hundred years, nobody except ranchers and miners used this land. Ranchers still use it. It's been that way for generations. They winter their cattle on their home ranches, and in the summer, they turn 'em out on the range and pay the government for the feed. Myself, I think it's perfect. The cattle do real good. They come off the range fat. Now, it's all changing. You hear a lot of people say they don't even want the cattle out there. Everybody wants a piece of the land, and it's all kinds of people.
- [Narrator] The West has been known for its range wars. This latest chapter began when a group of environmentalists, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, brought the Bureau of Land Management to court. The court found that the Bureau was mismanaging livestock grazing. It ordered the Bureau to study the way grazing affected the public lands and to make changes for their improvement. Joanna Wald, Natural Resources Defense Council.
- Vast areas of the public lands are in fair, poor, or bad condition. Almost one half of them are in unacceptable erosion condition, and we are losing millions of tons of valuable topsoil every year. Habitat for all forms of wildlife is deteriorating on the public lands. Our ranges are not in good condition because of improper management of livestock grazing, and changes have got to be made in order to improve their current conditions.
- [Narrator] Since this controversy began, there has been little agreement about the effect of livestock on the range. Jean Schadler, rancher.
- Nobody to my satisfaction has proven that the Western livestock industry from the first of the century on, has actually done that much damage. I think, probably, the need to mitigate the effects of the stress of urban living has done as much to to put pressure on the Western open spaces as anything. People want to get away from the city, and the West is the last place in this country where you can do that in any meaningful way.
- [Narrator] Today, the question of the effect of grazing on the land is overshadowed by other demands. In the old days, range wars were fought between cattlemen and sheepmen, or stockmen and homesteaders. But now the range is the scene of a controversy among a variety of interests who want to use the land. Lee Delaney, Bureau of Land Management.
- The BLM, of course, is the agency mandated with the responsibility to divide up the pie, so to speak, and to do this, not only do we have to apply our own professional expertise, but we have to go outside the Bureau and listen to the public.
- [Narrator] The range is in demand by many conflicting interests. Besides cattlemen, there are hunters, hikers, dirt bikers, oil companies, mining operations, and military installations.
- If we reduce the number of cattle on the range, you won't have cattle trampling stream banks, so the camper has a nice place to camp. You won't have cattle scattering arrowheads, so the cultural values are protected. The first easiest solution to the problem is to take the ranchers' use of the public land, which is grass grazed by livestock, and eliminate that. Then, let's see how much good that does for the range. If that doesn't do any good, then maybe we'll go on and see what we can do. Well, in the meantime, you've put a number of people out of business, disrupted their lifestyle, probably affected the economy of their communities, and you can't just start those things up again if you discover that maybe livestock were, in fact, beneficial. It's not a crisis; it's not something that... That you can rush out and solve or make a decision to resolve that kind of anxiety. But you live with a constant underlying anxiety about how reasonable is this decision when we may not even be here? The biggest problem with ranches that are based on public land use is that the children are deciding not to stay in the ranching business. The economic return is not very great, and when you never know, from one year to the next, whether the federal land management agency is going to put you out of business, when you're at the point of choosing your career, most of them are choosing to do something more stable, more secure.
- [Male Voice] Family Ranch is run by one family. Not that they don't have other hired help, but the son or the daughter, maybe they'll build a house and stay right there and keep working. And then when the old folks pass on, why, they just stay right there until their family's grown, and then it's handed right back... Stays right in the family.
- [Suzanne] My dad's real busy, so I go wrangle the milk cows for him so I can milk. My dad, he's a real good milker because he's been milking a long time, and he can go real fast when he milks.
- Hey, Suzanne. Suzanne, is your pony up?
- Yeah.
- Tomorrow, if you feel like it, would you go down to see if you can find Jessie and her two calves and bring her up?
- [Suzanne] But how will I know which one?
- Which one? The one that looks like that short-horned bull? --
- No, the one that looks like her.
- [Male Voice] If you ever see a cow man on television It's a damn poor image. He wheels up to a gambling casino in a Cadillac and gets out wearing a hundred dollar hat, and a goddamn silver buckle you could hide behind. You don't see any of those old horse backers out there going from daylight to dark. You don't see the things that the rancher has to worry about. Well, the government owns the land, and the bank owns the machinery, and you just borrow money and go from year to year. There's no way you'd get by without a loan from the bank. You put up everything that you're going to make, so that you can borrow money to operate that year.
- We pile everything here before we can it. Everything that grows, we try to can. Yes, we do. And we can, oh, string beans, and we freeze the peas. We buy very little, flour and coffee and... And we have our own meat or eggs and our pigs, and we make butter. Our store bill, that's one of the smallest items we have.
- [Jean] These are little towns. They're counties which are strapped for money now. And no matter how hard they try to diversify, the fact is livestock production is the base of the economy here. But without the agricultural base, all of these little towns are gone.
- [Narrator] Because such a huge portion of the West is federally owned, many ranchers find themselves dependent upon the public range lands for summer pasture. What ranchers have are islands of private land surrounded by miles and miles of government land. The private lands are small, not large enough to do two things at once. They cannot graze cattle for the summer and, at the same time, grow hay for winter feed. By turning the cattle out on the public lands, ranchers free up the private lands for growing hay. The range is desert. It won't support crops, but its grasses can feed cattle. So every spring, cattle are driven from the ranches, some 20 to 60 miles, and scattered out on the range for summer grazing. Ranchers pay the government for the six months or so the cattle spend on the range.
- [Male Voice] Well, along about April, they start moving their cattle out here. They go to the desert and mountains or wherever their range is, and you're through feeding them when get 'em out there. So it's a joyous time of the year. Lots of these ranchers have to come right through the main street of town. And sometimes there'll be a cow that gets scared and break back, and she'll run into a... Probably run into a store, doors open, or into a garage or up the street. They'll run up the sidewalk or anywhere. Cow gets scared, she's just liable to go any place. You have lots of mad ladies when you go through town, especially if the cows get in their yard and in their gardens and flowers. You have to be pretty careful where you step because it's pretty slick for a while.
- [Male Voice] Once the cattle hit the range, they run loose all summer. You check up on them brand 'em in mid summer, maybe move them around some. In summer, a ranch turns his horse out to pasture and goes to fighting the machinery. He's got to get his hay crop in so he'll be ready for winter. One thing that's hurting the ranch today is the price of machinery. It used to be, you could buy a ranch for $30,000. Now, you can't buy a tractor for that. It used to be ranchers would get together and work together. Well, there'd always be three or four ranchers work together And anymore, where there used to be two or three outfits in the field with horses and men, now you see one by himself, with that piece of equipment doing the same job.
- You know, that's the best part about haying is cleaning this bailer. I know I don't have to use it for another year. All I want to do now is get this cleaned out and get my saddle horse and go to Nevada.
- [Male Voice] In the fall, you roll up your bed and grab you an extra pair of overalls and just throw it all in the truck. Move out, go to Nevada, and start gathering your cattle. Then you bring your cattle home off the range for the winter. Summer range is a key to this whole business. I've seen it all go to hell. Fences go up. I like something to be like it used to be. Open and free. A cow camp isn't where cows go to camp. It's where buckaroos go to camp. Now the cow camp that we stay in is Alkali Cow Camp at Badger Mountain, and it's 60 miles straight east of here. Dirt road all the way.
- He thinks Bruce...
♪ When it's roundup time in Texas ♪
♪ And the bloom is on the sage ♪
♪ Then I long to be in Texas ♪
♪ Back riding on the range ♪
♪ Just the smell of bacon frying ♪
♪ Hear it sizzling in the pan ♪
♪ Hear the breakfast horn in the early morn ♪
♪ Drinking coffee from a can ♪
♪ Just a-riding, rockin' ropin' ♪
♪ Poundin' leather all day long ♪
- [Male Voice] Take a gallon pot and a pound of coffee. Just dump it in, let it boil. Then you pour little water over the top and it settles your grounds, and then you've got your buckaroo coffee. Good. Terrible good.
- [Male Voice] No, I don't think it's fun; it's just a job. It's a job I like. You get to visit with your friends. You haven't seen them all summer. You know, you work in the Valley, and you're putting up hay and all that. And it's the only chance you have of visitin' with your friends, is when you come to camp.
- Go on, get over there! Ha, get out of here, shoo!
- [Male Voice] This is a big land; it takes about 10 days to ride it. All these cows are brought out here and turned out in bunches and scattered. So when you gather 'em up, you've got to ride all of the country in order to pick up all the cattle. It takes 25 riders, you know, to cover this country, but you've got to scatter so far. Oh, we're going to head out over here at the east, and we'll circle around, and we'll end up back over here at the Blowout. Shipping crew ships the cows, and the circle boys ride and gather 'em. We get a lot of confusion out here. You can't say "circle boys;" it's boys and girls anymore. Now they just call 'em circle people. It's a good job, buckarooing, hunting cows. Cows are just like people; some like bunches, and some likes to be off to their self. So you just keep riding 'til you find 'em. If you can't outsmart a cow, well, you best not buckaroo. When we finally get the cattle gathered and back to camp, each brand is separated out and loaded onto trucks. And then that goes to its home ranch. Used to be, we always drove the cattle home, but problem with driving cows home is you have so many little calves that they get tired and they lay down in the brush, and then you ride by 'em. And so you've lost a calf. So they figured they'd pay to truck 'em in rather than drive them.
- [Male Voice] In this country. there's two seasons: summer and winter. And either one can happen at any time. So this time of year, you're glad when you got your cattle in the valley and your hay's put up. Only one thing to worry about, and that's getting through the winter.
- [Jean] This is not only a harsh country. This is a hard country. When December comes, January comes, even sometimes March comes, snow is on the land, or the ice is upon the land. And we can expect here temperatures all the way to 40 below zero. You hear the ice cracking on the window panes. Perhaps you're snowed in; you can't get out. It is a very harsh country indeed. Very hard for the men, very hard for the livestock.
- [Male Voice] Well, in the winter time, you fight bad weather. The summertime, broken down machinery. And you fight the bank and the government year round. Then in the spring, you always got a bunch of heifers you've got to calve out, which is tough.
- That's what we do is calve. We forget to sleep then. We have our heifers... Calve the heifers out here. And if we really think something's going to have a calf, we'll check them again every two hours, and it pays. That's the worst time of the year, is calving heifers. I don't like that. When you go out and see a cow trying to calve and she can't, well, you know that you're out there to save that calf and save that cow. Oh, you're always afraid to hurt the calf, and sometimes you do. Every rancher's a vet to a certain extent. Tryin' to call a vet from Alturas, which is 35 or 40 miles from here, is prohibitive because he'd cost you more than the calf.
- Stretch the calf gently.
- Yes, they're comin'! Oh, easy now, okay. Now, just go take the calf and go right on out if you can.
- Come on you guys.
- Just take hold and pull to you. Real hard to you, Linda.
- [Older Female Voice] That's when ranchers is happy. When you think something's completely backwards and upside down, and then have one of them come, oh boy, you just smile all over, I'll tell ya.
- Ok try, god damn it, calf, try. You little poop.
- [Male Voice] In the morning, you get up. It's cold and it's nasty, and you feed your cows. So maybe you go down for awhile, and you always drop in at Charlie's saddle shop. There's always some friends in there. You always got a cup of coffee and shoot the breeze awhile.
- [Amused Male Voice] Eatin' a damn donut soaked in whiskey.
- God, that was good. It was supposed to be coffee royal. This time, Fergie diluted all the coffee I was drinking.
- I'd like to see the outfit stay together. I don't know whether... We may run into some problems with BLM.
- [Male Voice] Well, if the BLM puts that proposal through, the little man's going to be out. The little man can't buy pasture. The big guy outfits is the only one that's going to stay in business.
- I think as public demands grow and grow, we're going to be faced with that situation more and more, is the human compassionate side of it versus some nebulous resource. But it does bother me to get acquainted with people and then be in a position maybe of telling them, "Hey, I'm going to reduce you out here, maybe to the point that it might put you out of business." Yes, that bothers me very much.
- I've seen hunger. I decided that that producing food was what I wanted to do. And that's what ranchers and farmers in the West do. And they see that as a ... As a noble enterprise. No, it's not something that we're ashamed of. And by virtue of that, the way we use the land is done in such a way that we can continue to produce food off of it. And we, I think, often tend to see the other uses of land, residential development of agricultural land in the fertile valleys and limiting of livestock production on the Western ranges, as frivolous. It's not the important thing that's happening here. The important thing that's happening here is the production of food, which is then distributed to all those people who want to come here and recreate and don't want us to be in their way when they're doing it. It's a difficult thing for people to understand why they're being attacked.
- [Female voice] These people believe if they stand together and they watch out for each other and they hold the line, that they will have a day in court and that their cause is just.
- [Male Voice] I haven't done any studies. All I've done is rode over the range. It all looked great to me.
- [Male Voice] It kind of makes a person wonder what it's going to be like out here in another four or five years.
- [Female Voice] No, I don't know, when Jeff, our grandson, comes along, just what there will be left for him, but he'll be a good rancher.
- [Male Voice] Lots of steers, fat cows, lots of rain, good hay crops. That's your dream. He's got to be able to dream and forget at the same time. He dreams about a good year and forgets about the bad ones. That's what carries him across.
♪ Give me a horse, the range, the cattle, the fall ♪
♪ The sky above and the earth below ♪
♪ And whatever may befall ♪
♪ Just a-ridin', rockin' ropin' ♪
♪ Pounding leather all day long ♪
♪ Just a-swayin', sweatin', swearin' ♪
♪ Listen to a cowhand's song ♪
♪ I would beckon and I reckon ♪
♪ That I'd work for any wage ♪
♪ Just to be, again, where the bloom is on the sage ♪
