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ranching legacies
Job aspirants to the Pitchfork study things from the top rail. |
Profiles of Persistence
By John Brown
Photography by Bob Moorehouse and Robert Dawson
These two ranches could not at first glance be more unlike, and yet the values of the McClaran and the Williams families are identical. Equal parts integrity, effort, and respect, their legacies are genuine, certain and true.
The Pitchfork Ranch of Guthrie, Texas, has
operated since 1883 as an outfit of the old
school. Now in its fourth generation of
family ownership, it has known every triumph and
trial that cattle operations encounter in this bigranch
country 80 miles east of Lubbock.
Unlike most ranches established during the great
cattle boom of the 1880s, the Pitchfork is the only
ranch in west-central Texas today with more fenced
acres than in its earliest years. With 125 years of continuous
operation under a single family’s ownership,
the Pitchfork sprawls across 180,000 acres in two
states, its 4,200 black and black-baldie cows
watched over by cowboys riding some of the best
ranch horses in the country. The “Pitchfork Gray”
(with black manes and tails) has evolved over the
last 75 years, building on the bloodlines of Joe
Bailey’s King, the magnificent quarter horse stallion
who came to the Pitchfork in 1946.
The Williams family, descendants of
Eugene F. Williams, the shoe salesman who made
trusted friends wherever he went, monitors the
Pitchfork with a herdsman’s affection for the old
ways, with a management style that is both hands-on
for the family and hands-free for the manager.
Witness this: across its life as a multi-million-dollar
agricultural undertaking, the Pitchfork’s general
managers have averaged 40 years in the saddle. (This
is not counting star-crossed cowboy Rudolph
Swenson, who introduced the American quarter
horse to the ranch before a tragic encounter with a
train in nearby Benjamin, Texas, took his life only 18
months after becoming the ranch’s manager.)
Bob Moorehouse |
Ron Lane took the managerial reins last May after
the departure of Bob Moorhouse, the legendary 35-
year veteran who was the successor to Jim
Humphreys of similar four-decade tenure in the pastures
along the Wichita River. Lane grew up as a
neighbor, having been the son of the manager of the
nearby 6666 Ranch’s North Division. Being a Texas
Tech alum just like Moorhouse, Lane brings business
and finance experience, as well as a degree in animal
science and a working cowboy’s skills. It’s all in service
of the Williams family’s only request: “Please
leave this ranch better than you found it.”
Careful management, and some white-knuckle
luck in the confrontation with the weather and the
market, has kept the Pitchfork debt free across its history.
“The number of investors outside our family has
shrunk, to be about 10 percent of the shares,” says
Gene Williams III, president and CEO of the
Pitchfork’s holding company, “and we realized quickly
that, going forward, if the ranch were to survive and
prosper, the family members needed to be accessible
to our manager, but not so as to interfere with the
workings of the ranch. We have always relied on our
managers. At no time in the ranch’s history did the
prospect of a sale ever come up.”
The nature of friendship
Dan Gardner came to Dickens County, Texas, in
1871. Well-educated, a surveyor and a cowboy who
had taken cattle up into Kansas, he partnered in the
founding of the Pitchfork and, when the chance
came, he called a friend with an offer to buy into the
Forks. A Dickens County, Texas, historian of 50 years
ago wrote that “Gardner had become acquainted
with Eugene F. Williams of St. Louis, who was in the
State in the interest of the Hamilton-Brown Shoe
Company. Their families had known each other in
Alabama and a warm friendship developed between the two men. So firm was his belief in Gardner [on
buying into the Pitchfork] that he refused to make
the 200-mile drive from Henrietta, then a railhead
for the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway, to
inspect the land and cattle. ‘I am buying Gardner,’ he
said, adding, ‘I believe what he tells me.’ The story of
the ranch’s founding is refreshing and reveals the
faith that two men had in each other, and of a business
connection and friendship that endured so long
as each lived. It tells, too, how this faith in West
Texas and the future of its lands and cattle was handed
down to the present generation, who hold the
same belief as did their forebears.”
Branding a calf |
“Our family has been blessed,” Gene III says. “We
have always appreciated the difficulties of the cattle
business, the need for proactive management amid
changing market conditions. We’ve been so fortunate
in finding these accomplished and committed
managers, each of whom has come from the west
Texas ranching community. Ron grew up on the
Sixes, and he knew our ranch from the neighbor
work done over the years. He and his wife fully
understand this lifestyle.”
Ag Econ
Now larger and more diversified than at any time
in its history, debt free of course, the Pitchfork
Ranch is agribusiness at its best. Consider these
characteristics:
The cattle: bulls selected for traits both maternal
and carcass-based, all calves verified by source and
age, all USDA verified as Non-Hormonally Treated
and All Natural. In Gene Williams II’s days, the purebred
Herefords would ship to Pitchfork grass in
Wyoming, two-year-old steers full of their unruly
selves, and then under Bob Moorhouse’s tenure, the
Pitchfork’s cattle moved slowly out of the Hereford
breed, and black hides came to dominate the herd.
Hunting: 165,000 acres of fields, pastures, thickets,
canyons, and cedar timber is home to hordes of
whitetail deer, mule deer, quail, dove, turkey, geese,
and varmints, not to mention wild hogs with strong
genetic and attitudinal ties to the Russian boar.
Farming: the wheat is green and growing, for both
winter grazing and grain production.
Petroleum energy: discovery of oil in the
Tannehill Sands beneath the ranch in 1980 meant
zip to the cowherd. “The ranch had operated for a
hundred years without oil income,” Gene Williams
II says. “While we were certainly grateful for the discovery,
we understood that we were in the cattle
business.”
The McClaran Ranch
Roping and dragging
is a time-honored
tradition. |
In 1904, C.A. McClaran came to the town of
Wallowa in the Wallowa Valley, in the extreme northeastern
corner of Oregon. He operated the Eastern
Oregon mercantile there and, interested in livestock,
kept horses and a few cows around, and in
time bought some sheep. C.A. and his son Joe ran
those sheep straight into profitability, most especially
when America entered the Great War. With the
battles at Ypres and Verdun waiting directly ahead,
Joe McClaran, at 18 years of age, on his way to war,
sought out a financial advisor.
No banks operated in extreme northeastern
Oregon in those days, and so young Joe found Earl
Sherod, a prosperous neighbor, who counseled him
on two options: a relatively safe investment that
might bring a three-percent return, or a more speculative
venture with greater risk but greater potential
reward. Young Joe chose the safer place for stashing
his savings. On his return from the war, his grubstake
had grown to $7,000. The more aggressive investment—
stock in a little start-up venture called Ford
Motor Company—would have returned 10 times as
much, but Sherod suggested that a good lesson had
been learned in his fiscal conservatism.
All members of the family
have a hand in ranch affairs. |
Joe was right back to running sheep with
his dad, on 160 acres of native grass and on the higher
surrounding elevations—ground steep enough
that lost footing on a frozen hill meant almost certain
death for creatures both two and four-footed.
Soon enough the McClarans bought out a neighbor
down the creek, acquiring more good bunchgrass
and another 75 cows. Married now to school teacher
Lorene, Joe saw his operation reach up into the high
Wallowa Mountains.
Food and mail were floated up the Snake River
from Lewiston, as were cook stoves, mowing
machines, and window frames—all the stuff of life
arriving aboard The Idaho, a surprisingly deep-drafted
boat that served all the ranchers up and down the
drainage. The boat came every Friday, and supplies
were packed the rest of the way home on mules.
By now, the Great Depression was finding its way
into even the wilderness, its effects probably fatal on
the ranchers there. Except, once more, for L.C.
Johnson. Joe’s son Jack remembers: “My dad had
borrowed money from him, as had six or eight other
ranchers in the area. Well, L.C. called his debtor
ranchers together, and announced that he was suspending
all regular debt payments until he and Dad and those other ranchers had ridden out the
Depression together. There is no doubt in my mind
that, without L.C. Johnson’s enlightened self-interest,
we would have lost the ranch.”
When young Jack went himself off to war, enlisting
at 18 years of age to charge across Europe with Patton
and the Fourth Armored Division, the ranch he left
behind was largely a sheep operation. When he
returned, the labor shortage of the war years had cut
into the wool business, with its work-intensive lambing
and shearing. The ovine phasing-out led to many a
mutton-based meal in the K-rations of GIs everywhere,
and the McClaran Ranch had switched to cows.
The spring calf crop awaits branding. |
Growth came consistently through the decades,
and the McClarans—Joe and Lorene, Jack and
Marge—and their three children, Chris, Katy, and
Scott. Scott says that “my parents and grandparents
couldn’t rub two nickels together at year’s end, but
they were accumulating net worth in a rugged and
beautiful place, living a life we all loved.” Still working
on the ranch, Jack insists “only a certain kind of
person can live up here. The challenges of making a
living in a place like ours doesn’t appeal to many people.
But the country takes hold of you, and you find
that you couldn’t possibly live anywhere else.”
Touching the canyon
Scott and his wife, Vicki, became directly involved
again in the ranch’s operation in 1980, and their
three daughters have grown up doing the work, both
physical and cerebral, of a remote, high-country
spread. An accredited teacher, Vicki homeschooled
her girls, thereby saving a three-hour commute. Jill,
the oldest, is pondering doctoral study. Beth and
Maggie both attend Oregon State University, studying
ranch science.
After a three-day visit with Vicki for some electricity
and some conversation, Scott McClaran rode
back to winter camp today [March 11]. It’s calving
time at that higher elevation, where he reads by
lantern-light waiting to help a heifer with her midnight
calf. The McClarans revere the singularity of
purpose in the responsibilities of a cow camp; they
know first hand the rewards of simplicity. “Up there
the rest of the world just disappears,” Jack says. “It’s
not an easy life, but it’s a great life.”
Scott serves the
ranch’s thousand head of mother cows as now four
generations of his family have done . . . with some
necessary and convenient adaptations to these modern
ways. An airplane, for example, sometimes flies
in late-summer roundup, skimming the highest
peaks, searching out stragglers before a couple of cowpeople and some exceptional border collies head out to bring them down.
The operation now includes seven different camps (four in winter country,
three on summer ground); a house in town; a hay basin and a background
lot; and two full-time employees with the cows and two more with the farming
and the backgrounding.
“About the time we pay off a debt, the family will make a decision to add a
federal permit or to buy a piece of private ground. We’re now retaining ownership
on some of our steers with a branded-beef program called Country
Natural Beef. At our heart, though, we’re a forage-based ranch operating yearround,
without fences, in some big country.”
Scott McClaran rides worry free these days: “I have three daughters
who are as handy as anyone who wants to come along, I have a wife who is
twice as valuable to this outfit as I am. With this kind of support, ranching is
pretty easy.” Maggie McClaran left home at four o’clock this morning [March
11], driving six hours back to Corvallis for an afternoon class. “Maggie needed
to be horseback for a while,” her grandfather says. “She needed to come home
to, as we say in our family, ‘touch the canyon.’”
Conclusion
Bob Moorhouse, on the Acknowledgements page of his photographic masterpiece
Pitchfork Country, thanks first of all his parents Togo and Lucille
Moorhouse, “who taught me how to work and know right from wrong.”
Meanwhile, up in Joseph, the succession planning of the McClaran family
goes like this: Scott McClaran says to me, “If my girls want to continue to be
involved in this ranch, they will have that opportunity.”
Right there, with that allegiance to individual conscience and individual
effort in pursuit of familial and societal good, lies the secret of it all. “If my
girls want to continue to be involved in this ranch, they will have that opportunity,”
McClaran says.
And, as with the Williams family, you believe him. |
