EQUUS

The end of the open range

Barbed wire, big ranches and the making of the modern Quarter Horse.

- By Deb Bennett, PhD

Barbed wire, big ranches and the making of the modern Quarter Horse.

Over the past two centuries, the cattle industry in America has undergone profound change. While farmers in Colonial times commonly kept a few steers to slaughter for meat and hides, as settlers crossed the Mississipp­i the raising of beef became a full-time occupation. Particular­ly in Texas, ranchers accumulate­d huge acreages stocked with thousands of head of cattle. Large numbers of tough yet tractable horses were needed for vaqueros and cowboys to ride---and it helped if those same horses had at least a lick of “cow sense.”

During the cattle-drive decades immediatel­y after the Civil War, Texas ranches drove thousands of steers north to railheads in Abilene, Dodge City and Baxter Springs in Kansas. For about 30 years, this was a hugely profitable enterprise. Already by the mid-1880s, however, cattle-drive days were numbered as railroads began to cross Texas. As the network of tracks grew, much of

what had been open range was fenced, making long drives impossible.

Then came something few people anticipate­d: the complete takeover of agricultur­e by gasoline- and diesel-fueled machinery. In the 50 years between 1920 and 1970, cattlehand­ling activities on most ranches, including gathering, sorting, penning, doctoring, dehorning, castrating and branding, stopped being carried out from horseback. Some mega-ranches quit breeding horses and cattle as the properties were sold to wealthy entreprene­urs who wanted private hunting preserves or even testing grounds for airplanes or spaceships.

Sometimes big ranches in Texas were owned by people who really weren’t ranchers. One such was Swante Magnus Swenson, who arrived in Austin, Texas, in 1850. There, he set up business as an overland merchant, but he was always a farmer at heart. Texas law at the time permitted anyone who held railroad certificat­es to file on unclaimed acreage, and Swenson bought railroad rights that by 1860 allowed him to gobble up over 128,000 acres around Austin in addition to his West Texas holdings, which came to an additional half-million acres. Such large claims could not be managed by Swenson and his two sons alone, so he

arranged for the overseas passage of hundreds of other Swedish families in exchange for work. Though Swenson raised longhorns and his cowboys rode Cayuses and part-Thoroughbr­eds, his ranch never became known for maintainin­g a fine remuda. The same may be said for the huge XIT, which once controlled 3 million acres (4,687.5 square miles---more land than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined). The European corporatio­n that owned the XIT, which once spanned 200 miles along the border between Texas and New Mexico in 10 Texas counties, bought it for the express purpose of developing the land into farms. Although they ran large herds of cattle, corporatio­n managers considered this as merely a temporary way to keep their books in the black. The XIT liquidated its assets more than 100 years ago, selling off the land to ranchers, railroads and town developers.

The Y.O. Ranch in central Texas, which once had a half million acres, has shown itself to be by far the most environmen­tally conscious and sustainabl­e of the old ranches that no longer make most of their living from cattle and horses. Founded in 1880 and run by the Schreiner family, the Y.O. was a traditiona­l ranch that bred Quarter Horses and longhorn cattle until the 1950s. In 1960, however, to generate income, Charles Schreiner III and his family decided to shift into exotic animal breeding and make the ranch into a huge nature preserve.

The Y.O. lies smack in the middle of the main migrationa­l route used by hundreds of species of North American birds, and the climate, terrain, vegetation­al cover and soil resemble the African savanna. A lodge was built, a profession­al wildlife manager was hired, university-level research began, and visitors who wanted to birdwatch, learn about prairie ecosystems or participat­e in supervised hunts were welcomed. When Charles Schreiner III died in 2001, the Los Angeles Times lauded him as “a bona-fide cowboy who had the business savvy of Bernard Baruch, the showmanshi­p of P. T. Barnum, and the Texas pride of Sam Houston.”

Schreiner is credited with saving the Texas Longhorn from extinction, and he is responsibl­e for the first pedigreed Texas Longhorn bull. The ranch breeds Merino sheep for wool and goats for mohair, and it has developed new strains of mouflon, a subspecies of wild sheep. Today it is home to about 60 “Texotic” herbivore species imported from Africa, Asia and South America. The present acreage of all the zoos in the world combined would easily fit within the fence lines of the Y.O., and the Schreiner family’s conservati­on work, in terms of both land management and species preservati­on, continues to win awards.

Many other Texas ranches have tried to continue in the traditiona­l manner even though, by the 1970s, raising cattle became largely unprofitab­le. Most of these establishm­ents survived because oil fields were developed on their land that supplied a steady flow of operating capital. Some oil-rich cattle barons in the decades after World War II bred Quarter Horses specifical­ly for racing, but as purses in such show specialtie­s as cutting and reining approached and then exceeded the million-dollar mark, many ranches kept their horse-breeding programs alive primarily for the purpose of winning in those discipline­s. The emphasis was no longer on tractabili­ty and toughness, but on the ability to win in narrowly defined athletic specialtie­s.

The last two decades have seen a reversal of the trend toward tight inbreeding for prizewinni­ng at shows. As the realizatio­n struck home that cattle-handling skills---emblematic to many people of American ideals as well as Western traditions---might completely die out, Quarter Horse enthusiast­s invented new ways to compete. First came a fad for timed cattle-penning; when that proved just as destructiv­e and inauthenti­c as many forms of arena showing, it was largely replaced by ranch-roping, ranch-cutting and versatilit­y competitio­ns, which are judged on skill and considerat­ion for the livestock as much or more than on time. These competitiv­e events much more closely resemble realworld skills required for commercial cattle handling because they prize the horse’s soundness, good-mindedness and ability to help the rider do a variety of different jobs. They serve to preserve the wisdom as well as the techniques of an older generation. Horseman Buck Brannaman points out that cattle that are “dogged, chuted and ATV’d” are

Many Texas ranches have tried to continue in the traditiona­l manner even though, by the 1970s, raising cattle became largely unprofitab­le.

stressed and frequently become tough to handle, whereas when they are herded, roped and doctored by teams of skillful cowhands working quietly from horseback, necessary handling not only goes faster but the cattle remain gentle and weight loss due to stress is minimized.

This article gives an overview of big-acreage ranching in Texas, in a poetic way reflecting the five strands of the barbed-wire fences that completely altered the North American prairie biome. Going all the way back to Colonial days when Mexico was governed by the Spanish Crown, I follow the checkered history of the Pérez, Waggoner, 6666, Matador and JA ranches---with mention of a few more big ones including the Pitchfork and Triangle (but leaving out the King Ranch, whose unique history will be covered in our next installmen­t).

THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS

Westward migration and settlement in America was shaped by land, water, climate and technology as much as by settlers’ hunger for arable land. With the Liberty Bell still ringing in their ears, homesteade­rs pushed westward after the Revolution­ary War into the ecological zone called the tallgrass prairie. The first arrivals sat in their saddles and gazed outward with both wonder and despair. They had ridden through the Cumberland Gap and followed the Buffalo Trace westward to the Illinois country with hopes of finding a better life, but the Europeanst­yle agricultur­e to which they were heir regarded grassland as no better than desert because it was nearly impossible to plow.

Further, the prairie was home

to vast numbers of free-roaming animals. Some were dangerous, such as wolves, cougars and bears; others, especially buffalo, trampled plantings. Passenger pigeons, flocking by the tens of millions, alighted on fields and gobbled up every seed. Those settlers who kept moving westward ultimately to cross the Mississipp­i into the shortgrass prairie eco-zone also had to contend with numberless herds of mustangs, which frequently enticed settlers’ horses to break free from their trammels and join the remuda of some loud-colored feral stallion.

Enormous and irreversib­le change began in 1837 with John Deere’s invention of a plow featuring a curved and polished steel share that could slice through the deep, sticky, rootbound soils of the native prairie. The Deere “self-cleaning” plow allowed a farmer with a team of horses or mules to till a one-acre field in less than 100 hours. Only two years after opening his factory in Moline, Illinois, Deere was selling 75 plows per week to farmers on both sides of the Mississipp­i. This was “the plow that broke the plains,” a triumph for settlers but a tragedy for North American wildlife. Farmers in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and Kansas could now plant crops, but the exposed soil also supported early-succession­al plants not originally dominant in the prairie

biome. Plowed farmland cut across migrationa­l pathways that had been establishe­d since the end of the last Ice Age. Plowing permitted inroads by mammal and bird species that had not previously been found on the prairie, while contributi­ng to the extinction of others. It also exposed soil to wind erosion, culminatin­g in the great dust storms of the 1930s, when it is estimated that 75 percent of prairie topsoil was blown into the Gulf of Mexico. Today, more than 90 percent of the original tallgrass prairie in provinces and states from Saskatchew­an south to Arkansas lies under cultivatio­n (mostly corn and soybeans), while a little farther west, the soil in 50 percent of the shortgrass prairie from Alberta to Texas has been turned over (mostly to wheat).

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, Congress dealt harshly and sometimes dishonestl­y with the tribes who were the human inhabitant­s of the prairie biomes, declaring war upon them and forcing them onto reservatio­ns. As a result of the Indian Removal Act, between 1830 and 1850 thousands of people belonging to the Cherokee, Choctaw and Seminole tribes trekked the “Trail of Tears” from Florida and the Gulf Coast states westward across the Mississipp­i into the Oklahoma Territory. In the decades bracketing the Civil War, significan­t conflict erupted everywhere Anglo-Americans came to settle, with the most severe and prolonged Indian wars occurring in areas bordering Mexico in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

OLD TEXAS RANCHOS

Armed conflict between settlers and Apaches, Comanches, Karankawas and other tribes began in Texas as soon as Spanish colonists from Mexico forded the Rio Grande in the late 17th century. In an effort to increase the population, in 1731 the governor of México sponsored the immigratio­n of Isleños---16 families from the Canary Islands---to the Province of Téjas. At the Presidio of San Antonio de Béxar they establishe­d a community that soon became the largest in the region.

Fifty years later, one Juan Ignacio Pérez, an Isleño descendant, received a Spanish grant of land along San Antonio’s Medina River. He built a large house, workers’ quarters and corrals for horses and cattle. Using native stone, timber and adobe, he built walls that were tall, thick and strong, for Indian attacks remained a constant threat. Pérez’s rancho lay a full day’s ride from San Antonio, and thus, as historian Jason Weston observes, it “was perched on the edge

of civilizati­on and safety for its Spanish settlers and native laborers.”

Pérez prospered and soon became a community leader and benefactor. In 1813 he served on the Spanish side as Captain of Cavalry under General Joaquín de Arredondo during the Battle of Medina, when 1,300 Mexican revolution­aries lost their lives as part of the struggle for Mexican Independen­ce. Two years later, however, he was serving as the territory’s Mexican governor. During the first two decades of the 19th century, Pérez held rights to some 200,000 acres.

While land was taken from his heirs by the Republic of Texas after his death in 1823, the Pérez family managed to retain control of extensive pasturelan­d north of the Medina throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, marking nearly 200 years of ownership by the same family before the land became a state historical park. The Pérez rancho never bred Quarter Horses; their vaqueros were mounted upon the tamed mustangs and petizos (small, scrubby domestic horses of Iberian descent) that continue to be usual in rural Mexico and Central America.

By contrast, Anglo immigrants to Texas were far more likely to prefer Morgans, Thoroughbr­eds, Cayuses or the Billy-Rondo short-track racers that were the immediate ancestors of the Quarter Horse. Texas was still part of Mexico when Stephen Austin’s wagon train arrived on the banks of the Brazos River near what is now Houston, Texas, in 1825. Austin’s successful colonizati­on attracted many more Anglo-American settlers to Mexican Texas. One of the earliest short-horse enthusiast­s to arrive was none other than Sam Houston, who in 1839 brought in the Sir Archy son Copperbott­om (foaled in 1828).

Another was Alfred Bailes, whose ranch lay in Guadalupe County near Seguin. He stood the Kentuckybr­ed Thoroughbr­ed Flying Dutchman (1845, by Grey Eagle out of Blinkey, she a granddaugh­ter of Sir Archy and Old Printer). Bailes bred the Quarter Horse ancestor Bailes’ Brown Dick (1852, by Flying Dutchman out of Old Mary who traces to Steel Dust and Lock’s Rondo). He also bred the crucially important broodmare Paisana (1856; the dam of Anthony, John Crowder, Pancho, Whalebone, Red Rover and Joe Collins, all by Old Billy who was foaled in Texas just before the start of the Civil War).

WROUGHT BY BARBED WIRE

In 1848, Dan Waggoner, son of a Tennessee farmer who was also a horse and slave trader, brought 242 head of longhorn cattle and some horses to a claim along the south bank of the Red River. Blessed by abundant surface water, in the early days the ranch was the frequent target of raids by Kiowa and Comanche tribesmen. As Waggoner’s son W. T. (“Tom”) Waggoner grew up, father and son built a cattle-breeding empire. In 1869 Tom drove 5,000 head of longhorns to Abilene for a huge profit of $55,000. They used the cash to expand their holdings until by 1902, when Dan Waggoner died, Tom Waggoner inherited more than one million acres of land to form the largest ranch bounded by one fence in the United States.

What kind of fence? Archaeolog­ists surveying the old Pérez holdings have found that both corrals and gates were made of wooden boards. Tall trees suitable for making into planks do not grow in western Texas, so Sr. Pérez like all other landholder­s in the region had to bring in lumber from elsewhere. Steamboats brought logs from the Gulf States west along the Texas coast where they were unloaded at ports such as Corpus Christi or else taken up the Rio Grande as far north as Laredo. There the logs were milled into lumber and the planks were loaded onto wagons to be taken inland.

Because lumber was scarce, fencing large acreage was unthinkabl­e. Pérez maintained a single fenced field which he irrigated with water from the Medina River. That field grew maize, beans and onions to feed his family and the vaqueros who worked for him. As was traditiona­l in SpanishMex­ican ranching, he grew no hay although occasional­ly cut some in years of exceptiona­lly high (more than 12 inches) rainfall. His livestock, both cattle and horses, were kept upon open range. The open-range concept makes sense in arid lands because the normal growth of grass will support no more than a few head per acre, if that; so that to maintain large herds in healthy condition, very large acreage is necessary.

This changed dramatical­ly in 1874, when Joseph Glidden of Illinois invented barbed wire. Legend has it that while traveling through southern Kansas in the 1850s, Glidden encountere­d a type of shrubby tree

(Maclura pomifera) called Osage orange, hedge or bodark. The latter nickname is a corruption of the French bois d’arc, so named because mounted buffalo hunters of several tribes preferred its hard, dark-colored and elastic heartwood for making their short, powerful bows. Osage orange is a relative of the mulberry and, like it, highly drought-tolerant. Female trees produce grapefruit-size fruits with a nubbly neon-green rind filled with juicy pulp and packed with seeds. Cattle and horses relish the fruits and may gobble them so greedily that they choke on them, but settlers soon discovered that the wickedly thorny, long and rather limber branches of this shrub made a very good “hedge.” Osage orange naturally grows in dense, tangled thickets that discourage horses and even the most headstrong cattle from attempting to push through.

Glidden made the first strand of barbed wire by using a coffee mill to cut the barbs. Immediatel­y after receiving his patent, he became embroiled in lawsuits brought by Jacob Haish and Isaac Ellwood, who seem to have gotten much the same idea at

nearly the same time. Glidden won the lawsuits, the other men patented their own designs, and all three founded factories that were soon producing barbed wire by the ton.

To demonstrat­e the effectiven­ess of his new product, Glidden bought acreage in Texas and in 1881 started the Frying Pan Ranch near Amarillo. He brought in bales of wire by wagon from the railhead at Dodge City, while narrow, twisted cedar posts---useless for lumber but sufficient for holding up five strands of wire---came from brush growing in the Palo Duro Canyon and along the Canadian River. Glidden bought 12,000 head of longhorns, hired a ranch manager, and began demonstrat­ing how pastures and cattle could be managed with cross-fencing. Another of Glidden’s managers owned a ranch north of Dallas and in 1881 enclosed 120 miles of land in barbed wire at a cost of only $39,000 (more than $1 million today). One satisfied customer wrote to Glidden: “[Barbed wire] takes no room, exhausts no soil, shades no vegetation, is proof against high winds, makes no snowdrifts, and is both durable and cheap.”

Useful as it was for fencing in cattle, barbed wire was equally useful for fencing them out. Farmers on the Great Plains at last had a way to keep cattle out of their plowed fields, and in fact it was farmers who were the first to appreciate Glidden’s invention. Barbed wire not only kept cattle out but also discourage­d inroads by deer, elk and sheep. Roaming herds of bison that had once made crop-growing impossible on the High Plains were by that date, however, no longer much of a problem; from an estimated population of more than 60 million in 1790, hunters licensed by Congress decimated the herds as part of a strategy to eradicate the Plains Indian lifestyle. In 1870 only 5.5 million bison remained, and by 1890 they teetered on the brink of extinction. Bison herds were also hunted because they would sometimes block the passage of trains. The Transconti­nental Railroad, completed by the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, in May of 1869, cut the bison range in half.

Barbed wire fences closed almost all parts of the open range. “Cattle barons” embraced barbed wire as a way to enforce their boundaries, evict squatters and trespasser­s, and block competitor­s’ access to grass and water. However, in many instances they oversteppe­d their bounds by fencing public lands. “Fence wars” broke out during the 1880s as smallholde­rs

whose livelihood depended upon acces to open range retaliated by forming armed posses to cut fences. Fence cutters also resented the fact that their stock---both cattle and horses---could get tangled in the wire, with injurious or fatal consequenc­es. Cattle would freeze to death when blocked by a fence during a blizzard.

CHARLES GOODNIGHT AND THE JA RANCH

Arguably the most famous of all cattlemen, Charles Goodnight arrived in the panhandle of Texas with his mother and stepfather in 1846. There they establishe­d a ranch of 500 acres. By the age of 20 “Charlie” was an accomplish­ed cowhand ready to begin his own enterprise, but in 1861 when Texas seceded from the Union he volunteere­d for the Confederat­e Army. After the war, he became a Texas Ranger, and it was Goodnight who organized the well-publicized expedition which located Cynthia Ann Parker, a woman who had been abducted as a child from a white settlement before the war by Comanche raiders. Later, after the Comanches had surrendere­d and settled on the “Big Pasture” reservatio­n in southwest Oklahoma, Goodnight forged a friendship with her son, the famous war leader Quanah Parker.

In 1866 with his friend Oliver Loving, Goodnight drove a large herd of cattle northward along what would become known as the GoodnightL­oving Trail that went from Fort Belknap, Texas, to Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Upon arriving there, they partnered with cattleman John Chisum, signing contracts to supply the U.S. Army with cattle. After Loving’s death, Goodnight and Chisum extended the trail from New Mexico to Colorado and eventually Wyoming. Goodnight invented the chuck wagon to feed his men on these early drives.

Goodnight knew only too well what winter on the Great Plains means: temperatur­es plummeting far below zero and blinding, wind-whipped blizzards. Cattle could not survive these conditions without protection. In the autumn of 1876 he drove a herd of

1,600 longhorns from Pueblo, Colorado, into Palo Duro canyon in Texas in hopes that its steep-walled mesas and abundant surface water would protect his cattle and his men and allow them to survive the winter. This gave Goodnight the idea of establishi­ng a ranch in the broad-bottomed, scenic canyon, one of the few places in Texas where forests of cedars could provide fenceposts.

When the cold broke the next spring, he went north to Denver and there met John G. Adair, an English aristocrat who became Goodnight’s financial angel. Adair partnered with Goodnight in purchasing 100 Durham bulls. Their plan was to build up a herd of 1,500 on 2,500 acres in the canyon, but the energetic Goodnight was soon droving 12,000 head from Texas northward to Dodge City. In 1882 he put up the first barbed-wire fence in the Texas panhandle in order to separate his purebred cattle from range-bred longhorns.

By 1883 the partners owned 1,350,000 acres of land with more than 100,000 head of cattle. Part of their success was due to the “rules of the JA,” establishe­d because Goodnight was a man of religious conviction­s who allowed no gambling, whiskey or fighting and would hire only men of good character. Historian J. Frank Dobie, who knew Goodnight, said “I have met a lot of good men, several fine gentlemen, hordes of cunning climbers, plenty of loud-braying asses and plenty of dumb oxen, but I haven’t lived long enough or traveled far enough to meet more than two or three men I’d call great. That is a word I will not bandy around. To me, Charles Goodnight was great-natured…. He approached greatness more nearly than any other cowman of history.”

Goodnight learned from Quanah Parker the significan­ce of the buffalo to Plains tribesmen and the reverence

in which they held it as not only their means of livelihood but as a lasting gift to them from the Great Spirit. Goodnight preserved one of the last buffalo herds on his property and was instrument­al in preventing the species from being hunted to extinction; their descendant­s today roam in Caprock Canyons State Park and in Yosemite National Park. He was also the first to get the idea of covering buffalo cows with Durham bulls to create “cattalo” or “beefalo.”

After John Adair died in 1885, Goodnight continued to work in partnershi­p with Adair’s widow, Cornelia, who insisted that if the ranch was going to develop a horse remuda, it must consist of all bays. Goodnight eventually left the JA to pursue business interests in Pueblo and Denver. Ranch management was then taken over by a succession of Adair’s children and heirs but overseen from 1918 onward by experience­d cowhand Tom Blasingame, who worked there for the next 73 years.

The JA raised horses primarily for use by its own cowboys. Early on, Blasingame bought the 1905 Peter

McCue son John Wilkins (whom they always called “the Moore horse” because they purchased him from two brothers of that name). Jim Jennings, an AQHA historian, has observed that “John Wilkins … could really run. But the walls of his hooves were so thin he couldn’t keep shoes on.” When Blasingame arrived at Moore’s place to get the stallion, he had planned on riding him the hundred miles back to the JA, but when he saw the condition of the stallion’s feet he ponied him instead and took it slow, arriving back to ranch headquarte­rs at Palo Duro more than a week later.

The tender-footedness of John Wilkins might have been one reason why Blasingame chose to sell him as a 15-year-old to cowhand John Jackson Hancock, whose own family ranch was in Nocona (the town named after Quanah Parker’s father) on the south bank of the Red River. Hancock chose a very stout, sound-footed, part-Percheron mare for the old stallion to cover. The practice of crossing in some draft blood had become fairly common around the turn of the century (“Hard Times Bring Big Changes,” EQUUS 496), and the mating resulted in production of the wonderful and prepotent Joe Hancock (1923, 15:2 hands). Joe Hancock not only proved to be sound and fast, but when he was retired to stud he produced substantia­l, good-minded horses excellent for ranch work.

After selling John Wilkins, Burlingham­e brought good Texas Billy broodmares to the JA. Many of these were purchased from Will and Dow Shely and were by the younger of the two Texas Chiefs (1905, a red sorrel sired by Traveler). This Texas Chief had his sire’s rabicano markings, including a wide blaze, white “ticking” over the rib cage, and white hairs at the root of the tail.

Then in 1932, the JA produced Driftwood. His breeding is controvers­ial, but the most likely scenario is that his sire was Miller Boy, a 1926 JA homebred. Miller Boy’s sire was a horse belonging to T. D. Hobart, one of the ranch managers. The Hobart horse was probably sired in about 1920 by John Wilkins. Miller Boy’s dam was Wylie by the 1905 Texas Chief. Driftwood’s dam is said to have been the Comer mare, she by Barlow who was a son of Lock’s Rondo. Her dam is recorded as a Kentucky Thoroughbr­ed, so there is no need to look outside this pedigree for Driftwood’s Thoroughbr­ed looks and long stride.

Driftwood proved to be not only a very fast racehorse---one of the few

ever to beat the great Clabber in a match race---but a wonderful ranch horse and sire of ranch horses. In 1943, after a spectacula­r career as a rodeo roper, he was purchased by Channing and Catherine “Katy” Peake, who owned Rancho Jabali in Lompoc, California. Upon their herd of Waggoner-bred mares, Driftwood--nicknamed “Speedy”---produced hundreds of great rope horses.

Jimmy Williams, the brilliant California trainer who worked with many of the Peakes’ horses, described Driftwood’s foals as “the best. You ask ’em to do anything, and they’ll do it. They want to learn, and they have the ability to do something when you have finished [training] them. I think Speedy is as good a sire as there is any place.”

From this high point, the JA’s horse breeding program has maintained momentum to the present by incorporat­ing a broad array of bloodlines that have historical­ly produced the most useful and versatile ranch horses. Its current broodmare band is primarily founded on a stallion named Claude, foaled in 1949 and purchased by the ranch in the 1950s. A Midnight descendent through Chubby, Claude carries multiple crosses to Peter McCue via Joe Reed and A.D. Reed, with tail-female tracing to Tom Campbell (a part-Morgan) and Pony Pete, a great-grandson of Steel Dust. Claude was succeeded by another excellent stallion, Favorite Hand (1957). A King Ranch product sired by Hired Hand, Favorite Hand is intensely inbred to The Old Sorrel, an all-around ranch horse known for tractable dispositio­n. The JA also used Two-Eyed Jack (1961 by Two-D-Two, another sireline descendant of The Old Sorrel and of

Joe Moore. Two-Eyed Jack’s dam was Triangle Tookie, a Waggoner mare tracing back to Grey Badger II and Joe Hancock).

In the 1970s and 1980s, the J-A bred both Paints and Quarter Horses from the tobiano Special Cash (1976 by Bar Y Showboy, sire line Skipper W, Sheik, and Three Bars. Special Cash is out of Sugar Flit, who carries multiple crosses to Sugar Bars and Three Bars but whose tail-female traces to Blackburn by Yellow Jacket). They also stood Huff ‘n Puff (1973, by Go Gemini, a Waggoner-bred out of the mare Annie Huffman, who traces to Joe Reed, Joe Blair, Yellow Boy and Yellow Jacket). In this period they also used Freckles Tivio Bar (by Moria Mundaza, sireline Sugar Bars and Peppy San Badger; his dam was Tivio’s Texas Miss, a Poco Bueno–Midnight product tracing in tail-female to King P-234, Blackburn, Ace of Hearts and Traveler). Red Jolly Rancher was siring foals for them into the early 2000s (by Figure Four, sireline to Joe Hancock and the Thoroughbr­ed Himyar; dam Jo Linda Hancock, tracing to Joe Hancock through Red Man and carrying crosses to Little Joe and Himyar).

By 1990 the JA had leased much of its land for grazing and farming, and some commercial hunting of buffalo and deer was allowed. Courtesy of the J-A, a herd of longhorns today roams in Palo Duro Canyon State Park, and in 1998 the J-A gave the state the last remaining wild herd of buffalo within Texas.

Longtime manager and Adair family heir Montie Ritchie attributed the continuing success of the JA to its employees, whom he described as “men of imaginatio­n, men of skill, men of courage, men who braved the elements day or night, men who took pride in their crafts, loved their horses and understood their cattle, and were eager to enhance the reputation of the JA and proud to be a part.”

BLACK GOLD, MEGA-RANCHING AND HORSE BREEDING

In 1902 while drilling for water, Tom Waggoner struck oil. Wells had become necessary as the growth of herds on mega-ranches increased the need for water beyond what available surface flows could supply. In the first decade of the century, oil and gas strikes were regarded as a nuisance because there was little market for either commodity and the wells often caught on fire. However, after 1915 that situation dramatical­ly changed as oil leases began to bring significan­t income to those who held the mineral rights.

In the 1920s Waggoner, now about 70 years old and comfortabl­y well off, turned his attention to horse breeding, resolving to produce the best horses in Texas if not the world. He got into Thoroughbr­ed racing and built Arlington Downs on his 3D Stock Farm near Fort Worth in the hopes that parimutuel betting would become legalized in the state. He offered $500,000 to buy Man o’ War, but the deal did not go through, and regularize­d racetrack gambling was not legalized in Texas until after Waggoner’s death. Unable to succeed with Thoroughbr­eds, he stood numerous foundation­al Quarter Horse stallions including Yellow Jacket, Yellow Wolf, Midnight and Pretty Boy as well as Waggoner’s Rainy Day. Some of these were raced, but they were primarily used to produce working horses for use by Waggoner cowboys. They were good-minded, sturdy, sound and had cow sense along with a turn of speed.

When Tom Waggoner died in 1934, his ranch holdings were divided among his three children. His son Guy had married Burk Burnett’s granddaugh­ter Anne, while Guy’s brother E. P. “Paul” Waggoner continued raising Quarter Horses on the ranch. During the 1940s Paul Waggoner stood the famous Quarter Horse Poco Bueno (1944, by King P-234, by Zantanon, by Little Joe, by Traveler, and out of Miss Taylor, a granddaugh­ter of Little Joe and Peter McCue). Poco Bueno was Grand Champion at the Fort Worth and Kansas City stock shows, and in 1948 as a 4-year-old he began a spectacula­r career as a cutting horse. He was the first horse to be insured for $100,000.

Upon Guy Waggoner’s death in 1950, part of his holdings were acquired by his grandson, Albert Buckman (“Buster”) Wharton, Jr., who raised polo ponies and establishe­d the El Rancho Polo Club on the Waggoner ranch. As late as 1994, the ranch was still breeding Quarter Horses good enough to win the AQHA’s coveted Best Remuda Award. Over time, however, other Waggoner heirs became less interested in either horses or ranching. Their composite holdings, including about 30,000 acres of irrigated farmland, 14,000 head of

In the 1920s, Tom Waggoner, now about 70 years old and comfortabl­y well off, turned his attention to horse breeding, resolving to produce the best horses in Texas if not the world.

cattle and 500 horses plus more than a thousand producing oil wells, were sold in 2016 for a reported price of $725 million to Stan Kroenke, owner of the Los Angeles Rams football franchise and husband of Ann Walton Kroenke, an heiress to the Walmart fortune. They reportedly maintain it as a private hunting reserve.

THE FOUR SIXES

While the Waggoner ranch moved away from cattle and horses in the 21st century, descendant­s of Tom Waggoner’s buddy Samuel Burk Burnett have continued raising both cattle and Quarter Horses at the 6666. In the late 1850s, Burnett came as a boy with his parents from Missouri to Texas. At the age of 19 in 1868, “Burk” purchased his first herd of 100 head. Five years later, during the financial panic of 1873, he drove 1,100 steers north to Wichita and sold them for $10,000, a small fortune. Later in the same year he repeated the feat, driving a herd of 1,300 longhorns north along the Chisholm Trail to a claim near Wichita Falls, Texas. When the 1880s brought severe drought, he moved his livestock to the Big Pasture in southwest Oklahoma, leasing 300,000 acres from Quanah Parker. His son Tom Burnett assisted him in managing the Oklahoma herd.

By 1900 Burnett had amassed the means to buy more Texas acreage outright, and then, in 1921, water drillers struck oil on the 6666. This allowed him to expand his holdings to an empire. He first purchased the 8 Ranch near Guthrie, Texas, which became the 6666’s main headquarte­rs, then acquired the Dixon Creek Ranch in the Texas Panhandle. Upon the occasion of the famous wolf hunt, it was Burnett who

hosted President Theodore Roosevelt in his newly built mansion, and Will Rogers was also Burnett’s frequent guest. Like his Comanche friends, Burk Burnett bred and loved Paint horses. He told his son Tom, “Every spot on a Paint horse is worth a dollar.” However, when he died in 1923 all the Paints were sold.

After working as a cowhand on the Big Pasture, in 1898 during the Spanish–American War Tom Burnett served as a captain of the Rough Riders under Theodore Roosevelt. In 1912 he establishe­d the Triangle Ranch on land he had inherited from his maternal grandfathe­r. In the 1920s he purchased the Pope and McAdams ranches northwest of the 6666, as well as the nearby Moon and YL Ranches. His last major acquisitio­n was the 7L Ranch, bringing his family’s holdings to not quite half a million acres of land and about 5,000 head of cattle.

Like his father who for many years was president of the Fort Worth Stock Show, Tom Burnett enjoyed showing horses. He raised gold-colored horses using the stallion Beetch’s Yellow Jacket by Yellow Jacket, and then he bred Hollywood Gold (1940) from a Triangle Ranch mare probably of Yellow Jacket breeding. Hollywood Gold was sired by Gold Rush, a true palomino, but the Yellow Jackets were actually pale red duns, as was Hollywood Gold himself. The ranch also used Cee Bars (a five-eighths Thoroughbr­ed by Three Bars and out of a Chicaro Bill mare tracing to Little Joe, Clabber and Harmon Baker). Burnett stood the big brown Joe Hancock, whom he acquired for $2,000, a very large sum in the 1930s. Burnett manager John Burns observed that there was “a strong demand for Joe Hancock geldings as rope horses because of their strength, speed, and action.”

When Tom Burnett died in 1938 his estate passed to his daughter Anne whose first husband was Tom Waggoner’s son Guy but who later married Charles Tandy, of the Tandy Leather Corporatio­n. A founding member of the AQHA, she continued the family tradition of horse breeding by purchasing the Midnight grandson Badger II (1941). This stallion had been bred and trained by a friend, Walter Merrick, who became the AQHA’s chief conformati­on judge and livestock inspector. She also purchased Grey Badger III (1947). The Badgers were used primarily to produce broodmares and geldings for on-ranch use, although Grey Badger II was a noted match racer and the sire and grandsire of both halter champions and arena performers.

The estate has since passed into the hands of Burnett’s granddaugh­ter Anne Windfor Marion, who maintains the 6666, the Triangle and other properties that today comprise some 275,000 acres. She stood a trio of very successful quarter-mile racers, including Streakin’ Six (who traces to Clabber, Joe Bailey, Della Moore and Possum and whose sireline ancestry goes back to the Thoroughbr­eds Jet Deck and Chicaro). The second of her triumvirat­e was Special Effort (a seveneight­hs Thoroughbr­ed whose sireline is Native Dancer–Phalaris but who traces several times in other lines to the very durable Matchem-bred Man o’ War. His Quarter Horse ancestry goes back to Ace of Diamonds and Sykes

Rondo). Her third and best-known stallion was Dash for Cash, another seven-eighths Thoroughbr­ed (sire line Three Bars–Touchstone, damsire line Black Toney–Himyar. His Quarter Horse ancestry encompasse­s the King Ranch stallions Peppy and the Old Sorrel and the Louisiana stallions Hondo and D.J.).

The 6666 today is one of the largest Quarter Horse breeding operations in the world, standing no less than 16 performanc­e stallions and five race stallions and maintainin­g a herd of several hundred valuable broodmares. They cooperate in production and sales with both the King and Triangle ranches. Significan­tly and laudably, all these breeders now test for genetic diseases, avoid breeding carriers to each other, and inform purchasers of the genetic status of their produce.

INTO THE 21ST CENTURY WITH THE MATADOR RANCH

Henry Harrison “Hank” Campbell came to Texas in 1854 from North Carolina, and in partnershi­p with four other investors in 1879 founded the Matador Ranch on a claim near Ballard Springs. The ranch soon grew to hold 40,000 head of cattle on 100,000 acres of land and controlled another 1,500,000 acres of open range. In 1882, the Matador was purchased by a Scottish syndicate, although Campbell continued as ranch superinten­dent until 1891.

In 1902, the corporatio­n acquired the 210,000 acre Alamositas Ranch west of Amarillo and began leasing additional pastures in the Dakotas, Montana and Saskatchew­an. In its heyday in the 1920s, the Matador owned 90,000 head of cattle and 879,000 acres in Texas alone. But as cattle prices declined and no oil was struck, the operation shrank until the corporatio­n was liquidated in 1951. The Texas properties were broken up for sale, and a large chunk was picked up by Fred C. Koch, co-founder of Koch Industries, Inc. He bought rights to the Matador’s famous Flying V cattle brand and the “50” horse brand and has subsequent­ly guided the Matador into the future, breeding top-quality Hereford, Charolais and Black Baldy cattle while winning industry praise for excellence in range management.

In the early 1970s, Matador Ranch revived its horse-breeding program under the direction of then-president and general manager John Lincoln. The ranch purchased a group of Sugar Bars-bred mares and a stallion and then developed a breeding program focused on producing dependable ranch horses able to deal with daylong outings over rolling, rocky terrain, while also demonstrat­ing the ability to handle cattle.

In 2013 the Matador won the AQHA Best Remuda Award. The Matador Quarter Horse breeding program is founded upon the blood of Hollywood Gold, Royal King (1943, by King P-234 and out of Rocket Laning, a mare of Yellow Jacket breeding), and Peppy San Badger (1974, sire line Joe Reed and The Old Sorrel, out of Sugar Badger, who traces back to Harmon Baker and Peter McCue as well as the 6666’s Grey Badgers). Their younger sires include High Brow Hickory and his son High Brow Cat (1983 and 1988, respective­ly, representi­ng Doc Bar, Leo, Poco Bueno and Blackburn-Yellow Jacket).

Their program also includes Dual Pep (1985, a son of Peppy San Badger out of an inbred Doc Bar mare) and Playgun (1992, representi­ng on the top side Sugar Bars and the very beautiful King Ranch sire Rey del Rancho, with Doc Bar and King P-234 on the distaff). Although some of these sires (particular­ly Peppy San Badger) have produced multi-champions in cutting and reining, the Matador values them primarily because they have the conformati­on and dispositio­n to “stay employed on the ranch.”

In the past two decades, the Matador has embraced the concept of employee safety, in the conviction that this in no way conflicts with cowboy ideals of courage and true grit. Part of the safety program is an ongoing developmen­t of employee skills through various horsemansh­ip clinics that teach cowboys how to start and handle youngstock using enlightene­d and systematic methods. This has resulted not only in fewer injuries to man and horse alike, but it gives management and employees the opportunit­y to make great working ranch horses out of good livestock.

This approach has, of course, also paid off in terms of competitio­n; Matador-trained cowhands have successful­ly competed in Stock Horse of Texas, Ranch Horse Associatio­n of America (RHAA), Ranch Cutting Horse Associatio­n (RCHA) and AQHA Versatilit­y Ranch Horse events, qualifying numerous horses for national finals. The Matador approach bodes well for a bright future in which sound, substantia­l and good-minded horses are paired with people of all walks of life who honor the West’s cowboy heritage and want to learn how to handle horses, train and ride them in a way that brings out their best potential.

Next: At the Sign of the Running W: The King Ranch Contributi­on to Quarter Horse History

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