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The Home of the Brave
Vague and acrid as the ocherous smoke drifting in
scarves and shoals from fires burning across the West, the specter of
Range Reform pervaded the Rocky Mountain states last summer, the
driest on record since 1932. In drought years, ranchers must move
their cattle rapidly off one pasture and onto the next in order to
prevent them from biting down the sparse short grasses. Over on the
Thoman Ranch on the Green River several miles south of Fontenelle Dam,
they were shorthanded during the season as the youngest daughter,
Laurie, completing her reign as Miss Rodeo Wyoming, appeared in rodeos
and parades around the Western states, while in town, 30 miles away, I
was sunk in an armchair scribbling notes for a book. When may a
gentleman refuse a lady in distress? I think of Jeeves' answer to
Bertie Wooster, who had inquired on what occasion a gentleman may
appear without a necktie. (There is no occasion, Jeeves replied, when
a gentleman may not wear a necktie.)
Being a friend of Mary Thoman is hard work. Back in
Kemmerer, my study was filling up with documents pertaining to the
Cumberland/Uinta Grazing Allotment Steering Committee; down here on
the Green River I had been in the saddle since 7:30 A.M., and it was
getting on to six in the evening now. Mary sat the bay thoroughbred,
barking orders from under the rolled brim of her purple felt hat at
the cows, and at me. We had pushed the 30-odd head of cattle out of
the Seedskadee Allotment (federal range), for which the Thomans'
grazing permit was set to expire at midnight, and were trying to put
them across the river where they balked, most of them standing
in water to their chests but some breaking from the herd to gallop
onto the grassy verge. We ki-yied and sshed, hazing them, setting the
horses at the water to push the cows into midstream and breaking away
to round up and drive back the renegades, but each time the leaders
were lifted off bottom by the current and began swimming they changed
their minds and returned to shallow water. My horse was so exhausted I
could get no acceleration from him, and at last Mary said we had
better hold the cows together in the river until Mickey Thoman, who
was bringing along a second bunch, arrived.
"As hot as it is, I'm surprised they don't want to
get wet. They're behaving really badly today. I wish Mother would
hurry up and get here."
It was pleasant sitting horseback in the river
where the weeds ran their full length in the freshened current caused
by a recent release from the dam upstream, pale boulders parted the
infinite series of advancing black wavelets with a purling sound, and
the big riverine cottonwoods turned over slowly on a light wind,
exposing the pale undersides of their leaves. On both sides of the
river the desert lifted away in golden steps beyond the vivid green of
the trees. Mary, as she kept a watchful eye on the cows, described for
me their complicated social life: how they will park their calves when
they need to go to water, how they provide daycare for the calves of
other cows . . . "--Bring that one back!" she shouted, pointing
suddenly behind me. I reined the horse about and took off at a gallop,
slapping with the full length of my legs at the broad barrel.
"You know," I told her when we had brought everyone
together again, "maybe the way for you ranchers to get around the
environmentalist crowd is to play up the humane and sympathetic
qualities of cows: their intelligence, their caring nature, their
inherently progressive social system--"
"No," Mary said decidedly, "it wouldn't work. They
wouldn't let us sell them for beef then. Here comes Mother along the
fence with the cows. What is she doing on the other side of it?"
She rode over to greet her across the wire while I
held the cows in the water, and returned to explain that Mickey,
seeing the gate above the river in the closed position, had assumed
that it was also locked. An electric fence installed by the government
to keep cattle out of the wildlife refuge prevented her from putting
the cows around the end of the Thoman's fence and driving them
upstream to our herd. So we stood once more with the cows while Mickey
drove her animals back along the fence, off the bottom and onto the
bench and across it half a mile to the gate, and down to the river
again.
When we added Mickey's cows to our cows the
expanded herd began immediately to cross, taking a course downriver
from the one we had chosen for them. Here the water ran shallower than
it appeared from the bank, but we were careful anyway to give wide
berth to the boulders, behind which the current gouges deep holes;
falling into one of these, a panicked horse will attempt to climb on
the swimming rider. In the early 70's, while the Thoman family was
battling the federal government's campaign to condemn their deeded
land along the river for the refuge, Mary's sister Cathy was drowned
crossing the Green on horseback.
As soon as the cows reached the opposite shore they
dove into the cottonwoods and willows and scattered; we put the horses
after them, dodging and wheeling among the tree trunks, the down
timber, and the shattered stumps, the raking branches and the
underbrush. The cattle ran bawling and stomping, but within ten
minutes we had flushed them from the breaks and set them moving
together onto the bench and across the upland sagebrush turning
lavender under the flat long strokes of the setting sun. The yellow
grass had headed a month or six weeks early and the bentonite ground
was parched to a hardness that went to powder under the animals'
hooves, forcing me to raise my bandana against the dust and pollen and
miniscule fragments of sagebrush. Thirty minutes later we put the cows
through the gate onto new pasture. Then we rode down the river and
crossed at a low place, Mickey's Blue Heeler rolling his eye at me as
he swam doggedly beside the horse.
"Do you see," Mary asked, "where the sod is falling
into the river? They tell us the cows do that, but the river undercuts
the grass naturally. If the BLM comes out here tomorrow and finds any
of our cows left, we'll be in trouble. I'll fly in the morning and see
if I can spot any stragglers."
The Cessna appeared to pivot on one wing on the
desert flat as we turned west again toward the river. From 500 feet up
(7000 on the altimeter) the desert looked almost entirely barren, a
lichenous pattern of spaced sagebrush spread over a pale gray floor
pimpled with ant hills and stained white by alkali deposits. The smoke
from fires in Washington, California, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah dimmed
the sky, and I made out the Big Sandy fire burning up a canyon in the
Wind River Range, 80 miles east across the Green River Basin and
visible this morning only as a dark transitional shadow between the
earth and the sky. Meandering south from the wide cofferdam
restraining Fontenelle Reservoir the Green revealed its rust-colored
bed, streaked by weedy greens above which white pelicans floated. The
bottom was emerald on the east side of the river, but on the west side
its intensity was muted and the polls of the cottonwoods showed gray
and ugly.
"The trees have been dying since they filled the
reservoir," Mary explained as she brought the wing up. "Cottonwood
seeds can't germinate without a layer of silt above them laid down by
flooding. With the dam in place, there are no more spring floods, and
without the floods the water table is dropping. Add to that the salty
alkali ponds the refuge is providing, and there's no way for the trees
to live. We can see those trees dying back a little every year; in
another 15 or 20, they'll all be dead, except on the side of the river
where we irrigate. But the environmentalists don't care. They think
that because the government did it, everything is perfectly all
right."
We scrutinized the bottom carefully and saw no cows
on the refuge, but Mary was not willing to return to Kemmerer yet. In
the groves along the banks and on the islands where the river braided,
buildings constructed of logs hewn from the same cottonwoods stood in
various stages of disrepair. Some of these, built by the early
homesteaders, had been acquired by the Thomans and finally abandoned
when, after a 20-year condemnation, the federals succeeded in forcing
the family from the land on which they had established a prosperous
ranch and raised six of their seven children. "All for a bird refuge,
and we're not even on a major flyway," Mary said.
This action followed by a decade the acquisition,
also by the federal government, of the ranch's deeded land upriver,
which though crucial to its operation for pasture and the production
of a hay crop was desired by the United States Bureau of Reclamation
to create a major water impoundment on the upper Green River. When the
Bureau of Sports Fisheries approached them about taking the majority
of their remaining land for the refuge, the Thomans decided it was
time to make a stand against the government. They fought the
condemnation for years at tremendous legal cost, but the law regarding
takings was even less generous 30-some years ago than it is today and
their adversary had no incentive to compromise and no obligation to
offer a land exchange. Instead, after accomplishing thievery by legal
means, it admitted having neglected to secure a Congressional
appropriation from which to make compensation: unable to offer full
payment at the time of transfer, it dribbled checks in widely
disparate amounts over a ten-year period to the Thoman Ranch, which
could not tell from one month to the next how much money to expect and
for that reason was incapable of either purchasing another ranch or
rebuilding on higher ground above the river north of the refuge. At
last, two weeks before Christmas while the family was burying their
eldest son after he had been killed in a winter wreck on South Pass,
the federals sent final payment and notified the Thomans that, their
patience exhausted, they would henceforth charge them a fine of $500
for each day that they remained on the old ranch. By working through
the winter with a backhoe, excavating the foundations and the water
and sewer lines, the Thomans installed themselves in March on
the new place, having incurred a penalty of $15,000. In Mary's
girlhood, there were no paved roads to Fontenelle, no electricity and
no water. Turning north again, she pointed out for me the white frame
schoolhouse in which the Thoman children had been instructed by a
teacher billeted on the ranch and where she had taken her first steps
on the road to a Ph.D.
We flew north of the ranch, and circled it. "Is
that you, Mary?" Mickey called up on the radio, and Mary assured her
that the cows were now where they belonged. As the July sun heated the
ground and the thermals rose, putting substantial bumps in the road,
we took a southwest heading on the Kemmerer Airport, known to pilots
as among the most hazardous in North America. The Exxon Corporation's
La Barge Creek sour gas plant passed under the left wing, and also a
few of its contributing wells. (I'd worked on one of these wells years
before, in January of 1980, when the temperature reached 40 degrees
below zero and the wind blew 60 miles an hour; the drilling crew was
so bundled you couldn't tell them apart from each other and the heater
in the derrick froze solid.) Off the right wing 20 miles out, the
tilted blue ridges--Absaroka, Indian, Commisary, Dempsey--ran north in
parallel lines toward the Wyoming and Salt River Ranges. So much
country, so little time to get to know it all.
The windsock pointed northeast. Mary overflew the
airport and came around sharply north, preparing to land to the south.
As the Cessna lowered toward the airstrip the runway lights flashed
on, red over white, and suddenly the sock swung directly into line
with our approach. I recalled another friend who had nearly caught a
wingtip while attempting to land on this high mesa always subject to
powerful shifting winds, but we were committed now. Mary made a nearly
perfect three-point landing and taxied up to the gas pump. In spite of
his many thousands of hours as a military pilot and since, the deputy
sheriff to whom she leases the plane was once diverted by crosswinds
seconds before touchdown onto the alternate east-west runway.
"People ask me if I'm not afraid to fly a plane,"
Mary said. "I tell them it's when I get on a horse that my life passes
before my eyes, nowadays."
She dropped me at the house and thanked me for my
help with the cattle drive. "The ranchers are the best
environmentalists Bruce Babbitt will ever find," Mary said. "The land
has been such a part of our lives! Since the government took our
deeded land, we've been completely dependent on the federal leases
that Babbitt wants to 'reform.' When I talk about the last roundup,
I'm not kidding anymore." |
