Woman Loses Her Steers and Home on the Range

Rural residents east of Ramona can breathe a sigh of relief. Carol Jessen’s dream of returning a herd of longhorns to the San Diego County range died in the dust of a San Jacinto auction arena last weekend.

A herd of nearly 200 cattle roamed--and occasionally ravaged--the countryside along California 78 west of Dudley’s Bakery until a few weeks ago, when a bankruptcy proceeding turned the cattle into chattel and sent them to the Riverside County cattle yard to be auctioned off.

Jessen, probably the only friend the longhorns have in East County, was determined to bring at least a few of them home to Ramona. But, with less than $100 in her pocket, Jessen was among the unsuccessful bidders last Saturday when the herd went on the auction block to produce funds to pay off debts.

She had cared for the longhorns for several years on the nearly 1,000-acre spread belonging to former San Diego land investor John Monk, now incommunicado in Texas. The ranch was put up for sale and the longhorn herd was shipped, following a Western-style roundup, to the auction yard early last month.

Some Missed in Roundup

Since then, another nine critters who evaded the cowboys and cattle trucks have wandered into someone’s garden and were whisked off to the San Jacinto feedlot.

“I wanted my stock back and the only way to get it is to bid on it,” explained Jessen. She said that four of her horses, six longhorn heifers and a bull were among the Monk herd that was shipped out.

The longhorns were gifts to her from Monk, she said, “and I had papers on some of them. The bull--Allegro--was registered in my name. But it didn’t make any difference. They were sold along with the rest.”

Last Saturday was one of the worst days of her life, Jessen admits. Standing there in the heat of the auction barn, she watched “her babies”--cattle weighing 1,600 pounds and more--being sold off to new owners at 55 to 63 cents per pound on the average.

Ernest Coneen was cast as the heavy in this melodrama, the villain in charge of selling off Monk’s assets--the longhorn livestock and their homestead.

Coneen, a semi-retired Santee construction company owner, provided momentary hope for Jessen when he turned to her during the auction and offered to bid on one of her favorite longhorns to give her as a gift.

But, as the price rose higher and higher, Coneen and Jessen struck a deal, “and I paid her the money, instead. She said she really didn’t have a place to keep it, anyway, and I figured that with a husband, two kids, 4 and 8, no job and hardly any money, she probably didn’t need that big thing to take care of, too.”

Helped With Papers

Coneen said that Jessen earned the commission, because she was very helpful in sorting out the registration papers and pointing out the animals’ good points.

“We’d been hoping the herd would bring $75,000, and it cleared about $65,000, mostly to breeders and rodeo operators,” Coneen said. “She probably raised the take by 10% or 15% because she knew those cattle so well.”

Ranger Shadow, Jessen’s favorite, went for 97 cents a pound, a good price. None of the herd went for slaughter.

“She was worth $20,000,” Jessen mourned about Ranger Shadow. “Up until last year, she was insured for $100,000.” But when Monk was hit with “a cash flow problem,” the insurance was dropped, and the prize longhorn was sold for a small fraction of the price Monk paid.

The hardest blow came as the longhorn auction drew to a close. Santana, “who was just like a family pet,” sold for 50 cents a pound to the auctioneer. After the gavel, Jessen said, a conversation he held with another man revealed that the auctioneer was going to have Santana slaughtered and use the longhorn’s awesome headgear as a mantle adornment.

That was just too much for her, Jessen said. She left the auction arena and returned home to Ramona without a herd and without a hope of ever seeing her enormous pets again.

A bittersweet footnote to the auction came this week when Jessen heard that Santana had been spared from the taxidermist and was again on the market. She called the San Jacinto auction house, only to learn that the price for the longhorn was $865.50--the price he had brought at the auction.

Had to Give Up

“When I heard that, I just gave up. I don’t have that kind of money,” Jessen said. “It might just as well have been $1 million.”

Jessen has cared for the longhorns, bringing them hay and water during the dry months, playing music for them while she tended to their needs, for the past four and a half years. She also held down a full-time job as a large-animal veterinary technician in Escondido.

Now everything is gone--her job, her horses and her beloved longhorns. Jessen said her Escondido employer gave her two weeks’ notice in mid-August.

Jessen’s problems started when some of the neighbors--she thinks she knows which ones--alerted the San Diego Humane Society to the longhorn herd’s alleged plight. The anonymous callers said the cattle were running out of feed, prompting Humane Society workers to rush an emergency load of 46 bales of hay to the pasture, only to find the cattle looking fit and trim, not starving.

Publicity about the Humane Society rescue mission, however, caused Jessen’s employer, an Escondido veterinary hospital, to consider Jessen a liability and to fire her.

Jessen says that she has other problems, too, but she doesn’t want to discuss her personal life. What she does know is that mean-looking longhorns with 4-foot horn spans are sometimes better company than a lot of the humans she has met.

Coneen, who earlier thought that the longhorns might sell for a song at Saturday’s auction, was saved by the arrival of registry papers on the herd which allowed sale of the adult stock for breeding at higher prices than they would have brought if sold as low-quality beef cattle.

He also had nibbles from some rodeo managers who have taken a look at the wild longhorn stock and thought the youngsters would be just the ticket for roping events because of their quickness and evasive maneuvers.

Coneen is one of Monk’s creditors and admits that he had a special interest in seeing the cattle turned into cash. But, he said, it’s a shame that this last vestige of the Old West is leaving the local range.

“What I won’t miss is the phone calls,” Coneen said. “My wife got a phone call in the wee hours of the night” from an irate Santa Ysabel family whose orchard and garden were invaded by some of the strays that evaded the roundup a month ago.

“Those folks thought that they had seen the last of the longhorns and when they came back, it was the last straw,” Coneen said.