20th-Century Cowboy

“I had an uncle named Joe Johnson. He had one eye and he was an ornery critter. He wore a derby hat and mule-ear boots. You ever see those boots with mule ears? on ‘em? You know you had to be tough to wear a derby as a cowboy.”

Delane Kendall speaks of his late Uncle Joe with all the reverence a VFW member might reserve for Douglas MacArthur. But one fears that if Uncle Joe were still around to see Nephew Delane sitting out on the patio of his Rancho Mission Viejo home--with three TVs inside wired for cable--he might give his whippersnapper nephew a fierce one-eyed look and flog him a bit with his derby.

“This is how you carry on the cowboy tradition?” Uncle Joe might ask.

Well, Uncle Joe, give Delane a break. He’s trying.

Never mind that he hasn’t slept in a bunkhouse in 10 years or rolled his own cigarette since he was 13. Or that he spends much of his workweek driving around a ranch in a pickup truck with a briefcase on the seat.

He does wear cowboy hats and boots and Levis. And his heart is all cowboy.

That’s got to count for something, Uncle Joe. After all, it’s not easy being a 20th-Century cowboy just a lariat’s throw from several major shopping malls.

“I tell people I’m a cowboy,” Kendall says. “Every once in a while, I run into somebody who doesn’t believe it. They say, ‘Are you for real?’ I say, ‘I hope so.’ ”

From high on a ridge in Chiquita Canyon on the 40,000-acre Rancho Mission Viejo, Kendall looks out over open range, over territory that looks much as it did 100 years ago when R.J. O’Neill bought it, and sees the present and the future. One can’t help but picture the past, too: Indians standing on another ridge a century ago, watching silently as progress assaulted them.

Stretched in front of Kendall is a broad expanse of scrub brush and green valleys that eventually leads into traffic and high-rise condos in the populous heart of Orange County. But from the ridge, where one can see cattle grazing and two-point deer idling under an oak tree, the past is holding down the fort, forestalling the ineluctable onslaught of people and progress.

“The freeway’s down over that hump,” Kendall says, pointing westward. “Santa Ana’s over there. If it were clearer today, all you’d see out there would be houses, houses, houses.”

He doesn’t say it hatefully. His 60th birthday behind him last summer, Kendall is wise enough to know that people in modern societies need houses. But he can remember a different time--a time fast approaching 50 years ago--when he rolled his own cigarettes on a cattle drive, when he spent nights on the trail between Reed Valley and Lake Hemet in neighboring Riverside County and bathed in icy creek waters, and when he wrote letters home by the light of a Coleman lamp.

Kendall is a cowboy--in all that the word conjures up. He’s got the telltale battle scars--the bum right knee that a steer smashed and the fingers gnarled from working the reins and ropes. He also speaks with a cowboy’s directness. Why ramble through a complicated sentence when a bit of plain talk will do? Ask him, for example, why he’s still a cowboy--one of about a dozen working cowboys left in the county, by his estimate.

“Because I want to. That’s the only answer I can give.”

He abandoned plans to have his own ranch and settled in 18 years ago as superintendent of the cattle operation at the ranch, still owned by the pioneering O’Neill family. As “cow boss,” Kendall supervises three cowboys, performing much of his work in the pickup equipped with a two-way radio. The briefcase is filled with papers and information about the cattle that goes into a computer.

“I’ve got to be partly businessman,” he says. “Some of these younger cowboys wouldn’t give a hoot. All they want to do is get up in the morning, saddle a horse and work. As far as sitting down and doing the book work, they could care less. Some of them hate it. But every ranch had a foreman. All through the years, ever since they had cattle ranches, there’s got to be someone who wants to sit down and keep track of something.”

For Kendall, that means monitoring cattle prices and tending to 1,000 head. When the business day is done, he often retires to his den, where he either flips on the TV or--more likely--dips into a book. His library features Herman Wouk and James Michener but is top-heavy with Western history and Robert Ludlum spy thrillers.

That’s not to say Kendall, married and the father of two grown children, doesn’t saddle up anymore. He does, but it’s no longer a staple of the job. “We’re not supposed to go out and sleep in the saddle every night,” he says.

Kendall is not one to glorify the cowboy mystique. “Some people love horses,” he says. “I never had a horse I loved. Some I liked more than others.

“You’d be surprised,” he says, debunking another myth, “how many people I meet who say they’d love to come out and ride with me and be a cowboy. There’s always the movies to make it seem so romantic. That’s a bunch of bull.”

Kendall says cowboying hasn’t changed much in 100 years. There are cows to move, fences to mend, horses to feed and various fix-it jobs. “All they’d have to do is be with me about two days and they couldn’t stand it,” he scoffs.

But it has its pleasures. Rancho Mission Viejo is split down the middle by a winding stretch of the Ortega Highway, whose bullying, speedway imagery makes it a strange neighbor for the pristine, peaceful ranch.

South of the highway, in Cristianitos Canyon, dotted with sycamores, oaks and sumac, Kendall finds special solace. “This is one of the prettiest valleys in Orange County,” he says. “I hope I’m dead before they put houses on it.”

Driving along another stretch of the Ortega Highway leading to the ranch, Kendall points to the roadside homes. “About 18, 19 years ago, I went to Nevada for a few days. When I came back, the orange groves were down and the frames of the houses had already been put up. It was like coming back to a different country.”

Kendall hasn’t tried to buck the inevitable. He’s a cowboy, but he’s also an employee of the O’Neill family’s Santa Margarita Co., which owns the ranch. Of the encroachment of houses, he says without rancor: “I hate to see it developed, but I know it has to be. Progress is something you have to put up with, no matter how much you hate to see the land go.”

He is talking on the patio outside his home. It’s a cool morning and he’s drinking hot coffee. On mornings like this, with his dog running through the tall grass and the morning deadly quiet, one senses that time could never encroach on the ranch. And Kendall is quick to point out the company’s efforts to maintain the ranch’s beauty. “You can get fired for throwing a beer can or a pop can out the window on this ranch,” he says appreciatively.

But, of course, time does encroach. Kendall wonders whether he is seeing the last generation of cowboys. “I kind of worry about it sometimes. I honestly do. I think, ‘Who’s going to do it next?’ There’s not a lot of them coming up. There’s a bunch of young cowboys who are awful good rodeo hands, but not too many of them who want to go out and work the ranch. If you’re good, you can make more money at rodeoing than you can on a ranch.”

Even the nature of cattle raising is working against the perpetuation of the cowboy species, Kendall says. In some places, for example, calves are taken from their mothers almost immediately and “put in pens and stay all their life on concrete floors until the day they’re sold to the butchers.”

Which means, Kendall concedes, that someday his successor as cow boss might do the job in a business suit instead of Levis. “It could easily happen,” he says.

But until it does, there are memories of the old days.

“You get a cowboy by himself, he might be kind of standoffish,” Kendall says. “But get a bunch of them together and you won’t find a wilder bunch.”

Ask him to recall a particularly raucous tale from around the old campfire, he says, “It wasn’t around the old campfire, I guarantee you that.”

He then breaks into a prolonged chuckle, as if privately recalling a long-ago night in a rowdy cow town when, like the dinosaurs, cowboys ruled the world.

Those days, indeed, may be gone. Wild nights in the High Sierra seem far away and long ago when the affluence of Orange County and the lights of L.A. are closing in around you.

But, Kendall says, looking out over the sprawling property outside his home, “We have a boundary we can cut all that off, in our minds and everyplace else. When I’m here on the ranch, I forget about how close I am to civilization. The times I drive to L.A., I can’t get home fast enough to cross that boundary and get off that highway.”