Colorado Woman’s Home Is on the Range : Rural life: Evelyn Horn, a middle-aged mother, is one of the nation’s few female cattle ranchers. Her late husband’s diaries are her guidebook.

As her horse bounds over the red, sagebrush-covered hills of the V11 Ranch, Evelyn Horn grips saddle and reins in her small, strong hands.

“Push ‘em up! Push ‘em up! Hee-ya!” she whoops at the cows, flinging an arm into the air. Riding nearby is her daughter, Trudy England, who helps her run the ranch and push the cows.

On a recent morning, mother and daughter moved a sea of red, brown, white and black cattle to a new pasture, up and down steep gullies, through shimmering stands of aspen and up hillsides to join up with ranch foreman Ferris Kirby.

For six years since her husband’s death, Horn has run the V11 Ranch. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 1987 agricultural survey, fewer than one in 10 of the nation’s cattle ranches are operated by women.

Horn, 54, grazes about 300 of her own cattle and several hundred belonging to other ranchers on the 1,200-acre ranch near Interstate 70. She leases adjacent land from the federal Bureau of Land Management.

Horn also owns a 1,800-acre ranch near Loma, Colo., where she moves the cattle every December. The cattle stay on that ranch, plus 18,200 adjacent acres Horn uses with a BLM permit, through the spring calving season.

As a cattlewoman, Horn haggles over water rights with neighbors and negotiates contracts with other ranchers and leases with the BLM. She rides fences, tracks market trends and decides when to sell the calves she helps deliver every spring.

“My husband was a very good teacher; he taught me everything,” she said over her kitchen table after half a day’s work moving cattle. “He kept business diaries, and I read and read them.”

It was her husband’s diaries, she says, that enabled her to run the ranch. After Leonard Horn died in 1985, she used them as a date-by-date manual. Through the documents, Leonard told his wife when to move cattle, what pastures to use and when to negotiate contracts.

“I was overwhelmed with the estate the first two years, getting all the papers to the attorneys,” Horn said. “I rode with Leonard in really bad weather and cold weather. That didn’t scare me. I was scared about not knowing what would happen.”

Yet Horn was confident that she could run the ranch and everything would be fine. “Leonard taught me: ‘It’s your decision to make, so live with it and go on.’ It’s worked for me,” she said. “The six years I’ve been ranching, the markets have been up.”

Before Leonard Horn died, Evelyn was part of a husband-wife team. She wrote checks, cooked and typed reports to the BLM. Team management is a common practice, with ownership lying with the husband and the wife in a supporting role.

“It’s more substantial a role than you’d pick up by reading trade journals,” said Jim Miller, spokesman for the Colorado Department of Agriculture. He says the female half of a ranching team “is more supporting, ranging from being a technical expert on something to being basically a hired guy.”

“It’s not 50-50,” said Horn, who readily admits that she likes neither cooking nor sewing. She says she never was cut out to be a homemaker.

After her husband underwent heart surgery, Horn rode with him every day. Keeping one eye on him, Horn learned the ranch.

To keep the BLM leasing rights, Horn needed to run more cattle than her own herd, but she had trouble finding someone willing to entrust their cattle to her.

Then a young man named Shane Wilson made a deal. “I had the feeling he thought he’d never see his cattle again,” she said.

More than four years later, Horn is still running Wilson’s cattle.

“She is smarter than most men,” said David Christensen, a sheep rancher and longtime family friend. “Lots and lots of men ranchers are not producing calves anywhere near the weight she is. Ranches need to change. She can change.”

But the land over which Horn runs her cattle is for sale. Leonard Horn’s two daughters from a previous marriage, who share ownership of the V11 Ranch but live out of state, want to sell. The ranch, its water rights and BLM leases, are for sale for $2 million.

Horn says she likely will move down to the Loma ranch. England says she will go with her mother, taking her husband and son along.