These Days, Even Computer Cowboys Find a Home on the Range

The day he needed a police escort for his cattle drive, Craig Crandall knew the Old West had died.

His family has worked this stubborn land since 1850, when Myron Nathan Crandall arrived in a covered wagon. Now, the Crandalls run the last full-time ranch in Springville, hemmed in by tract-house neighbors who commute to the booming cities of Provo and Orem.

Sometimes, commuters meet Crandall’s heifers as he herds them down the road. The police car, added two years ago, helps keep the peace.

“People are so impatient,” Crandall says. “They start to honk their horns and gun their engines. They think, ‘I’m late for my appointment,’ and charge right through. People don’t know how to handle a herd of cattle.”

How do you handle a herd of cattle? You stop, and then you wait--concepts seldom heard these days amid the West’s stampede toward more people, more jobs and more development.

Coping with new arrivals has long been a challenge for the West. But until recently, population gains in America’s fastest-growing region were concentrated in cities--first along the West Coast, then bouncing back eastward to the inland West’s metro areas.

While Salt Lake City, Boise, Idaho, and Las Vegas boomed during the 1980s, prosperity eluded many small towns in the hinterlands.

Since 1990, however, even the rural West has seen a revival. Population declines in many remote counties have been reversed by high-tech, service and tourist industries.

The new pioneers are apt to value mountains, forests and open spaces as scenic backdrops for the good life, not as places to mine ore, saw logs or graze cows. Not surprisingly, conflicts with old-timers are multiplying.

Loggers, ranchers and miners have staged angry rallies, fighting for the right to use public lands that, not long ago, few others wanted. But even as such resource-users grow more strident, their economic clout is waning, and their complaints must compete with a new clamor of demands on the land.

It used to be a sagebrush rebel knew his foe--the gol-dang federal bureaucracy back East. The new reality for the West’s old cowboys, loggers and miners is as clear as the gang graffiti scrawled recently on the Crandalls’ silage bin.

They’ve got to deal with the neighbors, too.

*

In a dark old barn that leans to one side, the Crandall men clear a space amid the saddles, chains and baling twine. They drag some rusty chairs from the shadows, hunker down by the open door and start to tell stories.

Lamar Crandall, 71, recalls 400-mile sheep drives across the desert as a boy, when the only rule of water rights was “the firstest with the mostest.”

Craig Crandall, Lamar’s son, talks about the weather, which after 36 years still surprises him: late-winter blizzards that kill newborn calves, spring thaws that melt fields into mud, summer droughts that bake the mud to dust.

Craig’s brother, 34-year-old Calvin, cheerfully lifts his pants to show the metal rods drilled into his leg, crushed four years ago when his horse fell on it.

Together they run Crandall Farms Inc., an enterprise that raises cattle and grain on 14,200 acres of private land and nearly 12,000 acres of leased federal and state land.

Ranching is their business, but it’s something more as well. The Crandalls are custodians of a Western ideal--hard-working, horse-riding, plain-talking cowboys. They eat steak for lunch and insist that their guest have the biggest piece.

Stand with Craig Crandall amid the cow patties and look southeast to Maple Mountain, which he calls “the most pretty mountain in the world.” As he tells of horseback rides up to a snow-fed lake, it’s easy to dream that the unspoiled frontier lives on.

To wake up, turn around. Five miles to the north, yellow smog hangs above the office towers of Provo. At the edge of the Crandall ranch, the buzz of Interstate 15 grows louder every year as Springville’s fields and orchards are paved and subdivided, three houses per acre, two cars per house. The town’s population, 13,000 in 1990, is 20,000 today.

The Crandalls’ spring has gone dry, denied its water by subdivisions up the hill, and homeowners toss grass clippings over backyard fences into the Crandall’s irrigation ditches.

But these are minor irritations. The real conflicts occur on land the Crandalls do not own but have used for generations.

In Utah, as in other states across the arid West, the federal government owns most of the land. Some is set aside as national parks or wilderness areas, but most is designated for multiple use.

For years, that meant primarily that the government sold off rights to log, graze and mine. But now, as the West’s population climbs, more is expected of its public land.

Skiers, hikers, hunters, anglers, mountain-bikers and motor-bikers all want a place to play. Thirsty cities and suburbs demand greater shares of the West’s limited water. The paving of wildlife habitat on private land prompts calls for balance by designating more public land as wilderness.

A backlash among resource-users has erupted, with frequent calls to kick out the federal government and turn the public land over to states or counties.

Whoever is in charge, the demands exerted by a growing population on a fixed amount of land will continue. As the Crandalls know, the history of the American West has proceeded in one direction only--toward more limits.

In places their animals used to roam freely--Maple Mountain, Hobble Creek, Strawberry Reservoir--grazing is now barred or greatly curtailed.

Forty years ago, the family bought 1,200 acres of summer range in Keetley, 50 miles north of Springville. That land is under water now, condemned and flooded for the Jordanelle Reservoir.

Since 1963, the Crandalls have run cattle on 11,000 acres administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management. The land is a parched expanse of grass 65 miles south of Springville, and a more remote spot is hard to imagine. But even there the Crandalls are no longer alone.

All-terrain vehicles tear across the landscape. Elk hunters snip barbed-wire fences and leave gates open. The Crandalls’ water tanks, on private land near their BLM allotment, have been shot full of holes two years in a row.

“You can put up ‘No Trespassing’ signs, but that only gets them mad,” Lamar says.

Some ranchers would fume, but the Crandalls are fatalistic.

“I think this sprawl is just inevitable,” Craig says. He doesn’t like the crush of urban refugees seeking the country life, but he understands. He’s a cowboy, after all.

“Nobody wants to live up there,” he says, waving north toward the city. “It’s such a rat race. I wouldn’t live up there. No way.”

*

The windowless room where Terry DeFreese works all day is dark, illuminated only by a bank of 17 computer screens. Some glow with nature scenes downloaded from the Internet: a cabin in an alpine meadow, rock formations in Arches National Park.

DeFreese, 37, loves the great outdoors.

“Ranching, that’s in me,” he muses, leaning back from his keyboard. “I think everybody wants to be the old cowboy. You know, feed the horses and ride up into the mountains.

“Cowboys are loners. I’m a loner, too. I know it’s strange for me to be sitting in this little cubicle, surrounded by people and telephones and computers and tell you I’m a loner. I guess I’d be the cowboy with a satellite dish.”

A Seattle-area native, DeFreese moved his family to Springville in 1989. They live in a subdivision less than a mile from the Crandall ranch, and DeFreese drives 25 minutes each day to Corel Inc. in Orem, where he is a computer programmer.

When his annual three weeks of vacation roll around and DeFreese goes camping, fishing or hunting, he wants to know that an empty spot in Utah is waiting for him.

That puts him in competition with neighbors like the Crandalls, but DeFreese believes they can coexist. “There’s a lot of land out there,” he says. “Just set aside a few places where we can go, and they can ranch the rest.”

This might be a reasonable request, if there were not so many people seeking their own few places.

Census Bureau estimates show the 13 westernmost states, including Alaska and Hawaii, grew by 9.1% between 1990 and 1995, faster than any other region and far above the national rate of 5.6%.

What’s more, the West’s growth no longer is confined to cities. After years of threatening to wither up and blow away like tumbleweeds, many rural areas are rebounding.

Of the West’s 351 rural counties (defined as counties outside a metropolitan area), just 40 lost population between 1990 and 1995, compared with 132 during the 1980s.

Several trends are behind the rural renaissance:

* Modern communications and the ease of shipping high-tech products like computer software make many companies more footloose, says John Mitchell, chief economist for U.S. Bancorp in Portland, Ore.

“They can locate in places that are nice places to live,” Mitchell says. “Those kinds of places can be anywhere.”

* Retirees are venturing beyond established gray havens such as Arizona and Florida. For example, they helped boost the population of southern Utah’s Washington County by 45% between 1990 and 1995.

* The lure of skiing, hiking and other outdoor recreation spurred population growth in many rural spots: 31% since 1990 in northern Idaho’s Kootenai County, 29% in southwestern Montana’s Ravalli County, 27% in Deschutes County around Bend, Ore.

Newcomers inject life and money into once-struggling areas. But, in the process, traditional ways of life can fall by the wayside.

This happened dramatically over the Memorial Day weekend in the northern Idaho town of Smelterville, where four huge smokestacks were demolished.

The toppling of the stacks, relics from a defunct ore smelter, drew a cheering crowd of gawkers--fitting for an area staking its economic future on tourism and scenic beauty instead of mining.

So it goes throughout the West.

Mining is enjoying a resurgence in some quarters, thanks to cheaper ore-processing techniques. But, overall, agriculture and resource-extraction account for less and less of the region’s total personal income, falling from 6% in 1975 to 3.5% in 1994.

Rural resource-users say they’re being politically marginalized, a lament that Mitchell says is justified.

“There’s a tendency of some to say the resource industries are going away,” he says. “But they’re still significant in a large number of rural areas, and I worry about the tendency to write them off.”

How far the region’s economic and political climate has shifted is illustrated by the controversy over wilderness in southern Utah. Even in this conservative state, the debate is not whether to set aside wilderness, but how much to set aside.

Utah’s Republican congressional delegation favors 2.1 million acres. Environmentalists want 5.7 million acres. While Congress stalls on the issue, polls have shown Utahans divided, with urban residents generally favoring more wilderness than their rural counterparts.

None of the wilderness proposals affect the Crandalls’ grazing land, but the family opposes them out of principle.

“We’re not against wilderness,” Calvin says. “We just don’t want the whole state locked up in wilderness and reserved for wildlife.”

DeFreese is sympathetic to the ranchers’ concerns. But he has six children. Maybe some of them will want to be loners, too. He hopes Utah will have some wilderness reserved for them.

“I can understand why people with ranches and all wouldn’t want it,” he says. “But we’re the majority. It’s not fair, but we are the majority.”