The Last Roundup

The five vaqueros and I split up and encircle the 6,000-acre pasture. Our plan is to ride the fence lines and the steep sea cliffs until we’ve pushed all the cattle back to a central watering hole. Then we’ll drive them home. Jose Marquez and I ride along the southern fence. If it weren’t for the ocean in the distance, this could be Wyoming. Grassy hills roll away in all directions. Here and there, an island poppy or an Indian paintbrush blooms between cow patties and hoof prints. From where I sit in the saddle, there’s not a ship, a plane or a man-made structure to be seen, just the crystal blue ocean surrounding Santa Rosa Island off the Southern California coast.

We drive the herd down a draw toward the ranch compound. The only sound is of hooves and the little “cha’s” and whistles the vaqueros use to keep the cattle moving. A few renegades bolt but are quickly chased down and returned. One breaks toward me, obviously understanding that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. I give my horse Matilda a little “hyahhh!” and she lunges between the steer and freedom. He feints left then spins right, but Matilda’s moves are better. Bred and born on this island, she’s clearly an old hand at these games. Pancho Castillo rides over in a cloud of dust and congratulates me. “I can see you know how to ride a horse,” he says. I smile and think to myself: I could do this forever, except I can’t. Too soon it will be over. With the dawn, when these last steers and heifers depart for the mainland, a way of life on this island will end.

Ever since a settlement in January ended a bitter three-way legal contest between a national parks advocacy group, the Channel Islands National Park and Vail & Vickers, owners of the ranch, over grazing rights, public access and endangered species protection, each day has been a countdown for the cowboys of Santa Rosa. For 97 years, while the mainland coast changed from wilderness to megalopolis, time stood still at this island ranch. Now, when the last of 6,500 cattle leave, the ranch will close.

“I wish you’d come here last year,” says Bill Wallace, a laconic, weathered cowboy of 70 who has been foreman of this 54,000-acre spread for two decades. “I could have showed you thousands of fine cattle. We used to ship 4 million pounds every year, but that’s all over. All that’s left now are the cripples and crazies, and those are leaving tomorrow. What kind of story is that? That’s a tragedy is what it is.”

*

To be a cowboy there must be cows, that much is a given. And cowboying is what Wallace and his crew of Mexican vaqueros do best--waking at 5 a.m. seven days a week, riding all day leaning into winds that blow around Point Conception and howl over Santa Rosa with such force that it’s a favorite island joke that when the wind stops, the cattle fall over.

With the nearest city, Santa Barbara, 27 miles across the Pacific, the Vail & Vickers ranch is a model of self-sufficiency, a place where an old boat propeller is pressed into use as a lawn-mower blade, where no problem is so big it can’t be solved with a little common sense and a lot of hard work. In an age when many mainland ranches have replaced horses with pickups and helicopters, the island vaqueros continued to breed, raise and train their own horses for this rugged terrain.

Cattle first set foot here in 1844 when Alpheus Basil Thompson took 270 head across the Santa Barbara Channel on his schooner the Bolivar. Before that, the last large grazing animal to wander Santa Rosa was the pygmy mammoth. In the absence of grazers and predators, a unique ecosystem evolved. Most of the island was covered in sage scrub. Tiny foxes the size of a house cat were the largest land mammals on the island other than the Chumash Indians whose kitchen middens, villages and burial grounds still dot the landscape.

During the Civil War, wool was in great demand, and as many as 100,000 sheep replaced the cattle. The wool market collapsed, and soon half-wild sheep roamed unmanaged and the entire island was overgrazed. That was the condition the ranch was in when Walter L. Vail and J.V. Vickers bought the island in 1901 to turn it back over to cattle. Since then, one Vail after another has managed the ranch, with the Vickerses remaining silent partners.

The current Vail patriarchs are Russ and Al, blue-eyed, fair-haired, 76-year-old twin brothers. On first meeting they can be cranky and crusty, “a little hard-twisted,” to borrow their own term; men who could cuss the paint off the side of a barn. They’re leery, too. When approached about this article they declined to be involved until Al’s daughter, Nita, an assistant secretary of food and agriculture in Gov. Wilson’s administration, put out feelers to make sure I wasn’t a vegetarian. They’re also the kind of guys who can tell you the names, dispositions, and ancestry of most of the 100-plus horses on the island. When one of their cowboys calls from Mexico needing money, the only questions are how much and where to send it. They hark back to an Old West ranching tradition in which the land is king and you treat it with respect because it gives you life.

“Al and Russ live to ranch, they don’t ranch to live,” explains Channel Islands National Park Supt. Tim Setnicka. “They were able to do something the rest of us only read about, and then we think it’s fiction. They’re real-life Louis L’Amour novels.”

Russ and Al’s father managed the ranch, spending weekdays at the Vail & Vickers Los Angeles headquarters and weekends at the island until he died in 1943. Back then, the entire family would board the Vaquero, a 130-foot cargo vessel, at San Pedro on a Friday evening and wake up anchored off the island in the morning. On Sunday evening, after a weekend of riding, roping, hunting and running wild, the process was reversed, with the kids returning to town in time to get to school in Beverly Hills. “I don’t think we realized how lucky we were,” Russ remembers.

*

Santa Rosa Island is the second largest of the California Channel Islands, which are often called the Galapagos of the northern Pacific. Like the real Galapagos, they’re home to plants and animals that exist nowhere else on earth. In 1980 Congress expanded Channel Islands National Park to include Santa Rosa. The Vails fought to be excluded, but lost. “We were living under threat of condemnation, so we decided to expedite the sale and get it over with,” Russ remembers. In 1986 they sold Santa Rosa to the Park Service for $30 million, but retained permission to keep ranching through the year 2011 or until they died, whichever came first. “Even though we didn’t really want to sell, it was all very amiable at the time,” Russ says.

The deal didn’t hold. Upon transfer of ownership, Park Service resource scientists inventoried the island and discovered what many had suspected: The remote outpost was an ecological treasure trove. Besides 6,500 cattle and about 1,500 elk and deer, which Russ and Al’s father introduced to the island, the biologists and botanists found 10 plant species that existed only on Santa Rosa and an important nesting population of endangered snowy plovers. The resource specialists concluded that these species were being jeopardized by the cattle, deer and elk. One plant species, Arabis hoffmannii (Hoffman’s rockcress), was confined to eight plants on a tiny cliff ledge protected from grazers. All the rest had been eaten or trampled. Others, like the Santa Rosa Island manzanita (Arctostaphylos confertiflora), couldn’t reproduce because of the animals. Another time, snowy plover nests were found trampled by wandering cattle.

The discoveries put the Park Service’s agreement with Vail & Vickers in direct conflict with the agency’s mandate to protect species on the island. In the ensuing dispute, top Park Service administrators, who wanted to uphold the spirit of the agreement with the Vails, were pitted against the field staff of the park, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Regional Water Quality Control Board and environmental groups. Environmentalists discovered through a Freedom of Information Act request that the Vails’ agreement with the government was revocable if the cattle operation was found to conflict with park preservation. The National Parks and Conservation Assn., a nonprofit group, filed a lawsuit to compel the park to enforce its own rules.

Brian Huse, regional director of the association, says the goal was to make sure the park was protected, not to “end the era of the rancheros. We entered into two years of negotiation with the park and the Vails and we were getting stonewalled. There was nothing we could do but sue the park to uphold the law.”

Rather than battle it out in court, the parties involved agreed to a settlement requiring removal of all cattle from the island by the end of the year but allowing the Vails to gradually phase out the deer and elk, which support a lucrative private hunting operation. Even as the ranch closes, however, a debate rages over what will happen once the cattle are gone. The pro-cow crowd says the cattle have been serving an important role in controlling exotic weeds, which they say will overrun the island and choke out the very endangered species that removing the cattle was supposed to protect. “It’s like putting toothpaste back in the tube,” says Al Vail. He points to neighboring Santa Cruz Island, where wild fennel took over after its cows were removed. The anti-cattle faction say the opposite will happen, that the native flora will bounce back and compete successfully with exotic species that were better adapted to the grazing ecology. But the truth is nobody knows.

“That’s a huge shock to the natural system, yanking those cattle off,” says Setnicka, the park superintendent. “I would have preferred to do it slowly and cautiously. My own opinion is that the natural resources won’t be better off. Basically, the Park Service was handed a bigger mess by well-intentioned people.” Setnicka is also concerned about the end of the ranching culture. “How do we preserve the ranching history? It’s not just the buildings and the barns. When you walk up that pier and see Al Vail leading a range crew on horseback, you’re walking back in time. How do I preserve that?” For their part, the Vails have stopped cooperating with the Park Service on any cultural preservation efforts. A documentary film and a series of oral histories that were to be funded with federal money were stopped in their tracks when the Vails refused to participate. “We find it ironic,” says Nita Vail, “that they’ve just got done driving us out of business and now they want to replicate it.”

*

In the hours before the roundup, Wallace is restless. He and his wife Meredith are sitting at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee. Normally Wallace would be hard at work: directing his crew, ordering supplies, tending sick cattle and the like. But there’s nothing more for him to do. I ask Wallace if I can join in the final roundup that afternoon, but he says no, muttering something about not enough horses. Resigned, I pull up a chair and start asking questions. I can tell I’m making him and Meredith uncomfortable by pestering them about what they’ll do next in life, where they’re going after they leave the island; questions for which they don’t seem to have answers. They generally leave the island just twice a year--to pay taxes and buy Christmas presents.

Suddenly, Wallace shoots me a weary look and asks, “Are you good writer?”

“A good writer?” I reply.

“No, rider. How well can you ride a horse?”

“Good enough.”

“Then let’s go get you a horse; the cowboys are leaving in 10 minutes.”

We saddle up and ride out of the corral up a rutted dirt road to the Carrington pasture on the island’s northern tip. Our horses alternate between trotting and walking, jostling for position. Speaking among themselves in Spanish, the cowboys talk about horses, cattle, saddles and pending visits to wives and families back in Mexico when they leave the island the next day. Unlike their Garth Brooks-listening mainland counterparts, with their skintight Wranglers, silver belt buckles and ten-gallon hats, these buckaroos wear baggy jeans, low sturdy boots and baseball caps--a Stetson wouldn’t last in these winds.

Marquez, also known as “Scalper” for the Bowie knife he wore on his belt when he first came to the island at 19, says he has been here 20 years. “I was living in Los Angeles and nobody would give me a job because I was very young-looking. Then Al called a guy I knew and asked if he knew an extra cowboy.” Marquez lives with his wife, Griselda, and two children in the island’s old schoolhouse. But he will have to move on soon. When he leaves, the Vails will fly the family off the island because the kids get seasick on boats. Russ Vail’s son Tim, a veterinarian in Indio, has offered Marquez a job. “I’ve never lived in the desert before. I think it’s very hot there. But I’m going to go take a look and see if I like it.”

Pancho Castillo is 45 years old, with a wife and kids he supports in Mexico. “It’s really bad what they’re doing because it’s the end of this way of living,” he says. He pauses and stares at his hand, the one missing two fingers from an industrial accident in Mexico. “There’s so much pasture here, and now it’s going to be used for nothing. I don’t know what to feel. It’s very bad.”

The roundup concludes without a hitch. We put the last “cripples and crazies” into the corral, unsaddle and brush our horses and head to dinner. The original two-story bunkhouse burned down in 1969 when a drunk cook took his cigarette to bed. The replacement looks like a modern tract home. The mess hall has an L-shaped metal counter with red vinyl swivel stools, more Mel’s Diner than “Bonanza.” While we shovel down enchiladas, Castillo shows me some reins he wove out of rawhide. Leather-making is a tradition here. The tack room is filled with saddles made by Wallace. When Al and Russ were born, the foreman wove each of the babies a lariat. Al still has his, 76 years later.

*

Wallace wakes me before dawn. We head down to the pier, where the Vaquero II is tied up. Custom-built in the 1950s for Vail & Vickers, the 65-foot-long, 25-foot-wide wooden boat is a one-of-a kind floating corral. Wallace lowers the cattle chute and Jesus Bracamontes locks it into place. Planks shake as Castillo and Arturo Teran drive the first of the cattle down the pier. Soon we are down to the last one. As it goes down the chute, Meredith looks up with moist eyes. “It makes me sad because this is the last time,” she says. “It shouldn’t have had to happen like this. This was a terrific ranch.”

The cowboys are casting off dock lines as I say my good-byes and leap aboard. We motor toward Port Hueneme in the fog. Near Anacapa Island, the fog lifts a little. Behind us a blue whale spouts several times. Dolphins join up and surf in the bow wake. As we approach shore, the captain, Russ Collins, gets on the radio to declare his cargo. “Port Hueneme, this is the Vaquero coming in with 44 steers. This is the last of them.”