Drought Drives Ranchers on Trail to Last Roundup

With no snow last winter, and no rain last spring, there is no grass this summer. With no grass there is no choice. They must bring their herds here, to this stop on the old Santa Fe Trail, this crossroads of the ancient trading routes, and sell.

They arrive almost every morning, their sad caravans pulling up to the two sale barns on the edge of town. They sort their cattle into pens, then arrange themselves in bleachers around the dirt ring, trying to maintain their composure while they watch the hard work of a lifetime go to the highest bidder.

It’s more than just another dry season for the 16,000 cattle ranchers of Colorado, proud men who have been running cattle on this vast grassland since their grandfathers first taught them the difference between a calf and a yearling. As the West swelters through a once-in-a-lifetime drought, as the soil turns the driest it’s been since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, ranchers are forced to cut back or fold up spreads that have been in their families for generations.

Some weep. Others hold the frozen smiles of men losing at poker. No matter what face they show the world, however, every herd being broken up means a cattleman’s heart is being broken, and everyone in the sale barns knows it.

“I don’t know a single buyer,” says John Campbell, manager of one sale barn, “who hasn’t expressed concern and compassion for these sellers.”

Outside one barn last week, a Kansas woman whose husband had come to buy cattle met a Colorado man who had come to sell. They stood, visiting, and the man told the woman about his troubles--dry weather, hungry livestock. She shoved her fists into the pockets of her long skirt.

“That’s a shame,” she said. “A real shame.”

He looked at her, his face wracked with worry, and they walked together like old partners into the barn.

Herd liquidations are happening elsewhere in the drought-stricken West, but the ranchers of Colorado consider La Junta the epicenter. Even under normal circumstances, they say, La Junta is the nation’s second-busiest cattle market, after Oklahoma City. But suddenly the steady flow of summer sales has turned into a stampede.

La Junta and cattle have always gone together, like hamburger and ketchup, since the days when driving a herd through downtown didn’t involve a trailer. And the two sale barns in La Junta have always been sanctuaries for ranchers, places for talking shop and socializing after weeks of speaking with no one but their cows. The air is warm and moist with the smell of dung. The walls and floors are specked with flies and spit and cigarette butts and sunflower seeds. The auctioneers and ring men exchange sly winks with the buyers and silly jokes with the sellers, and it’s all a bit of fraternity and fun for loners who rarely go a day without breaking a sweat.

This summer, however, the barns have become somber playhouses, their rings the stages for one-act tragedies about the ravages of drought.

“A rancher and his cattle--it’s like a romance,” Campbell said.

And when the romance ends, the lowing of the cows can sound like weeping violins.

On a typical June day last year, a sale barn in La Junta would auction about 1,700 head of cattle. This summer the barns are working three times that fast, and one day last week the number of cattle sold hit 6,000. The sell-off has become so frenzied, both barns are adding extra days to their schedules, with some auctions going around the clock.

One buyer from Missouri, who didn’t want to give his name, came to La Junta last month with the intention of staying two days. When he saw the quality and abundance of cattle coming into the barns, he stayed six weeks, filling $4.5 million worth of orders from various clients. By Wednesday the man had shipped 142 semis full of cattle back East, and he wasn’t done.

Before the summer is over, two-thirds of Colorado’s 3.3 million head of cattle will be sold or shipped elsewhere to graze, said Chuck Hanagan, executive director of the local Farm Service Agency. The immediate loss to ranchers will be $420 million, he estimated. But the long-term effect on the region, and on a way of life as old as the West, is impossible to gauge.

“These guys are selling their livelihood,” Hanagan said. “It would be like a carpenter selling his tools.”

Floyd Rains was just one of the ranchers selling off last week. He came to town early from his spread just south, parked his pickup in the lot and walked slowly past the pens, where his herd was being sorted. Bulls this way, cows and calves that way.

He entered the barn, which was already packed with buyers from Missouri, Kentucky, Minnesota and other rain-soaked states where the ground has been blessed with a velvety layer of grass. A few men stared in sympathy. Rains acknowledged their stares from deep under the brim of his white cowboy hat.

He looked tired.

“Only slept a little last night,” he said, spitting the words out like sunflower seeds.

He took a seat in the second row, beside Paul and Gayle Taramarcaz, who also hadn’t gotten much sleep. They drove 160 head from Gunnison the night before and slept in a downtown motel. They weren’t selling off completely, like Rains, but they were drastically cutting the size of their herd, and they too were holding themselves tight.

“Makes you want to cry,” Gayle said.

“I’d rather let them go,” Paul said, “than let them go hungry.”

Riding around the ranch these days, Paul sees things he hasn’t seen in his 70 years. Creek beds that have always sparkled with mountain runoff--dry. Irrigation ditches that have never been without moisture--dry.

“It’s pretty sad when you see them out there with nothing to drink or eat,” he said of his cows. “It hurts you.”

The pain will come in waves. Nearly a third of the cows being sold are carrying calves, Hanagan said, “so those calves won’t be hauled to the feedlots this fall.” The feedlots will feel the pinch first, along with their suppliers. Then the trucking companies that would have hauled the calves to the feedlots will feel it, followed by the service stations that would have pumped gas for those trucks, and the restaurants that would have fed the drivers, and the farms that supply the restaurants.

Then there is the matter of pride. A rancher spends a lifetime cultivating his herd. Some ranchers trace an animal’s lineage on a line parallel with their own.

“They can tell you if a cow is a sixth-, seventh-, eighth-generation heifer,” Hanagan said. “Forty years ago that rancher branded that cow’s great-great-great-great-grandmother. He can remember when his grandfather went back to Missouri to pick up the bulls who sired that bloodline.”

Now, forced to sell that cow before it’s calved, the rancher loses not just his inheritance but also part of his heritage.

For some, it’s like losing a friend.

“I’ve got a cow here today,” Paul Taramarcaz said. “An old milking cow, name of Old Ellie, I’ve had her for years.”

Gayle gasped.

“Oh no!” she said. “Not Old Ellie!”

“Yeah,” he said, looking guilty.

“I didn’t know you brought Old Ellie.”

He nodded.

“Ooh,” she said.

They turned away from each other and faced the ring, where Old Ellie would eventually come through a gate, and the bidding would start at around $400.

Paul is a quiet man, Gayle said, so it’s hard to tell when he’s being quiet for a special reason. But this morning she could tell he was different. No jokes. No smart remarks. He just stared, hard.

Across the barn, staring back, was 72-year-old Hans Hansen. He came to La Junta neither to buy nor sell, just to watch, and to hope he wasn’t seeing a preview of his own fate. “I’m just trying to decide if I can hold on,” Hansen said, “or if I’ll have to pull the plug.”

Besides his fate, everything about Hansen seemed determined by the arid country. His eyes were blue as a cloudless sky. His wrinkles looked like dry riverbeds. Even his voice rumbled like far-off thunder as he acknowledged his debt to the elements.

“It’s amazing how much we live with the weather,” he said. “It calls all the shots.”

Though the land seems to fight him and resist his love, Hansen clings to it with a vise grip. He seldom strays far from home. He sleeps in the room where he was born and hasn’t spent a night in a different bed for five years.

At first glance he might seem like the rancher emeritus around here, the white-haired elder, but soon it becomes clear that Hansen’s no different from the others, just a more sharply drawn version of the archetype. All the ranchers in the barn are branded by their sameness. They all wear white hats. They all drive trucks. They all say as much as a novel with just a nod.

And they all take a fierce pride in their connection to the past, to the first ranchers who ran cattle across the grassland. They derive confidence from their link to those pioneers, who came through disease and dust and every other disaster, and never said die.

Still, if the skies don’t open up soon, Hansen said, you have to wonder.

“A lot have already pulled the plug,” he said. “They had to get jobs in town.”

He pronounced this fate as though it were far worse than death.

After a brief pause for a change of auctioneers, it was time at last for Rains’ cattle to be sold.

“These are 4-year-old Angus bulls,” the new auctioneer bellowed, as the first animals came into the ring with Rains’ brand on their backsides--a lazy TH over a bar. “These are from Floyd Rains’ place out south, and I imagine they’re only being sold because it’s dried up out there.”

Rains’ bulls ran around the ring, staring, their eyes nearly as sad as Rains’. There was a flurry of bids, then the auctioneer murmured, “Sold.” The bulls were shooed through a gate on the right, after fetching nearly $670 a head.

“Less than I paid for them,” Rains grumbled.

Next came his cows, “all with calves in them,” the auctioneer promised.

When the last Rains cattle were sold, ranchers came ambling over, one by one, to pat Rains on the shoulder or simply tip their hats. One man put his boot on the bleacher and leaned forward.

“Well,” the man said, smiling, “you won’t have to feed them now.”

“No,” Rains said, smiling.

Then they both stopped smiling, and Rains dropped his voice an octave.

“I just couldn’t hack it anymore,” he said.

To which his friend could only nod.