Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

Afterward we sat around the fire eating tins of sliced peaches. Jim took out his little cotton sack of Bull Durham, rolled himself a cigarette, closing the sack by pulling on the yellow string with his teeth like he always did, then made his pitch.

Only two things really mattered to a rancher, he said: land and water. We had plenty of land in these parts, but not enough water, and without water, the land ain’t worth nothing. Water made the difference. Water out here was precious, he said, more precious than you gentlemen, living on that rainy island of yours, can possibly imagine. That was why, for centuries, the Indians and the Mexicans and the Anglos had all been fighting over it, why families were torn apart over it, why neighbors killed each other over it.

One of the Poms piped up to say he knew firsthand how precious water was, because at the hotel in Seligman, he’d been charged an extra fifty cents to take a bath. Everyone got a laugh out of that, and it made me hope that Jim’s pitch would receive a sympathetic hearing.

Seeing as how the ranch had no natural source of water, Jim said, one had to be created if it was going to support a sizable herd. Some ranchers went drilling for water, but you might drill all sorts of dry holes before you actually found water, and there was no guarantee of how long it would last. When the Santa Fe Railroad had needed water for its steam engines, it had drilled a hole half a mile deep in these parts and come up dry.

What made the most sense, Jim went on, was to build a big dam to trap rainwater. He described my plan to bring up a bulldozer from Phoenix. When Jim mentioned the cost, the Poms looked at one another, and a few raised their eyebrows, but then Jim pulled out a column of numbers I’d drawn up and explained that without the dam, they could run only a few thousand head on the ranch; with it, they could go to twenty thousand, and that meant bringing five thousand head to market every year. The dam would pay for itself in no time.

The next day the Poms went into Seligman to cable the rest of the investors. After some backing and forthing about engineering details, we got the go-ahead. The Poms wrote a check before they left, and in no time, a flatbed truck was pulling up to the ranch with a big yellow bulldozer on the back. It was the first bulldozer to be seen in these parts, and people came from all over Yavapai County to marvel at it chugging away.

Since we had the darned contraption there, we decided to build dams all over the ranch, the operator scraping out the sides of gullies and draws, lining the bottoms with packed-down clay, and using the fill to build up the walls that would hold back the water from the flash floods. By far the biggest dam we built-so big you needed five minutes to walk around it-was the one in front of the ranch house.

When the rains came that December, the water coursed through the gullies and draws and poured right into the ponds created by the dams. It was just like filling a bathtub. That winter was unusually wet, and by the spring, the water was three feet deep in the big pond-the finest body of water I’d seen since Lake Michigan.

In one sense, that pond was nothing more than a hole in the ground, but Jim treated it like our proudest possession, and that was what it was. He checked the dam every day, measuring the depth of the water and inspecting the walls. In the summer, folks drove from miles away to ask if they might take a dip, and we always let them. Sometimes during dry spells, neighbors without as much water would come over with wagonloads of barrels and ask, as they’d put it, to borrow from our pond, though there was no way they were ever going to repay us, and we never charged for it, since, as Jim liked to say, the heavens had given it to us.

The dam and its pond came to be known as Big Jim’s Dam, and then just Big Jim. People around the county measured the severity of dry spells by the amount of water in Big Jim. “How’s Big Jim doin’?” people in town might ask me, or “I hear Big Jim’s low,” and I always knew they were talking about the water level in the pond, not my husband’s state of mind.

THE RANCH’S OFFICIAL NAMEwas the Arizona Incorporated Cattle Ranch, but we always called it the AIC, or just The Ranch. It was only dudes and greenhorns-people who got their ideas about ranching from western movies and dime-store novels-who gussied up their ranches with highfalutin names like Acres of Eden or Rancho Mirage or Paradise Plateau. A fancy name, Jim liked to say, was a sure sign that the owner didn’t know the first thing about ranching.

With the Depression still going strong, owners like that-as well as plenty of owners who did know a thing or two about ranching-were going out of business. That meant more people were selling than buying cattle, and Jim traveled around Arizona picking up entire herds for rock-bottom prices. He hired about a dozen cowboys, mostly Mexican and Havasupai, to drive the cattle to the ranch and brand them before sending them out to the range. Cowboying was rough, and so were those kids-misfits, most of them, runaways and boys who’d been whipped too hard. For these young fellows, it was a question of joining the roundup or joining the circus-not a lot of other options out there for them-and they took life day by day. The one thing they knew how to do better than anything else was stick a horse, and they took great pride in that.

When the cowboys arrived, the first thing they did was head out into open country and round up a herd of range horses, which they proceeded to break-after a fashion-in the palisaded corral. The horses bucked and fishtailed like rodeo broncs, but those hard-assed boys would just as soon bust every bone in their bodies before calling it quits. They weren’t much more than half-broke horses themselves.

I stood there watching them with Rosemary. “I feel bad for the horses,” she said. “They just want to be free.”

“In this life,” I said, “hardly anyone gets to do what they want to do.”

Once the cowboys each had a string of horses, they started bringing in the cattle and branding them. They were all living in the bunkhouse, and I had my hands full cooking for everyone, in addition to helping out with the branding. The cowboys got steak and eggs for breakfast and steak and beans for dinner, with as much salt and roof water as they wanted. Anyone who asked for one could have a raw onion, as good as an orange for staving off scurvy. Most of the boys peeled those onions and ate them like apples.

I didn’t particularly trust them around Rosemary, who wasn’t allowed to go near the bunkhouse-where there was nonstop cussing, drinking, brawling, card play, and knife play-and that was when I got in the habit of sleeping with her in the bedroom of the ranch house while Big Jim and Little Jim slept in the main room.

Rosemary was also a little like a half-broke horse. She was happiest running around out of doors, without a stitch of clothing if I’d let her. She climbed the cedar trees, splashed in the horse trough, peed in the yard, swung from vines, and jumped from the barn rafters onto the hay bales, yelling at Mei-Mei to stand clear. She loved spending the day on horseback, holding on behind her father. The saddles were too heavy for her to lift, so she rode her little mule, Jenny, bareback, mounting her by grabbing mane and toe-walking up the animal’s leg.

Jim once told Rosemary that she was so tough, any critter that took a bite of her would spit it out, and she just loved that. Rosemary was never afraid of coyotes or wolves, and she hated to see any animal caged, tied up, or penned in. She even thought that the chickens should be freed from the coop, that the risk of being eaten by a coyote was a price worth paying for freedom, and besides, she said, the coyotes needed food, too. That was why I always blamed Rosemary for what happened to Bossie the cow.