My Texans of the Year are legacy cattle ranchers

Jerry Craft

West Texas ranch and range land is honest country — doesn’t deceive you with trees, bushes, vines or shade. There’s nowhere to hide from the sun. The litany of such places is always supplication for rain, and the colloquy of praise is ever for it. The earth is rocky, thorny and dry, and those legacy ranchers who lived, and still do, on land inherited from their ancestors, have personalities to match. They endure. Recently, drought-draped silence hung over West Texas. You read about it, saw the gut-wrenching images: furious winds fanning fire and brimstone, reminding of Old Testament rhetoric; the roar of fire and firetrucks and the noise of helicopters dropping orange fire retardant and precious water. Dust devils filled with flames raced across grasslands west of urban places where we wrung our hands because we weren’t able to water lawns as much as we wanted. Drought had destroyed prairie grasses, hay, grain, even cattle and wildlife. Then the relentless fires delivered a blow of such magnitude on cattle ranchers that recovery may take years. The economy played descant to the dirge of wastelands. In Jack County, on the eastern edge of West Texas, one rancher of many faced the cataclysmic event, fought as hard as he could, and came away almost whipped with his head almost down — but not quite. He had been through it all before, in the ’50s, considered the worst drought in the history of the Southwest. Jerry Craft is his name, and he represents others whose names you never heard. West Texans are accustomed to anonymity, even though ancestral roots go back for four and five generations. Twenty-five hundred acres of one of the Craft Ranches went up in flames. State and federal agencies advised evacuation. How do you evacuate a ranch? Fences were cut to allow cattle to escape. Cows put their calves down in the grass for protection at the sign of danger. That’s where the fire consumed them. Cows, perhaps checking on their offspring or reluctant to leave them, had hooves burned off and were left walking on leg bones. Those animals had to be shot...more