A way of life slips out of range

The highway is jammed with people who wanted to live in the country inching their way toward jobs in the city. A few miles and a universe away, the last cowboy is making a living in what's left of that country. Steve Tellam is bent over in a foul patch of mud and cow dung stroking a calf and feeding it milk from a bottle. He is wearing a straw Bangora hat, checkered shirt, Wranglers and a belt buckle the size of a salad plate. His hands are misshapen by decades of labor, hard as ax handles and rough as an old baseball glove. Two bicyclists pedal past the corral in Day-Glo outfits and don't even glance at Tellam and the starving newborn. Tellam, 54, is a fourth-generation cowboy working in a region where being a cowboy no longer makes sense. A century ago, San Diego County was a cattleman's paradise -- endless open range, plentiful water, tall grass and convenient transport to slaughterhouses and growing cities. Tellam's great-grandfather, George Sawday, was Southern California's largest cattle baron. At a time when the Wright brothers were demonstrating that man could fly, Sawday ran vast herds on land stretching from the coast to the desert and from the Mexican border to Riverside. A semblance of the Old West survived in the folds of the backcountry around Ramona and Julian well into the 20th century. Today, the range has been subdivided and developed, the water sucked away by cities, the grass thinned by years of drought. With the beef industry consolidated far from Southern California, raising cattle in these mountains is as viable a business as selling surfboards in Nebraska. Tellam doesn't need a full hand to count the number of full-time cowboys in the area. "It's not going to survive into the next generation," he says...LA Times

Go to the LA Times link and watch the video.

The last 50 seconds tells it all.