THE WESTERNER: Cowboy rides through century of memories

by Ollie Reed Jr.

Casimiro “Ike” Laumbach was born 102 years ago today on his father’s La Cinta Ranch at La Cinta Canyon in San Miguel County.

He doesn’t remember that – his own birth, I mean. But there isn’t much else he has forgotten. As I talk to him in his room at a retirement community in Rio Rancho, I can feel the memories crowding in around us, kicking up dust like so many horses milling around in a corral.

He remembers:

• La Cinta Ranch school, established by his father and attended by Ike’s family – six girls, 11 boys – and other local kids.

• His cowboy days at New Mexico ranches such as the Bell, the CS and the OX.

• That rough lot of 108 horses he broke for the YNB Ranch in Harding County.

• A bitterly cold February day in the 1930s when he rode 50 miles looking for missing steers.

• The sorrel horse he rode to first place in bronc riding at the 1936 Fourth of July rodeo in Mosquero.

We’ll start with that rodeo. Laumbach said the entry fee was $2.50 and prize money was $5 for first place, $3 for second place and $2 for third.

“So the guy who took second made 50 cents, and the guy in third lost 50 cents,” he said. “I just happened to get a good horse, a big sorrel. I got lucky and took first place.” And thereby doubled his money.

In 1934, when Laumbach was 21, the country was in the throes of the Great Depression and New Mexico was in the grips of a drought. His father, Peter Joseph Laumbach, was forced to turn La Cinta Ranch cattle – 1,200 head, more or less – over to the First National Bank in Raton.

With no cattle on the place, Pete told his sons they’d best find work where they could. That’s how Ike ended up working for ranches such as the CS, the Bell and the OX.

He was between ranches one day in 1936 when he stopped in Roy to get a haircut and learned that Frank Hartley, the manager of the YNB Ranch at Bueyeros in Harding County, was looking for a man wearing “a size 6 hat and size 14 boots.” That’s another way of saying Hartley wanted someone who was not all that bright, in this case someone foolhardy enough to break more than 100 head of big, ragtag horses Hartley intended to sell to the Army as cavalry mounts.

The way Laumbach looked at it, times were tough so it’d be dumb not to take a paying job.