Last of the Cowboys: One rancher preserves history

Pamela Doiron opened the gate to her Cuyama Valley ranch for the first time, and the land was singing to her. With its barren hills and sweltering heat, El Rancho Espanol de Cuyama No. 1 is among the oldest vestiges of the Santa Barbara County cattle industry. Pristine grazing land stretches to the horizon as it did more than a century ago; before rural communities succumbed to urban sprawl, before grazing lost ground to higher value agricultural products, and before cattle became a nostalgic footnote in a landscape of changing economics. Doiron recalls looking back at her husband that day in 1998. The ranch's adobe home, charred in a fire decades before, needed remodeling. The wooden corrals were rotting. The bridge crossing Cuyama River would need to be rebuilt, and the cattle operation brought back to life. “This is where I belong,” she told him. “This is where we’re going to build our home.” A history of cattle The property is one-sixth of a 22,000-acre Mexican land grant that has served as a cattle ranch since 1843. Doiron’s 5,600 acres include the original adobe homestead built by Gaspar Orena, a prominent Spanish settler whose family owned thousands of acres of grazing land on the Central Coast. For 20 years following the Mexican-American War, when California was a territory of the United States and Spanish land grants were deemed void, Maria Antonia de la Guerra y Lataillade battled the U.S. government to keep the property. She lost half her land in the struggle, sacrificing it to pay legal fees. Now Doiron, an anomaly in her field, is preserving what she can of the historic property. Few get into the cattle business mid-life, and fewer see Santa Barbara County as a viable place for a cattle start-up...more