McClintocks’ Saloon and Dining House Syndrome

 

Short Numbers

McClintocks’ Saloon and Dining House Syndrome

Quest for Reservations

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

 

 

            2020 Thanksgiving thoughts and outcome did it.

            Our government did its level best to disrupt a vestige of our personal life that should best be left for us to decide. Thanksgiving is ours to make decisions over and the edicts of authority should stay the hell away from of our firesides. They are not welcome.

            For reasons left unsaid, the thought of the ambiance of McClintock’s up there high on the slope above the freeway and overlooking Pismo Beach and the ocean best describes the rationale. It is one of the nation’s great steak houses, and, as a saloon, it is pretty fair to middlin’, too.

            Tourists and locals love it.

            It is a walk back into the ranching heritage of the Central Coast of California. It is a sanctuary of wine and spirits mixed with beef, chinks, Garcia bits, finished horses, Ortega museum quality braiding, Visalia stock saddles, and the mystery of some of the finest cow country in the entire world.

            It is also a showplace of American contradiction. Fully on display is an era, a lifestyle, and a period of independence that regulatory burdens have sought to destroy.

Only when it is gone or crippled does it become fashionable to embrace and glorify in memory.

Short Numbers

Cochise was certainly aware of the phenomena.

He demonstrated what humans invariably do when exposed to open hostilities. Pressed by enemies he protected his family and his administrative borders. Given the latitude of independence, he elevated his actions into deadly enforcement. Time had reinforced the conditions of reality and he learned he had to play for keeps. By no means could he be classified as benevolent or courteous to a greater world. Likewise, he cannot be classified as a shrinking violet that got his great and just punishment from a similarly benevolent United States government.

Promises made to him and his people were set aside when gold, demands by immigrants for protection, and a southern railroad route superseded the hallowed words of the great white father. He fought for his lifestyle and he lost.

He didn’t have the numbers.

The same thing happened elsewhere as settlers continued to rain down across the landscape and demanded protection from their Washington leadership. In every case, issues of economics or political expediency prevailed. Words, in every case, were conditional until the veil of some evolving truth was lifted.

The native Americans didn’t have the numbers.

Quest for Reservations

The ranching industry in the federal West continues to find common ground with real and perceived past foes, similarly. The storyline is as tedious as it is predictable.

The great white father and his ensemble of statesmen offered incentives as long as there was useful purpose and then systematically withdrew the conditions of freedom as the next circuitous tumult was revealed. The issues weren’t just gold or railroad routes, either.

They were and have become theoretical and much as physical.

Consider the plight of the timber industry. The spotted owl must be considered a modern proxy for gold across western forests. The characters staking their economic future on grants and or legal settlements from its protection have essentially dismantled the western logging business.

In a superior fashion, the checkerboard ownership of land of the West has accomplished the same thing. In this case, a new legion of operators has arisen. It isn’t the immigrant farmer or the prospector calling for protective help. It is the government’s own agency groups. By holding the dominion of ownership (government owns 61% of the surface landscape of the West), dominion of management has also largely been achieved.

This foothold places all land-based industry at higher risk, and, once again, Cochise’s experience and his plight are revealed. When your administrative boundaries become the objects of intended administrative control, your very existence is at risk. The target is eventually forcefully discredited and denigrated. The difference in now and then is land to pigeonhole the foe.

There is no more undesirable land to forcefully place them.

McClintock’s Saloon and Dining House Syndrome

If it hasn’t been clearly visible, the cornerstone of these United States is not the citizen. The citizenry cannot even be assured its votes will be counted.

No, the cornerstone is revealed to be the vote counters, the politically best positioned.

Individual liberties running counter to them become victims of the McClintock’s Saloon and Dining House Syndrome. It is only fashionable to honor the efforts of the past when control by the elite is achieved and the outcome mirrors the evolving agenda.

It was such that I found myself last week. I happened into the presence of a staffer of one of the New Mexico’s two progressive senators. The discussion was our ranch’s contribution to the sequestration of carbon by turf management. It is an effort we have worked very hard to improve.

For various reasons including these lands were seasonal migration routes used by the Apaches, Geronimo came into the discussion. The innuendo was my presence can be construed to be antagonistic to what happened to the Chiricahuas.

It was an accusation on which I disagreed.

The more I understand the more I have come to believe old Geronimo and I are more alike than not. The point was even made that if we all came back together to stand out in the pasture where the discussion took place, we would be arrayed and might just find ourselves as unlikely but actual teammates. Geronimo wouldn’t have been there until the conditions of the year would allow his passage. Likewise, my cows and I wouldn’t be there until the conditions allowed our presence. The rest of the year we would be absent allowing full rest for the land.

Too few people even understand those implications. Who knows? We might even have hoisted a drink together and agreed … our numbers are too short as well.

 

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico.