Roswell Crash Revelations From The Foster Ranch

New Mexico ranches are some of the most spectacular in the country. But one spread of land there holds a special distinction. It is said that in July of 1947 a craft from another world crashed from the sky onto the Foster Ranch outside Roswell. Strewn wide across the desert grasses, arroyos and rock outcroppings lay unearthly debris from a flying saucer. Recently obtained information provides astonishing insight about what fell on the Foster fields. Two descendants of the famous ranching family have come forward to tell their stories of what they know about the event. A recently acquired federal document indicates that the government has forever barred the ranch from development. And as the investigation continues, we find the possibility of a pay-off for rancher silence! What celestial secrets do the soils at the Foster Ranch hold?...read more

Florida's Black Cowboys

Ivory Lucky's got stories to tell. Like how he and his daddy used to haul cattle across State Road 40 from Ocala to the packinghouse in Daytona Beach. Or how he'd pen and tag cows at the livestock market in the 1950s. They called him "As Is," he said, when he started buying blind and maimed cows in high school for $1 apiece because that was all he could afford. "I always wanted me some cattle," said Lucky, now 61. And he remembers not being able to eat at the livestock market diner because of the color of his skin. But on the open range, things were different. "Long years ago, those cattlemen rolled together," Lucky said. These days, the rancher rounds up his 175 cattle with dogs and a four-wheeler at his farm in rural Blitchton, about 20 minutes west of Ocala. It's stories like these of Florida's black cattlemen and ranchers that the Florida Agricultural Museum in Palm Coast is trying to preserve. The museum recently launched a new permanent exhibit -- Florida's Black Cowboys: Past and Present -- tracing the centuries-long history of African-Americans in the cattle industry...read more

Baxter Black: A boy and his goat

There is a parable of the International Goat Sensation. A story about a boy and his goat. Tim was a kindhearted graduate student who raised longhorn cattle. On his daily trips from the ranch to school and back, he passed a plowed field with sparse feed left. A big horse and a small goat stood by the fence and watched him as he came and went. Concerned for their well-being, on the third day he stopped at the feed store, bought some hay pellets and, after dark, sneaked back to the pasture and fed them. One day he saw a man loading the horse in a trailer. Tim pulled in to visit, never mentioning his "meals on wheels" activity. It turned out the owner had been hospitalized, and his brother was picking up the horse. The sick owner had given instructions to sell the animals. "I've got the horse sold," he told Tim, "but my brother promised the goat to a family of 'exchange students' from Mexico, and I'm afraid they plan to eat him." This saddened Tim, so he reluctantly took the goat. He named him Chico. Back home Chico didn't fit in with the longhorns. They used him variously as a soccer ball, shot put, back scrubber and tank float. He also stank...read more

Song Of The Day #196

Shut That Gate recorded by Jack Guthrie in 1947 is the offering on Ranch Radio this morning.

The song is available on his 30 track CD Milk Cow Blues.

Climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes & "carbon dating" by prostitutes

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden." And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish." The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers. As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges...

My, my, these folks don't seem to be environmentally conscientius. What will the carbon footprint be of this momentous meeting?

According to the organisers, the eleven-day conference, including the participants' travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of "carbon dioxide equivalent", equal to the amount produced over the same period by a city the size of Middlesbrough.

A gathering of this size always creates a demand for extracurricular activities - in other words sex. But sex is carbon neutral, right? Yes, but the Danish prostitutes are upset:

And this being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to "be sustainable, don't buy sex," the local sex workers' union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate's pass. The term "carbon dating" just took on an entirely new meaning.

Looks like the only free trade to be discussed will be between the delegates and the prostitutes.

So what if you want to protest these doings? They've taken care of that too:

Denmark has taken delivery of its first-ever water-cannon – one of the newspapers is running a competition to suggest names for it – plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.

So sex is free but speech isn't.

Depending on on which side you advocate, you'll either be whored or hosed.

Actually, our only hope is that with all the free sex going on nothing else will get done. I wasn't part of the Free Sex Movement in the 60's, but I'm damn sure all for it in Copenhagen.

Check it out here.

The Scientific Tragedy of Climategate

Consider researcher Tom Wigley’s email describing his adjustments to mid-20th century global temperature data in order to lower an inconvenient warming "blip." According to the global warming hypothesis, late 20th century man-made warming was supposed to be faster than earlier natural warming. But the data show rapid "natural" warming in the 1930s. Adjusting the 1940 temperature blip downward makes a better-looking trend line in support of the notion of rapidly accelerating man-made warming. Collecting and evaluating temperature data requires the exercise of scientific judgment, but Wigley's emails suggest a convenient correction of 0.15 degree Celsius that fits the man-made global warming hypothesis. The adjustment may be reasonable—changes in instrumentation might need to be accounted for—but all raw data and the methodologies used to adjust them should be publicly available so others can check them to make sure. In another set of troubling emails, the CRU crew and associates discussed how to freeze out researchers and editors who expressed doubts about the man-made climate change. For example, an email from CRU’s leader Phil Jones saying that he and Kevin Trenberth would keep two dissenting scientific articles out of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next report "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" In addition, the CRU crew evidently plotted to remove journal editors with whom they disagreed and suppress the publication of articles that they disliked. If they actually succeeded, this compounds the tragedy. Eliminating dissenting voices distorts the peer review process and the resulting scientific literature. The world's policymakers rarely enjoy access to complete information, but the Climategate emails suggest they have been robbed of the chance to get the best information available...read more

Backlash by sceptics gains ground after 'Climategate'

The resurgent climate sceptic movement claimed its first political scalp this week when Australia's opposition Liberal party dumped its leader, Malcolm Turnbull, over his support for the federal government's climate change legislation. At the same time the sceptics have been making hay with the "Climategate scandal" - the release a week ago by computer hackers of thousands of e-mails sent to and from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK. The timing of Climategate, just before next week's Copenhagen negotiations, could hardly be worse for the majority seeking an agreement to limit carbon emissions. The sceptics claim that the e-mails show a conspiracy to manipulate and suppress data that do not support the cause for man-made global warming - a charge vigorously denied by mainstream climate scientists. Lorraine Whitmarsh, an environmental psychologist at Cardiff University in Wales, says opinion worldwide is becoming more polarised, with supporters of more rightwing parties more likely to doubt the need for action on climate change. But Prof Whitmarsh warns climate scientists that the negative impact of Climategate may be long-lasting. "It may resonate for a long time and support the doubters," she says. "The Great Global Warming Swindle [a sceptical television programme broadcast in 2007] is still having an effect today."...read more

Burning our forests is the best way to save them

Here's the prescription for our catastrophically burned forests: Burn them again ... and again. In Southern Arizona, scientists and land managers are enlisting environmentalists and residents of threatened settlements to support an effort to make the forests safer and healthier by reintroducing fire on a "landscape scale" to our Sky Island mountains and the grassy plains beneath them. The Coronado National Forest -- where the U.S. Forest Service manages nearly 1.8 million acres of old-growth forests, rolling grasslands and semi-arid deserts -- is creating those landscape-scale burn programs, dubbed "FireScape," for most of its 17 Sky Island mountain ranges. Plans would increase the number of planned fires and would make more use of "resource benefit" fires, in which the Forest Service doesn't immediately extinguish naturally occurring fires. It's a fairly easy call in the most remote ranges, but it will take finesse and scientific expertise to pull it off on two troubled mountain ranges...read more

Federal officials look for ways to make wolf recovery a success in the Southwest

A decade has passed since the federal government began returning endangered Mexican wolves to their historic range in the Southwest. It hasn't worked out — for the wolves, for ranchers, for conservationists or for federal biologists. And that has resulted in frustration and resentment by many involved in the reintroduction program along the Arizona-New Mexico border, a landscape of sprawling pine and spruce forests, cold-water lakes and clear streams. "I believe in being a good steward of the land and preserving it for generations to come, but this is ridiculous," said Ed Wehrheim, who heads the county commission in Catron County, in the heart of wolf country. "I've had ranchers' wives come to me just bawling because everything they and their parents have worked for is going down the drain." Four ranches have gone out of business since the wolf reintroduction began and another four are expected to do the same before next summer, Wehrheim said. The region has been hit by drought and cattle prices aren't what they used to be, but Wehrheim said pressure from environmentalists and hundreds of livestock kills by Mexican gray wolves over the past decade have only made things worse. Environmentalists argue that grazing practices are part of the problem and the wolf reintroduction program has failed because of mismanagement by the federal government...read more

Colo. regulators hash out gas-well water rights

Water regulators are close to solving a fight between gas drillers and ranchers, who say coalbed methane wells are draining their water rights. State Engineer Dick Wolfe held hearings last week to develop a computer model that will tell him which gas wells need extra attention. The hearings will conclude Dec. 16 with a discussion of wells in the San Juan Basin. The dispute started in 2005, when two Southwest Colorado ranching families, William and Elizabeth Vance and James and Mary Fitzgerald, sued the state, claiming nearby gas wells had siphoned water from their springs. In April, the state Supreme Court ruled for the couples, which opened up the possibility that every gas and oil well in the state would have to get a water well permit and submit to regulation by the state engineer. The Legislature acted quickly to direct Wolfe's office to limit the number of gas wells that would need regulation. Energy companies have argued that most gas wells are much deeper than the water table, so they should be excluded as “nontributary" water. Wolfe conducted hearings last week on technical issues around a computer model his staff will use. Sarah Klahn, lawyer for the Vance and Fitzgerald families, wants the model to be tweaked, especially for the edges of gas fields, where the gas formations outcrop and come close to the underground water that feeds streams...read more

Sheepman fighting to save flock

...But there he was a week ago Friday, featured in an article with the headline, "Ranching, Recreation Collide in the Great Outdoors." The story is about an incident from the summer of 2008, when two of Robinson's dogs were accused of attacking a woman riding a mountain bike. The assault resulted in injuries and a court action that branded Robinson — a good man his wife, Cheri, described to the Times as "a Sunday school teacher who has no record" — a criminal. He was found guilty of a misdemeanor, fined, ordered to pay restitution and, in lieu of jail time, sentenced to 200 hours community service. Now, Sam Robinson is fighting back. Robinson has seen this fight long coming. Slowly but steadily, he's watched civilization's advancements intrude on his ability to protect his sheep. First there was the environmentalist-inspired government ban in the 1970s on all toxicants, meaning you couldn't poison the mountain lions, coyotes, bears and other natural predators of the herd. Next came a crusade led by animal rights groups that resulted in a government ban on steel-jawed traps, followed by outlawing all baiting and scent lures. All that was left for a sheepman to defend his herd was to shoot predators during a legal hunting season or when they were caught in the act. It was like telling a store owner he couldn't lock the door when he went home at night. But then the government advised Robinson of a new option that was enjoying some success elsewhere: livestock protection dogs...read more

A cowboy's tale

Will Rogers had sage advice for friend and co-star Joel McCrea: The best way to get perspective on Hollywood is on the back of a horse while herding cattle. McCrea, who appeared in 90 films, heeded his mentor’s suggestion and bought an expanse of land in Thousand Oaks. The working ranch served as a home for himself and his wife, actress Frances Dee, and their sons, and became a rural refuge for friends Gary Cooper, Katherine Hepburn and Alfred Hitchcock. The public will have the chance in a year to explore part of the 76-year-old ranch, where Hollywood intersected with the Old West. “This ranch is a great piece of California history, and that’s what we want people to be exposed to,” said Wyatt McCrea, the grandson of Joel McCrea and Dee. “This is just our little effort to keep that pioneering spirit alive.” Sitting in an office with his cowboy hat hanging from a chair back and a signed portrait of Will Rogers behind him, McCrea said in a recent interview his grandfather acted in order to ranch. The elder McCrea, born in south Pasadena, starred in “Sullivan’s Travels,” “The Virginian” and “Foreign Correspondent.” One year he listed his profession as rancher on his income tax returns, prompting the Internal Revenue Service to audit him. Joel McCrea, who bought his first horse at age 10, held out his calloused hands to the auditor and asked if an actor would have hands like that. The IRS dropped the audit...read more

For Lewistown rancher, training cattle dogs uses same rules as life

One of Carl's favorite things to do during the day is to work with his dogs. He loves dogs and likes to train them to work his cattle. He teaches them to respond to both voice commands and hand signals. “That way, if you're around a bunch of bawling cattle, they still know what you want them to do,” Carl said. Carl explained that if the people you're working with can't hear you over the noise, chances are the dogs won't hear you either. Most of his dogs are Australian Shepherds, descended from the first one he purchased from a breeder back in 1995. Carl likes the way they worked the cattle. The breeder raised national champion stock dogs. “I listened to the breeders and trainers and watched them work their dogs, and I asked a lot of questions,” he said. Recently he purchased a Hangin' Tree Cow Dog out of Portland, Ore. The male pup is not quite six months old, tall and leggy with a short fine coat. He plans on cross-breeding the male with his females in the hopes of producing a taller dog with a thinner coat, without losing working ability. “Having these qualities they can travel in the rough breaks country a little longer. They'll be bigger build in order to cover more country and their hair won't let them get over-heated or collect as many burrs,” he said...read more

Endorsing lifelong lessons

The lessons John David Fields Jr. learned in life started early and haven’t stopped. Growing up on a ranch in Sonora, Fields learned to raise sheep, goats and cattle, but Fields said his father also taught him lifelong lessons. “My father was of the old school,” he said. “He’d tell me, ‘Your word is your bond. Your handshake is as good as a contract. You treat everyone the way you want to be treated.’” But Fields, 62, said the best advice he ever received came from a Sutton County rancher named Bryan Hunt. “He told me, ‘When you shake somebody’s hand, look them straight in the eye.’” Hunt had a way of teaching what he preached, Fields said. The old rancher could make a coin seemingly disappear, and when Hunt shook hands with youngsters, he’d have a quarter tucked in his palm. “If you looked him straight in the eye while you shook, he’d turn loose of that coin,” Fields remembered. “If you didn’t look him in the eye, you didn’t get the quarter.”...read more

‘Half Broke Horses’

There are “Half Broke Horses” of the human variety in Jeannette Walls’ new book of that name—Walls, her mother and her grandmother among them. All three are tough, intelligent, and often running on pluck, but it is Walls’ spirited grandmother who holds center stage here, a woman born in 1901 in the gritty horse lands of the American West. Lily Casey Smith was a force, it seems, from birth. She was not yet 20 when she became known as “the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County.” She wasn’t much older when she took up the automobile, became a rum runner, then a biplane pilot. She was a rancher for years, a wife and mother of two (including the wild and willful Rosemary, later known as Rose Mary). She was, in short, a sort of Sarah Palin of her day: People always knew when the outspoken Lily was around — as they would her daughter Rosemary and, in turn, Rosemary’s daughter, Jeannette. We know because we remember all three women from Walls’ widely read memoir, “The Glass Castle.” In fact, “Half Broke Horses” is a prequel to the earlier book, giving us only a reversal in time and the teller...read more

H-Bar History

In the early days before the coming of the railroad, the ranch located closest to Clovis and Portales was the H-Bar. The H-Bar, located where the Portales Country Club now stands, was established by some unlikely cowmen, and associated with some wild characters in its early days. It was 1884, just 16 years since the end of the Civil War and three years since the death of Billy the Kid, that a group of Missourians traveled south to become cattle ranchers on the Llano Estacado. These compadres from Cass County, Missouri, were W. G. and W. C. Urton, J. D. Cooley, and Lee Easley. They formed the Cass Land and Cattle Company and set up their operation on the Pecos River at Cedar Canyon, 60 miles northeast of the present site of Roswell. With them came a close acquaintance, Dr. Hadley Winfrey. Winfrey had been sent to Pecos County by his brother, Dr. Caleb Winfrey, who had decided to move to the Southwest in search of a more healthy climate. So in 1884, Hadley went ahead with his fellow Missourians to gather up a herd. Col. Jack Potter, noted cowboy, author and historian, knew the Winfreys well. He worked on the roundup spring and summer with Hadley Winfrey throughout the Pecos roundups, when Hadley was gathering the cattle to move to the plains...read more

It's All Trew: For your vocabulary pleasure

Historians continually write of nesters, settlers, settlements and free-range cattlemen. Exactly what were the origins of these terms? # The term "nester" was first applied to families who chose a plot of land clearing the brush for farming. They cut the large trees to build shelters, then piled the brush from this, plus the brush cleared from the land around the edges of their property, to act as a fence of sorts for protection for their crops. Others, like the cowboys, thought the new farms looked like huge bird nests, hence the title of nesters. # The first white people in America were the explorers, trappers, Mountain Men and soldiers all leading mostly a nomadic life. When families began to arrive, the nomadic way of life ceased as people began to "settle down," thus the term "settler" was born. When settlers gathered in close proximity, it became a "settlement." # A "free-range rancher" was a product of a short period of time beginning when the Indians were placed on reservations. There were no fences, except natural terrain barriers; land titles were scarce and hard to recognize. They considered all the range free to graze their cattle. This all came to an end when barbed wire was invented. This product provided landowners an economical way to delineate their boundaries and protect their crops, thus ending the free-range concept...read more

Cartoon - School Vending Machines

Song Of The Day #195

Ranch Radio hopes to get your heart pumpin' and your feet tappin' this Monday morning with the 1939 recording of Beaumont Rag by Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys.

The instrumental tune is available on their 4 disc box set Take Me Back to Tulsa by Proper Records and on the wonderful 11 disc + dvd + book San Antonio Rose by Bear Family Records.

Cowgirl Sass & Savvy

Equal opportunity cowgirl

Julie Carter

It didn't take an act of Congress to give cowgirls their equal opportunity rights in their work at the ranch.

Since cowgirl time began, the women of the range have been afforded the opportunity to work side by side with their male counterparts.

The weather never made the issue debatable. She was allowed to freeze her backside off in the same West Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, or Dakotas blizzard as he was.

Her circle for the day included ice just as thick to axe through and the same drifts to drive or ride through.

Her frost-encrusted eyelashes, batting over blue eyes, never turned an ounce of sympathy or empathy with any of the other chilled-down hands as they moved a herd of mother cows and calves in a spring snowstorm.

Dust boiling from a droughty country side as the winds whipped across the landscape never offered a preference for what gender the rider was when she got sandblasted, dirt stuck to eyes and nostrils and teeth turned brown with grit.

The start before daylight, the stop long past sundown carried no clause for shorter hours for the fairer sex.

In fact, more often than not, she started earlier and ended later, as she first tended to arrangements for provisions to last the day and the cleanup at the end of the day. It's not a complaint, just a fact.

A charging cow in the alley will just as quickly run over the one wearing chaps and mascara as she will the one who hollers at her in a deep voice, then laughs when the denim bottom is last seen baling over the fence into the weeds.

The bulls will knock down the gate she is holding with no regard to the fact she's a mother and has plans to live to raise her children, preferably not as a quadriplegic.

The real equalizer in the operation has always been the horses. And, this is where the cowboys will, and they can't help it because it is how they are, claim a superior notion that they can ride what the little woman can't.

Sometimes true, sometimes not.

I remember my dad warning me not to ride a horse he'd just bought in a herd of several he brought home.

"You stay off that horse," he said. "Even the cowboys at the ranch I bought him from are afraid of him and for good reason."

The local hands murmured and warned me. Eagle's reputation had traveled the information highway common to ranch hands.

You can see where this is going. I was 15 and bullet proof, or horse proof as it were.

As soon as nobody was looking, I had the tall, leggy dun saddled and in a long trot to the south, so my mother couldn't see me from the house.

Never knew why, but nothing happened. It never did and when Dad got over being mad at me, Eagle and I covered lots of miles at a long trot.

Recently a friend of mine was hurt seriously when her horse bucked her off at the ranch. She's been healing and will return to ride by springtime, but the best medicine she got came in the form of recent news.

The "outlaw" that had put her on the ground was sent to a cowboy for some miles, wet saddle blankets and manners. Seems that was going along fairly well until this same horse dusted that cowboy's britches in the dirt as well.

"That son-of-gun sure can buck," he said. The radiant light had come on. The cowgirl hadn't "fallen" off in a crow-hopping event ... dang if she hadn't actually been bucked down by a real bucker. Victories for the cowgirl sometimes come in odd ways.

This was one of them.

Julie can be reached for comment at jcarter@tularosa.net