9/22/2023 0 Comments Cattle range new mexico“These are sort of the 4-wheel drives of horses, cattle-working horses in rough country.” Then, considering that this might end up in a magazine, he smiles and adds, “Don’t try this at home. The third just got worked out, sore muscles. The second one slipped and fell climbing the canyon. One sprained on slick pavement, pulled a muscle. “They went lame – not hurt bad, but lame enough. “I watched a TV show once called ‘Extreme Horseman’ and just laughed because what I saw was nothing compared to what the horses here do every day.” He says he wore out horses three of the four days of the cattle drive. Harvey muses on the toll the cattle drive took on the horses. You almost always get enough back to bet again.” Thinking back to the stock market, he adds, “You have to be a business person.” You gamble your whole life savings on one year. “It is more challenging than anything else in the world. “The cattle business is one you become addicted to.” Harvey lights up. In other words, cattlemen watch the stock market. Off the phone, Harvey explains that when the stock market falls, the futures market immediately follows, resulting in a drop in livestock prices. “If nothing happens to the stock market, we’re gonna ship calves to Winters on the 27 th.” The stock market was in a slide that would continue, steeper and deeper than the walls of that box canyon. HLS.” Harvey’s talking into his cell phone outside the tire shop. There’s only a small sign, handwritten, on the door: “Temporary Hrs - 3:30pm – 6:00pm Aprox - Thank you. They had to be smarter than cattle, because they had to make cattle do what they wanted without forcing them.”ĪT HOME IN DOWNTOWN DES MOINES, population 149, Harvey runs a tire shop out of his garage. That was a different era and they knew more about cattle than today’s cowboys do, because they didn’t have trailers. “My dad went on one of the last cattle drives from Clayton to Springfield, Colorado, around 1914, at age 16. But son, once you start taking that rope down to rope that cow, you have admitted that she’s smarter than you are.’ My dad told me when I was a kid, ‘A cow will do anything you want her to do as long as you convince her it’s her idea. It’s easier to say they didn’t do something because they’re dumb than to say they outsmarted you. He continues, “Most people think cows are dumb but they’re actually smarter than a lot of people. We can’t do it the way we planned but we can do it the way they want to and still get the same job done.” Harvey pauses, then adds with the hint of a grin, “Indecision is the key to versatility.” Reaching the mesa at the top, he and his hands spend two hours gathering the herd. “I KNEW THOSE COWS WOULDN'T STAY in that canyon, but I had no place else to put ‘em.” Riding up canyon, Harvey follows a trail of cow patties up a steep trail that looks more appropriate for mountain goats. “But,” he says, “it was ingrained into my soul to be a cattleman.” During slow times, he hired on to do highway construction. He worked as a Colorado brand inspector, a bucellosis technician, and he vaccinated calves. “I tried to retire, for about six months.”īack in his early days, Harvey had enlisted in the Navy, then used the GI bill to go to horseshoeing school he was the only horseshoer in southeastern Colorado for years. “I was younger and more adventurous,” Harvey reminisces. His parents had split the family ranch south of Kim, Colorado, along the New Mexico border. “I owned a ranch at one time,” Harvey says. The leases vary over time from 10,000 to 80,000 acres, carrying 700 to 3000 cattle. HARVEY HAS BOUGHT AND SOLD CATTLE annually for 35 years, raising them on far-flung pastures that he leases. When Harvey rides in to bring them out at dawn the next morning, every last cow has disappeared. It has a stream, grass, and steep canyon walls. Instead he arranges with Sunny Hill, the rancher whose land they’ve just reached, to leave the herd up a box canyon behind her headquarters. Harvey already knows they’re not going to make today’s goal, a “hotel pasture” just this side of Folsom. For that matter, neither do the men, though there’s another full day’s ride ahead tomorrow, to winter pasture at Des Moines, New Mexico. Horses and cattle show no interest in taking another step. Finally reaching the Dry Cimarron River, the men take their only break of the day, sprawling on the grass under a highway sign demarking the line between Colfax and Union counties. HARVEY SHANNON AND HIS RIDERS have pushed 550 head of cattle along a remote New Mexico two-lane for fourteen miles, descending 1500 feet in elevation and making a ten-hour day.
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