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Tuesday, July 13, 1999

Where ranching is a job, not a hobby
Some small ranchers must wring their living from the earth
By Mary Lee Grant
Caller-Times

   FREER - Leroy Hardcastle, 78, peers with faded blue eyes into an empty coffee cup at the Hitching Post Cafe, shakes his head and says that the movies have got it all wrong about ranchers.
   "Most people think of ranchers as rich and riding horses, like in those western shoot 'em ups," Hardcastle said. "I don't even own a horse."
   Hardcastle doesn't command the wealth of legendary Texas ranches like the King Ranch, but he is the stuff of legend himself.
   "It's men like him who made the West," said Lionel Garza, who owns Muy Grande Village restaurant in Freer.
   Hardcastle and others like him live the life of the hardscrabble rancher, who scrapes a living from the land with hard labor, often alone, far away from the wealth and glamour of a big house and blooded horses.
   Hardcastle, with his wife and eight children, built all that he has from scratch.
   "My daddy was a horse trader, and he didn't leave me much of anything," Hardcastle said. "I worked in the oil fields and I bought cattle. I raised the cattle on land I leased. With the profits from the cattle, I put together my own ranch."
   He bought much of the 5,000-acre Hardcastle Ranch, which stretches through McMullen, La Salle, Duval and Live Oak counties, for $2 an acre.
   "There are a lot of people like me who are rich in land but not much else," he said.
   Hardcastle doesn't have any cowboys working for him.
   "I do it all myself," he said. "It is hot and dusty work - lots of blood and sweat. It's not for people who aren't used to working. If a windmill needs fixing, I fix it. It's very simple."
   Hardcastle has about 250 Beefmaster cattle and sells the calves when they are seven or eight months old for about $350 each. He grows his own hay and bales it himself, and raises grain sorghum to feed the cattle. He leases his land out for $10 an acre for deer hunting.
   If there isn't enough grass for the cattle, he loads a tank of propane onto the bed of his pickup truck, and takes a torch to cactus, burning the thorns off as the cattle gorge on the soft, hot cactus pads.
   "The floods are almost as bad as the droughts," said Hardcastle, whose ranch borders the Nueces River. "When it rains heavy, there is no way to get out. . . . Sometimes you can't get out for six weeks. The only way out is in a boat, or on a horse, or swimming. I've done all three."
   Even though the work is backbreaking, he wouldn't trade it, he said.
   "It's pretty much a free life," Hardcastle said. "I like it that I don't have to answer to anyone."
   On the state's 131,000 ranches, 90 percent of the herds have fewer than 100 cows, said Jim McGrann, a professor of agricultural economics at Texas A&M University. The average size of a herd in Texas is 40 cattle, he said.
   Wayne T. Hamilton, director of the Center for Grazing and Ranch Management at Texas A&M University, said that in his view, small ranches are the core of the ranching community.
   "They are the heartbeat,'' Hamilton said. "They are what ranching in Texas is all about. It would be a great loss to the state if these ranchers disappeared. They really care for the land. To stay in business, they have to be good stewards of the land and understand it. Their livelihood depends on it.''
   For a small rancher in South Texas to make a living, he probably has to own between 5,000 and 16,000 acres and between 300 to 400 head of cattle, Hamilton said.
   With rising costs of ranching equipment and the constant threat of drought, the small rancher is always endangered, Hamilton said.
   "They can put together a good herd and then it won't rain and they can lose everything,'' he said "And if they borrow money, they will have debt hanging over them for the rest of their lives. Many of them will have to get bigger or get out.''
   Hamilton said that many small ranches are falling apart as the children either don't have the resources, the time or the interest to work the land. They often subdivide the land and sell it, he said.
   "It takes more money than many ranches can provide to put a pickup under you and send the kids to A&M,'' Hamilton said.
   He said many ranchers only survive by having second jobs.
   "An old rancher told me he was only able to support his ranch because his wife worked,'' Hamilton said. "He told me 'Times are getting so tough I guess she is going to have to get a second job.' He said it as a joke, but there are a lot of old gals working in courthouses throughout this state whose paychecks are keeping the family ranch together.''
   Hamilton is confident that the small rancher will survive, and perhaps even prosper, despite adversity.
   "With some of these people, their families have been ranching for generations,'' he said. "They know how to work hard. They know how fight the heat and the drought. They are tough.''
   Oscar Hassette, 53, is one of those whose family has survived the rough times.
   Hassette's sharp dark features show his French, American Indian and Mexican ancestry. Apart from his pickup, he looks like he could have stepped out of a 19th century western landscape painting. He speaks more Spanish than English. He lives closer to Mexico, where he does his grocery shopping, than to any big city in the United States.
   Hassette has an 800-acre ranch about 23 miles north of Freer in McMullen County, in wild, rolling scrub and brush country which his ancestors bought in 1904.
   "The ranch is real quiet, real peaceful," he said. "The air is more healthy and fresher. You can hear the quail making that little sound, saying 'bob white.' This is something that gets into your blood."
   He makes about $12,000 a year ranching, and raises about 35 cows. Much of the money he makes from ranching comes from leasing his land to deer hunters.
   "I have lived a very basic life," Hassette said. "In the ranch house we have had kerosene lanterns instead of electricity. There is no running water. We bring water in from the stock tanks and boil it. We wash clothes in the stock tank.
   "Sometimes, we slaughter cattle and eat them," he said. "We get good warm milk from our cows. And we kill deer and wild hogs and cook them."
   He pulls his black pickup up near the family cemetery where his wife was recently buried.
   "She wanted to be here, because she felt the same way about the land that I do," he said.
   Hassette calls to the cattle, many of which he has named, and throws grain from the back of the truck.
   "You really get to like them after a while," he said. "I can't imagine living another way."
   About 40 miles south of Hassette's ranch, between Freer and Hebbronville, the country gets even wilder, the hills larger, and the cactus more abundant. Few cars pass down the highway. There are no telephone wires. Eight miles from the highway, down a hilly, dusty road, Charlie Diaz lives in trailer with a bay horse tied beside it.
   Like Hassette and Hardcastle, he has spent his life scraping a living from the land. Unlike them, Diaz, 73, has never owned a piece of it. He has spent most of his life as a foreman on area ranches.
   Diaz stands outside his trailer and points a long, thin finger at a trail that runs north and another that forks east.
   "That is the old San Antonio Trail," he said. "You can still get through, straight from Laredo to San Antonio."
   He used to take the trail himself as a young man, when he went on some of the last big cattle drives in the nation in the 1930s and 1940s.
   Starting at age 11, Diaz said, he drove cattle north with other men and boys, sometimes all the way from South Texas to Kansas. He drove cattle on shorter trips too, between Cotulla, Encinal, Benavides, Three Rivers and George West.
   "We would take about 200 head of cattle and have five horses to a man," Diaz said. "Usually we wouldn't even stop to sleep. I would sleep on the back of my horse. We brought dogs to help control the cattle. The cattle back then were wild. Some of them had never seen a human. I got hurt a lot.
   "I like to watch old western movies because they make it look so easy,'' Diaz said. "It isn't easy. It is a very hard life."
   By the time he was 20, he had become a ranch foreman, spending much of his career running the 40,000-acre Cameron Ranch and the adjacent 60,000-acre Dobie ranch in La Salle County, overseeing 2,000 head of cattle. He then worked as foreman of the Welder Ranch near Benavides.
   Now he runs Las Lomas Ranch, owned by a couple from Pennsylvania who keep it primarily for hunting.
   "We check the ponds, and check the deer feeders to make sure they are working," Diaz said. "My wife goes to pick the owners up at the airport in Corpus Christi or San Antonio, and we skin the deer for them when they hunt. It doesn't pay much, but they pay for our utilities and housing. It is a different life from the cattle drives when I was young.''
   Although he says the ranching life has been a good one for him, he is glad his children haven't followed in his path. Of his five boys, two are prison guards, two are truck drivers and one is a maintenance worker.
   "All my boys did something else." Diaz said. "I didn't want them to have my life."
   Still he says, it has been a life of adventure, and much contentment.
   "The ranch life is a dangerous, hard life, but it is a happy one," he said.




Staff writer Mary Lee Grant can be reached at 886-3752 or by e-mail at grantm@caller.com

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