![]() He’s got Lupe, who works in trade for Darien pasturing 16 of Lupe’s own cows, a deal that’s suited both for more than a decade. Despite today’s daunting challenges, it’s an enviable outdoor lifestyle: it’s not just close to the land it is the land.īut the cows don’t make enough money for Darien to hire cowboys for this all-day job. He and Brian hope to one day take over the ranch, just as Darien did from his dad, just as Darien’s dad and granddad did from their dads. Unloading the calves at Reif’s, I ask Robbie whether he wouldn’t prefer a weekend of rest. Robbie’s a C-130 crew chief expecting to be in Kuwait or Afghanistan by spring, but for now he’s stationed at Abilene, close enough to drive 475 miles home to help move these calves. Brian’s brother Robbie, 27, left Texas Tech just short of his mechanical engineering degree to join the US Air Force. “Any time I’m not working there, I’m working here on the ranch,” says Brian, 28, who lives in Branson with his wife Laura and their sons Cole, Jace, Kade, and Kyle. Like most ranch wives today, Darien’s wife Dianne earns a much-needed paycheck working away from the ranch: with NMSU degrees in agricultural biology and pest management, plus a masters degree earned online, she’s the science teacher at the Branson School, just across the state line in tiny Branson, Colorado, which is closer than the nearest New Mexico school at Des Moines.ĭarien and Dianne’s son Brian works for Folsom Well Service to earn a living. “In the 1950s and 60s, fifty or sixty cows would make a good living for a family. “It’s too much work for one man, but not enough money for one man to make a living,” Darien explains. But in this high arid country, it’s enough to raise just 200 cows. Over the past century, the Brown Ranch has grown to 10,500 acres, which sounds like a lot to a city slicker. Ten calves might buy me a third of a new car.” “Fifty years ago,” Darien says, “my dad could trade the money he made on ten calves for one new car. “It’s not like that anymore,” Darien laments. Brown bought the Devoy place and started ranching it when he returned from World War I action in France, paying off the entire loan with his first year’s alfalfa crop. “He got his rain this year, and mine, too.”ĭarien’s great grandfather was John Thomas Brown, a Texas cowboy who moved to the Dry Cimarron Valley in 1882 and built a home in Long Canyon. ![]() “This is the first time we’ve gotten so little rain that we have to truck some cows to someone else’s pasture,” Darien tells me later on the long drive to Vernon Reif’s ranch south of Clayton. Underfoot are grandsons Kyle, Kade, and Jace, ages 4 to 10, the sixth generation of the Brown ranch. It’s autumn: the smell of roasted green chile lingers in the crisp air.Īt milepost 13 I turn in at the modest old “Brown Ranch” sign and find Darien loading cattle from Devoy’s old pens, assisted by his sons Brian and Robbie and friend Lupe Machuca. In the sunrise glow I brake for a flock of wild turkeys scurrying across Highway 456 beside grazing longhorn cattle near Folsom Falls. We’re taking some calves a hundred miles south and we can talk in the truck.” “You wanted to ask me some questions about ranching?” It’s Darien Brown. From the inception of American cattle ranching to the 21st century, this one ranch has seen it all.ĭawn hasn’t begun when the phone wakes me. He built a small general store and a successful cattle ranch whose irrigation system and buildings are still in use, 140 years later, by the Brown family, who acquired the ranch at auction after Devoy’s death in 1914. Finding Mexican sheepherders and a winter Indian camp, he liked the place so much that he filed a homestead claim and moved in. In 1865, Irishman Mike Devoy took a job creating the original government survey of the valley. The river – some would call it a creek – continues east and north for 80 miles before exiting the state on its way to the Arkansas River above Tulsa. Waters flowing down the east slopes of Johnson Mesa, east of Raton, form the Dry Cimarron River as it passes the Folsom Man archaeological site and the village of Folsom, where a devastating 1908 flood left little in its wake. To find out how, writer/photographer Tim Keller heads to far northeastern New Mexico to visit with Darien Brown, a fourth-generation cattle rancher. When your family’s home and business have barely changed in a century, what happens when you see your livelihood dwindling even as you watch your grandkids growing up? The cowboy is an iconic symbol of the American West, but his life is changing in the digital age.
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