October 1993: Fall roundup gets foggy start

By Hudson Old, Journal publisher

By just after noon on the first day of the fall roundup, the boss and a half dozen cowboys on the Broseco ranch had corralled, weighed and loaded 800 steers and moved a set of mama cows.

The Broseco then was 35,000 acres stretched across the northern edges of Titus and Morris County, Texas.

The top cow hand that day was Lawrence Wingate, a one-time saddle bronc rodeo hand, an ex ag teacher. With the morning’s work done, he adjourned for lunch and we piled in a ranch pickup for a ride up to his ranch house.

It was the first chance I had to ask him stuff about his ranch.

“Broseco,” I said. “That Spanish for something?”

“Yea, put that down,” he answered. “It’s Spanish for ‘Brown Security Company.'”

I found out this about Lawrence Wingate — cattle are serious business. Not much else is.

“So you used to ride saddle broncs?” I tried.

“After lunch we got one for you to try, that is if you want to ride and get pictures — we’ve got some cattle to sort,” he said.

His bride had a table set with goulash, beans, cornbread, plenty of onions, hot sauce and iced tea and when I couldn’t eat any more, she brought out a cake.

At the junction of U.S. 759 and Texas 71 that morning, a line of trucks, each hooked to a double decker cattle trailer, sat waiting word to drive on down to the ranch.

There was light in the barn when I got there an hour before daylight, longer if you allowed for the fog. The air was so thick it dripped from the brims of the cowboys’ hats.

A prototype Texas ranch, the Broseco had some oil. From time to time, they sold timber out of the Sulphur River bottom — the river snaked through the place when it was 45,000 acres. Whenever the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dammed up the North Sulphur below Cooper, they took 10,000 acres of the Broseco wetlands as replacement for what they were flooding.

Counting Mr. Wingate, there were seven cowboys at lunch.

If you get to digging around at the Broseco’s linage, you’ll dig back to the DuPont family filtering through the Brown Security Company that bought the ranch from the Pewitt family.

Lawrence Wingate ran 6,000 head of mamma cows at any given time, more on occasion. In the spring, he bought the steers rounded up that morning.

Along with 230 heifers culled from the herd, they made up the first stock shipped from the ranch that fall. They’d been sold on closed circuit TV.

In August, Joe Reppeto, a cattle broker on the cutting technological edge of the time brought out his video recorder, filmed the fall crop and beamed it out to buyers across the land.

“Like a home shopping network show?” I asked.

“Just like that,” said Mr. Reppeto of Producers Video Auction out of Fort Worth. A buyer in Colorado bought the heifers in a single lot. An Amarillo feed lot did the same for the steers.

Conditions of the sale were strict — the cattle had to be gathered at daybreak, before they began feeding for the day, before they had time to drink. Mr. Reppeto, trusted by Broseco to find a top price for its stock, was equally trusted by the buyers to oversee the shipping. The broker allowed that a good morning drink of water and a couple of hours grazing can add as much as five percent body weight in undigested stuff.

With no light, in a dense fog, the cowboys rode out. Ted Ashby, the unit manager of the part of the ranch where the cattle had spent the summer grazing, cranked up his ranch truck with a feed trailer in tow.

“Okay,” Mr. Wingate said, and they vanished in the fog. Ted eased out with the pickup headlights punching futile beams in the mist.

We idled along, maybe a half mile into the pasture with Ted blowing the horn. We could hear the heifers bawling in answer — couldn’t see squat.

Ted brought the truck around, stopped and sat, blew the horn some more and nervously checked the mirrors.

“This durn fog,” he finally complained, “ain’t helping a thing.”

Something bumped the truck. In a moment, a sea of heifers had surrounded the pickup and the first of the cowboys flanking the herd came out of the mist and fog. Ted slipped the pickup into gear, began easing toward the catch pens and the corral.

“Easy, everybody,” he said, “easy girls. We’re moving now.”

Seems like you could see one part of the Broseco — any part — and judge the whole ranch by it. As we rode toward the catch pen, Ted sort of apologized for the heifers–

“You ought to see the ones we’re keeping,” he said. I wondered what the keepers might look like because the culls looked good. The catch pen was cattle panels with about 5-inch top posts every four feet, a string of barbed wire above and below. The working pens were welded pipe and the horses sleek. The cowboys penned the heifers without a hitch, and still working in the dark, rode out to get the steers.

Before good light, they began running the cattle, 25 to a group, over the scales. The trucks came rolling in, backed up to the loading chutes, and to a man, every driver who climbed out of the cab made some comment about the facilities.

“I’ve seen outfits take all day to put together one load,” Joe Reppeto said about mid morning. “At the rate these guys are working, they’ll have all these loaded by noon.” And they did.

If the morning’s work had been edgy, the afternoon was relaxed.

I never heard Mr. Wingate give anybody any instruction – a horse named Squirrel did my thinking, following the other horses. I knotted the reins, dropped them on his neck and gave Squirrel her head when I was shooting.

“If you want that Lonesome Dove shot, ride on ahead across that draw and wait on the hill on the other side,” Mr. Wingate said.

So I did.