In the open savannah grasslands of southern Arizona near Sonoita, Walter Vail and Herbert Hislop bought 160 acres, a quarter section of land, in 1876 to begin the Empire Ranch along Cienega Creek. Over time, the ranch grew to 2,560 acres. Still a working ranch, now it is public land as part of the 45,000-acre Las Cienegas National Conservation Area.
Grasslands surrounded by mountains make for beautiful settings. At Las Cienegas, the Santa Rita Mountains stretch to the west, the Whetstones to the east and the Empire Mountains to the northwest. The four-room adobe house with dirt floors grew to 28 rooms including a gable-roofed Victorian addition. What struck me first were the tall grasses, waving in a late March breeze. Then I saw the pronghorn antelope, grazing above me on a ridge, calm but alert. Grasslands, woodlands and the free-flowing, year-around Cienega Creek make this a valuable riparian zone in an otherwise dry and dusty landscape.
Cienega is Spanish for marsh and across the Southwest most marshy areas are long gone – ditched and drained for farms that have often failed. Invasive weeds and compacted hard pan soils have replaced natural vegetation, which once soaked up water and kept it in small pools for wildlife and migrating birds. At Las Cienegas the ecosystem is being restored. The creek wanders across the landscape, and this ribbon of green grasses and flowers showcases the West that was.
Historically, the Empire Land & Cattle Co. grazed over 100,000 acres of private and public land. A dozen hardworking vaqueros with their chaps, cowboy hats, boots and spurs lived in the big ranch house. Cowboy quarters was room three built in the 1870s. By the early 1900s, ranch hands herded 30,000 head of cattle that overgrazed the fragile desert turf across 1,000 square miles. The cowboys worked long hours for little pay and only had a day off a month. Their sleeping area is well interpreted at the ranch with artifacts, maps, photos and captions depicting a century of cowboys bunking in the same double rooms with small fireplaces for heat.
To walk through the 28 mostly empty rooms is to feel the size of the ranch without even getting on a horse. Over the decades, different Anglo families came to own the ranch, but it was Hispanic cowboys, cooks and household staff members who kept the enterprise going.
Breezeways between rooms or to patios were called zaguans in Spanish. When the Vail family ran the ranch, they set up a commissary, like a company store, where the vaqueros bought tobacco, candy and new riding gear to replace their worn out stirrups and saddles. A bookkeeper deducted their purchases from the cowboys’ pay. The riders earned room and board – bunking with each other during short nights, listening to the snores of their compañeros, then a quick breakfast with hot black coffee and a warm tortilla or two with refried beans and a little cheese.
They rose before dawn to ride for hours checking pastures, looking for cows and calves, a rifle ready for trespassing coyotes and the infrequent mountain lion. For lunch, cowboys carried biscuits and cold meat. They returned at dark for a dinner of beef and beans.
The cool, thick adobe rooms of the ranch house, some with long vertical cracks in the walls, display cowboy artifacts of tools, spurs, bits, curry combs, bridles, pliers and brands. There is little furniture. The emptiness only accentuates to visitors how full the rooms would have been with sweating bodies in the heat of summer, a few pegs to hold a jacket or a serape in winter and dusty boots taken off to fall on the hard floor. Owners came and went often selling out and moving on to California, but Hispanic families continued working the ranch as they had always done.
In 1988 after a series of land swaps, the Bureau of Land Management acquired the ranch and began to stabilize and restore the Empire Ranch and its historical structures of houses, barns, corrals and outbuildings. Ninety-nine years after the first rooms of the ranch house had been built it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Sacaton Flats at Las Cienegas contains acres of giant sacaton bunch grass (Sporobulus wrightii), which is a drought resistant native plant with seed heads that can top six feet in height. Restoring the Cienega watershed will absorb floods and hold soils in what is now one of the largest sacaton grass stands in the Southwest. Volunteers helped through the YES Program or Youth Engaged Stewardship. In 2014 and 2015, they hand-built rock structures within the grasslands to capture moisture and to slow and eventually stop erosion.
Thanks to Congress, funding land purchases for the Las Cienegas National Conservation Area in 2000, Empire Gulch now features world class birding because birds migrate through southern Arizona and rest in the tall cottonwood tree gallery along the gulch. Their bright chirping contrasts with the soft sibilance of breezes rustling restored grasses.
But none of this was easy. Establishing the national conservation area as a working ranch took years of negotiation, collaboration, compromise and understanding. Across the West in the first decades of the 21st century, groups argue against federal involvement on ranchlands. Conservatives complain that federal agencies and nonprofits blocking up land to restore and sustain ecosystems are attempting to “kill the cowboy,” when in fact economics, the price of beef and lamb and the monopoly of packing plants ratcheting down livestock prices, are the real factors limiting the future of family ranches.
So how do we keep ranching heritage alive? One solution is the template followed by the BLM’s Las Cienegas, which is a working ranch dedicated to landscape conservation. In 1995, a community potluck dinner at the Sonoita Fairgrounds in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, brought together ranchers, wildlife conservationists, hikers, equestrians, mountain bikers and local residents to recommend how to develop a management plan for the BLM’s 42,000 acres. “Along with the dish each brought to share, most of the 100 or so people accepting the BLM’s invitation also carried with them a strong opinion about how the land should be managed and perhaps an even stronger skepticism that their voice would be heard,” says the Sonoran Institute.
Local groups advocated for legislative, not executive, action. That came with a Congressionally approved national conservation area. “The management plan of the Las Cienegas NCA is based on the local partnership’s land-use plan, which was a collaborative effort,” says Rep. Jim Kolbe from southeastern Arizona. Kolbe adds, “Our mission was to give future generations this corner of Arizona so that it will forever be what we all picture the West to be – cowboys, desert wildlife, vast open tracts of land and people enjoying the land.”
Now, the Cienega Watershed Partnership continues monitoring ranch restoration, hosting youth environmental stewardship projects and twice a year having watershed tours. Cowboys still move cattle across the ranch, but now birders arrive, finding their binoculars before leaving their cars. Ranch heritage is evident as visitors walk through historic buildings. Additional interpretation will be possible when more structures are restored with support from the Empire Ranch Foundation and its volunteers.
A landscape once dominated by dusty herds of Hereford cattle and vaqueros riding out of stone corrals with biscuits in their shirt pockets, now welcomes warblers and Harrier hawks. As grasses return the landscape heals. Water once again slowly trickles across southern Arizona.
Andrew Gulliford is an award-winning author and editor and a professor of history at Fort Lewis College. He can be reached at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.
