D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
April 2010
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Home on the Range
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Bim Kerr is a "people person." When the friendly 57-year-old retired after spending more than two decades teaching math at Animas and Lordsburg schools, his wife quickly concluded she had to get him out of the house.
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"Bim" Kerr at the mysterious
Rock House on his ranch.
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"Lindy knew I wouldn't be happy just talkin' to cows and horses all day," laughs the fourth-generation Hidalgo County cattleman, minutes after I've met him in a Lordsburg coffee shop. "That, along with [an owner-guided] visit to a ranching operation in Australia, is how we got the idea for offering our tours."
Kerr Ranch Tours gives city folks like me a four- to eight-hour guided look at the ranching life most Americans know only from television. Ed Kerr — who has gone by the nickname "Bim" since childhood — takes customers around some of the roughly 40,000 acres he and a partner currently control, serving as driver, tour guide and ranch historian.
Bim welcomes me into the shotgun seat of his big pickup. For someone like me, for whom such humongous livestock operations always have been something admired from a distance, this will be an education in Western heritage as well as an afternoon enjoying the great outdoors.
"Both sets of my great-grandparents started out ranching here around 1900," Kerr announces, in what proves to become a fact-filled running commentary on both personal and regional history. "The original Kerr Cattle Company, founded by my grandfather, T.A. Kerr, eventually grew to include 124 sections [of one square mile each] and a thousand mother cows. It was open range then. They worked the cattle with no fences."
Here, as elsewhere in the West, the spectacular size of such ranches was largely curtailed during the 20th century by a series of events: droughts, the Depression, world wars, industry consolidations, and land-divisions to family members. In recent times economic pressures have joined the mix to place even more ranches in precarious financial condition.
"It's a struggle," concedes Kerr, a gregarious man with an open face and ready smile. Clad in a wide-brimmed black hat, snap-button shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, he projects the straight-shooting demeanor of those who earn a hardscrabble living in the rural Southwest. A person clearly at one with his homeland, Kerr seems to know — and get along with — everyone in Hidalgo County, population 4,900 and falling.
"A lot of ranches are just barely hangin' on," says Kerr, sipping a soda as we roll past a series of dilapidated motels and gas stations on Lordsburg's main drag, a thoroughfare largely abandoned in the early 1960s following construction of parallel, high-speed Interstate 10. He notes that the livestock business in this part of New Mexico has been hard hit in recent years by lack of moisture and increasing corporate competition as well as high fuel and feed costs.
"So why do it?" Kerr asks rhetorically, squinting into the midday glare. "Well, it's a wonderful lifestyle, for one thing. You're outside in beautiful country and get to be your own boss. The sunsets out here are somethin' else."
Yet even for someone with an obvious passion for ranching, staying afloat has demanded meeting one challenge after another. "Ranching is an odd enterprise," he allows. "Every aspect of it seems to be changing constantly. There's not much you can count on except the need to work hard."
Although Bim was born in Silver City, his parents were living on ranchland near Animas at the time of his birth and he attended public schools in Lordsburg from kindergarten through high school. Young Kerr went on to earn degrees at New Mexico State University and Western New Mexico University.
He's always worked with cattle, even during his long stint as a schoolteacher. His wife, Lindy, supplements the family income through her own career as an administrator and freelance photographer. She is currently the DWI Coordinator for Hidalgo County and does photo shoots as a sideline, including weddings and students' senior portraits. The couple has four adult sons and several grandchildren.
"Growing up on a ranch," declares Kerr, "you really learn the value of a dollar. My sons came to understand, as I did, what the true cost is of everything. You just don't spend money you don't have."
A practical, entrepreneurial spirit runs deep in Kerr's line, dating back more than a century to an era in which the promise of free land brought hundreds of homesteaders to New Mexico's undeveloped southwestern corner. Many ranchers started out as dry-land farmers, miners, shopkeepers or tradesmen. A bad drought that began in the late 1920s shuttered many farms, however, and changes in the law and economy closed down hundreds of small mines. For those who sought to stay, ranching remained one of the few viable options in the Depression and post-World War II years.
"My father's side of the family eventually divided up shares of the original ranch among T.A.'s six sons and one daughter," says Kerr, who seems to hold complex family trees inside his head. "My mother's family, the Bickfords and the McCants, were early settlers in this area, too."
Colorful stories of departed ancestors — a teacher whose school roof was blown off by a windstorm during class, for example, and an uncle killed by the kick of a mule — pepper Kerr's conversation as he points out downtown landmarks and the Lordsburg-Hidalgo County Museum, dominated by a wooden windmill with a 20-foot-diameter wheel. Soon we're on the "old" road headed south, an unpaved affair that winds through a series of low hills before entering the Animas Valley.
We turn onto a rough track that leads to the site of the Gamco Mine, where Kerr's cattle gather at one of the various watering stations on his non-contiguous ranchlands, which extend from the Pyramid Mountains west to near Road Forks and north across Interstate 10 into the vast Animas playa, a seasonally flooded plain. Checking water, maintaining windmills, repairing pumps and patching pipelines are part and parcel of a Hidalgo rancher's regular routine, inasmuch as fickle rains and rare snows invariably leave the land parched.
"There's also mending fences, moving cows and bulls, pregnancy testing, weaning and branding calves, fixing pens and vaccinating the herd," says Kerr, ticking off other familiar chores. He is proud of what he does and gently disputes accusations that ranching often destroys public lands, which are grazed on through permits. "We rotate our animals to rest pastures and increase the vitality of the earth."
His outfit, Kerr explains, runs "a crossbred herd in which we use Brangus and Angus bulls on English cross and Brahman cross cows." They graze primarily on tabosa grass along with native black grama and side-oats grama. Carrying capacity of the land, says Kerr, is generally considered to be one cow per 100 acres. The range is shared with wildlife that includes mule deer, javalina, coati, ringtails, coyotes, rabbits, snakes and the occasional mountain lion.
At Gamco, below Aberdeen Peak, we eyeball foundations for long-gone buildings and an 800-foot vertical mine shaft that has been shielded with an owl-friendly metal barrier. Kerr informs me that the Bureau of Land Management, which owns much of the region's backcountry, has filled in or gated most of the 100-plus abandoned mines in the area for safety reasons. Those known to shelter owls and bats were fitted with special wildlife-friendly grates that allow such critters free access. One exception is the nearby Venice Mine, whose metal head-frame still towers above its thousand-foot shaft at the site of a deserted settlement called Pyramid, where the foundation of an old smelter is crumbling away. Mining reportedly ceased here in the 1930s.
"Copper, gold, silver and other metals were drawn from the ground," say Kerr, waving his left hand out the truck's window toward a dusty slope dotted with old prospects amid the cat's claw and cacti. Later, he tells me tales of lost treasure, including Spanish gold coins, found in this nearly treeless, uninhabited expanse, once bustling with miners eager to strike it rich.
Another bumpy side road takes us to Willow Pasture, an "alternate" wagon and stagecoach stop on the 19th-century Butterfield line. The spring dried up long ago, its location marked by a few hackberry trees, a collapsed windmill and a stone-and-cement trough once used by herders to water goats. Kerr displays an 1889 photo that shows a stagecoach and several buildings at the location, including a one-room school, but all that remains are some broken bricks, rusty cans and purple glass shards.
"This has always been rough country," allows Kerr, noting that even Native American artifacts are few and far between. Nor did Spanish and Mexican travelers, who crossed this terrain over a period of nearly two centuries, leave much evidence of their passage. "It's amazing," he muses, "how quickly the things humans work so hard to make can disappear."
But that's not always true.
We head toward Rockhouse Canyon, along a gated and desolate dirt road that, to my surprise, is a designated link in the Continental Divide Trail. "This was one of the last segments added to a route that goes from Mexico all the way up to Canada," says Kerr, adding that he was the only private property owner along this segment who consented to access. "We get backpackers along here pretty regularly, along with the occasional illegal [immigrant] from south of the border."
Prominent metal signs mark the way across a portion of Kerr's ranch. Caches of water have been tucked here and there to aid thirsty hikers. (Cyclists go a different way on this part of the Continental Divide route.)
Along a steep canyon, unmarked and probably unknown to most trail-followers, is an ancient and roof-less structure made of native stone, referred to simply as the Rock House. Its origin, according to Kerr, is unknown, although some speculate it was erected either by Native Americans or Spanish-speaking travelers before the 1854 acquisition of the territory by the US. The walls of the single room are sturdy, despite the absence of mortar or plaster, and a particularly large, flat stone serves as a fireplace lintel. The location seems ideal, perched above a series of seasonal pools along an arroyo and nestled among juniper trees. Anyone sitting a few steps outside the old building enjoys an expansive view of many square miles, handy in the event of hostile intrusion. A ledge above the Rock House is a favorite hangout for mountain lions, Kerr reveals, which adds even more excitement to our visit.
We check two more watering stations, one of them filled via a solar-powered pump. As he drives, Kerr waxes philosophic about the region's Mexican wolf controversy, Mormon migration into the area during the 1940s, fluctuating commodity prices, the 19th-century Apache kidnapping of Judge McComas' young son, and the slow decline of irrigated farming in the Animas Valley. The rancher reflects on the cyclical nature of local droughts, citing terribly dry periods of the 1930s, 1950s and 1990s.
"One out of five springs in our area is gone," estimates Kerr, noting the high cost of supplemental hay and pumped water. "As a result, money has gotten very tight in cattle and agriculture now." He tells me he strings as many as six miles of plastic waterline to make sure his animals have enough to drink.
"People sometimes accuse ranchers of overgrazing," says Kerr, conceding this sometimes happens to a limited degree. "But the land itself takes care of [ranchers who overgraze]. The land will cull the cows if there are too many for it to support."
Yet the Animas Valley appears lush in places on the day of my visit. Rainwater and snowmelt have collected on the playa, bed of an ancient lake that inundated the area after the last ice age ended some 10,000 years ago. Groundwater pumped onto fields and pastures has turned many acres green. But looks are deceptive. In a typical year, less than nine inches of moisture falls from the sky, most of it in summer.
"I wish we had more time," Kerr laments, as we make our way from his edge-of-the-valley ranch house back toward the interstate. "I'd like to show you the old adobe at Goat Camp in the Peloncillo Mountains where my mother's people homesteaded in the 1890s. We would also go to the cemetery at Steins [population 2], where one of my ancestors was killed at age 16." The boy, it seems, got hopelessly ensnarled in horse tack. This grotesque tale leads to another, involving discovery of a dead woman in a parked vehicle on a Sunday drive to Steins when Bim was only five. The bizarre incident, and its partial cover-up, seems to still haunt him more than a half-century later.
"I'm often asked to officiate or speak at funerals — and I welcome the opportunity," Kerr says, as we complete our circle and pull back into Lordsburg. "I think it's important to remember where a person came from and what they did."
It comes as little surprise that Kerr once served as a lay preacher for the local Church of Christ, filling in for a dozen years after the ordained minister departed. "I am very interested in the stories of the families who've lived in this area, like mine, for many generations," he says. "I love these people, and by now I'm related one way or another to a good many of 'em or else I've taught 'em in high school."
The pioneer legacy lives on in Hidalgo County. Thanks to a "people" person.
Learn more about Kerr Ranch Tours at www.kerrranchtours.com, 313-2606, or edkerr52@hotmail.com Tours are by appointment only and range from four to eight hours ($60 or $120 per person).
Southwest Storylines columnist Richard Mahler is a freelance
writer
based in Silver City. Read more of his work at www.richardmahler.com