Vic Culberson walked into southern New Mexico with little more than a stubborn idea of the life he wanted.
Somewhere out there, he believed, was a place where a man could build something of his own on open range. What he found instead was a land as unforgiving as it was full of promise, and a life that would shape him as much as he shaped it.
At 18, Culberson left Texas chasing that idea. He worked where he could — hauling water for a railroad crew, drifting between jobs that never quite held. In El Paso, he tried waiting tables, but that ended quickly.
“I disagreed with the cook,” he later wrote.
It was one way to describe throwing a tray of dishes in a man’s face. So, he moved on. On foot. A hundred miles to Deming, then farther still, following the pull of something he hadn’t yet found.
What he found instead was a mine, and a warning.
Fifteen days into the job, the shaft collapsed around him. He was pulled out alive, but barely.
“That thoroughly convinced me that I was not a miner.”
If the ground wouldn’t hold him, he would try his chances on top of it.
Not far away, a mine owner named George O. Smith had begun shifting his fortunes from ore to cattle. He needed someone to run 121 head on open range.
Culberson volunteered.
He moved into a small cabin, eight by ten feet, on a stretch of country that felt as wide as anything he had imagined. For weeks at a time, he didn’t hear another human voice.
But in that quiet, something settled. He had a place, a herd to watch over, and grass and water enough to make it all possible.
For the first time, the life he had been chasing didn’t feel so far away.
Culberson’s story anchors Chapter 6 of “Unpacking Silver City: Revealing the Rich Tapestry of a Historic Town,” edited by Silver City Museum director Bart Roselli. In the chapter on cattle ranching, historian Stephen Fox uses Culberson to open a window into a much larger story.
“Vic Culberson is huge. He's the first real leader here, and he has one of the biggest ranches in the county, the GOS Ranch near Georgetown,” Fox said. “He wrote a long memoir that was published in a newspaper here about a year before he died and I quote his memoir at length.
“He’s a great story from his beginnings and his adventures. I spend a lot of time on him because he's important. He's the big guy. He was a good man. He was an active force in the Cattle Growers Association and served as their president for a couple of years.”
Culberson was still figuring out how to make a life on the range. Others had already begun building one.
John Brockman
John Brockman arrived in Grant County with a different kind of purpose. An immigrant from Germany, he came to America as a child, fought in the Civil War, and followed the same westward pull that brought so many others to New Mexico. Like Culberson, he tried mining first. Like many, he didn’t stay.
By the late 1860s, Brockman had turned to cattle, and quickly moved beyond simply raising them. He ran thousands of head along the Mimbres River, improving his stock and supplying cattle to other ranchers across the region.
He farmed as well, growing crops that added stability to a business built on uncertainty. Where Culberson lived alone in a small cabin, Brockman built something that reached beyond himself.
By his mid-40s, he was among the most connected men in the county, helping establish Silver City’s first bank.
For a time, it seemed both paths — chasing the life and building it — could exist side by side — because the land allowed it.
In those early years, there was very little standing in the way of anyone willing to try. No fences. No grazing permits. No real boundaries at all.
“You could go wherever you please and settle where you wanted,” one ranchwoman later remembered. “There was no limit to ya at all.”
Cattle moved where the grass took them. Ranchers claimed what they could manage. The range felt endless. For a while, that was enough.
But a place without limits doesn’t stay that way for long.
“Cattle King”
Tom Lyons understood that better than most — or perhaps he was simply more willing to act on it.
By the 1880s, Lyons had built one of the largest ranching operations in the region. His land stretched across vast distances. His herds numbered in the tens of thousands. To the outside world, he was a success story, a man who had risen from nothing to become the “cattle king” of Grant County.
But along the edges of his empire, other stories took hold.
Smaller ranchers disappeared from neighboring lands. Some left.
For years, those stories lived in whispers — shared carefully, never spoken too loudly, never written down.
Time changed that. Later accounts made something clear: Lyons had hired men to remove competitors, sometimes permanently. It was the kind of truth that didn’t fit the myth of the open range. But it belonged to it just the same.
Lyons himself would die violently years later, beaten to death under circumstances never fully explained.
In a place with few rules, power had always written its own ending.
“Lyons was also a man of great charm and affability and generous at times if he liked you,” Fox said. “He could help people down on their luck. He was very wealthy, but the rest of the story should not be excused, and it needs to be attached to his name because he was a major figure here.”
Fox points to one of the most compelling documents in his research — an affidavit from a foreman named Johnny Johnson, detailing what he knew about killings tied to the range wars.
“There are still people, especially ranchers, who circle the wagons and defend their own,” Fox said. “I'm sure there are still ranchers here, way beyond Tom Lyons' time, I mean, he died in 1917, but there are still ranchers here who would defend him.”
The cattle business wasn’t easy. As Fox writes, survival often dictated decisions.
“It's not something that ranchers now want to hear or would particularly agree with, but it was a renegade kind of business back then,” Fox said. “People came here from who knows where and struck it rich, who knows how. Lyons aside, there was a lot of chicanery in the cattle business here in the late 1800s.
I quote Clark Husk as saying, ‘Everybody wasn't a criminal, but everybody had dealings with criminals.’”
For most men on the range, however, power like that was distant. What mattered was the work.
The day began before sunrise with coffee, thick and black, and a quick meal if there was time. Then into the saddle.
Cattle didn’t stay put. They drifted with the seasons, with the grass, with the water. Herds mixed and scattered across miles of country. Roundups were the only way to bring order to it.
Cowboys rode wide circles, gathering what they could find, pushing cattle toward a central point. Dust filled the air. Horses moved quickly and low, cutting individual animals from the herd with instinctive precision.
When the herd settled, the real work began.
Calves were roped and dragged to the fire. Branding irons glowed red. The smell of burned hair and hide filled the air. There was no pause, just the steady rhythm of a job that had to be done.
Meals came when they could, featuring beef, beans, biscuits and coffee.
It wasn’t an easy life, but it was the one they chose.
Years later, when those same men looked back, their memories softened around the edges.
“A cowboy’s life was not for weaklings,” one man wrote.
The hours were long, the conditions rough, and the comforts few. Yet they didn’t regret it.
“They were good days,” another said.
Not because they were easier, but because they felt fuller. Memory, after all, has a way of softening what the land never did.
Much of what we know about that life comes from voices preserved in sources like the Blatchley interviews, which Fox relied on heavily.
“(They) are a wonderful and untapped source, and that’s the source of the quotations,” Fox said. “They were my basic source on the 19th century, and I just wish people used them more. They're in libraries in Albuquerque and Tucson, and here in Silver, and they're just not used very much. But that's where I got a lot of my stories and certainly the quotations. I like to quote people a lot in my historical work because people want to hear the voice of the person.”
For all its promise, the range had limits. There were too many cattle and too much pressure. Grass that once stretched unbroken began to thin. Then came the drought.
In the early 1920s, rain disappeared. Water sources dried. Herds weakened. Ranchers who had borrowed heavily during good years found themselves with nothing to sell and no way to recover.
Cattle were shipped out in staggering numbers — more than half the state’s herd in a single year.
Banks failed. Ranches collapsed.
The life Culberson had chased, the one Brockman had built, the one so many had worked to sustain all came back to the same truth.
The land was never something you could control. Only something you could try, for a while, to live with.
Fox also traces the stories of others drawn to that same promise.
“I'm very much taken with Gene Simon just because of his versatility,” Fox said. “Until the age of 62, he was a newspaper guy in western Pennsylvania and then suddenly decides to become a cowboy.”
Then there’s John Sinclair.
“Here’s a guy who was a Scottish immigrant and was a cowboy in the 20s and 30s and then became a well-known writer. He peaked during World War II with a novel that sold nationally. He often wrote about being a cowboy. He’s one of my best sources.”
And even an Ivy League connection found its way to the range.
“He's a very unlikely addition to the ranchers of Grant County, but he comes through town to see his friend who had moved here for his health, and he just loves the place,” Fox said of Hugh Lenox Hodge. “He's back a few months later, prepared to stay, and he becomes one of the leaders of the local ranchers. He’s just interesting, because of the question, ‘Why is this guy from a mainline Philadelphia wealthy family a cowboy in Grant County now?’”
In the end, the story of cattle ranching in Grant County isn’t just about cattle.
It’s about the people who came looking for something, and what they found when they got there.
Some built. Some drifted. Some took more than they should have.
All of them, in one way or another, were shaped by the same place.
Even now, long after the fences went up and the rules took hold, something of that earlier time remains.
It’s in the grass and in the dust.
And in the idea that once, not so long ago, a man could walk into that country with nothing but a belief and find a life waiting for him there.
