On an American frontier, cowboys confront their latest threat: climate change

An old cowboy, now dead, once sat next to Terrel Young in the dry cattle country of eastern Oregon’s high desert and dispensed some advice.

“At the time,” Mr. Young recalls, “I worked for a big ranch. We ran 2,500 head of cows.

“We were sitting in the road, and that old man told me, ‘I’ll tell you what, young man. This country will scare you to death, but it won’t kill you.’ ”

That was, Mr. Young said, “a true statement in my book.”

He speaks now with the benefit of recent history, after years of drought that parched eastern Oregon, whose bunchgrass meadows have been grazing land since the 1870s – so coveted that ranchers and shepherds once fought murderous wars for primacy.

Central Oregon’s “flat-hat” buckaroo cowboys still ride with traditions inherited from Spanish vaqueros, wanderers whose slick-horn saddles and 20-metre ropes have been American icons since the dawn of westward colonial expansion.

For some, the drought was the end of the line.

As temperatures approached 50 C in recent years, springs that long sustained cowboys and cow alike went dry. Reservoirs receded to mud. Ranchers built water pipelines to keep cows alive. Landowners barred grazing in places to preserve what grasses remained.

Some culled herds. Others sold off altogether. The number of beef cattle in Oregon further contracted; it’s down by a fifth since 2005.

In Jefferson County, one of the hardest-hit areas, “there was for-sale signs on probably half the places over there,” says Doug Breese, 80, a member of a prominent central Oregon ranching family. His father was a founder of the Crooked River Roundup, the annual rodeo in Prineville, which calls itself Cowboy Capital of Oregon.

“We’ve had droughts before, but not as bad as this one was,” he says. Ranchers struggled to raise hay to feed cattle, and struggled again to buy hay after it exploded in price. So they sold cows. “I can’t tell you how many,” Mr. Breese says, “but I saw a lot of trucks coming by with cows on them.”

And cowboys hung up their hats. No one knows exact numbers, but “there’s definitely been a drop-off in our area,” said Jake Tolton, assistant manager of the White Butte Ranch in Oregon’s Wheeler County. “The drought – it doesn’t make it easy to do this work, I know that much. It’s definitely demoralizing.”

Today, six central Oregon counties remain the only parts of the Pacific seaboard still in severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Yet in the cool of a recent morning, nearly a dozen men and women gathered just outside Mitchell to move the White Butte cows to fresh pasture. They towed horse trailers up a rough road, some with pistols strapped to their chests as a defence against snakes and other predators.

Then they rode, pushing the herd to higher ground through meadows and stands of ponderosa pine. Winter snow fell more heavily here than in past years, and the grasses have returned with a flourish. Beef prices are up, and the calves are putting on weight. Those who “hung in there made it some way or another – and they’re in hog heaven now,” Mr. Breese says.

You could say this is the way it has always been, livelihoods sometimes thirsting, sometimes thriving on cycles of weather and beef prices.

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“It’s a game of survival,” says Mr. Breese, whose ancestors homesteaded Gravy Gulch, so named because at the time, they had enough moisture to grow wheat and make gravy.

“You work 12 months out of the year and you hope the market is good – and if it’s bad, you go to the bank and beg and borrow and hope you can drag through another year.”

But the severity of recent drought has brought new anxieties, even in a year when moisture has returned. Confidence no longer comes as easily.

Mr. Tolton remembers one of the drought years when the weather suddenly snapped. “It went from nice cool weather, then it just cranked up to … it was 115, 118 degrees” – 46 to 48 C – “and just absolutely scorched everything, pulled all the moisture out of the ground,” Mr. Tolton says. “What would have been good for two months – in two weeks, it was gone.”

The White Butte herd is not what it once was, down to 345 cows from more than 500 a few years ago. In the dry years, “we would cull anything that was even close to not making the set date for calving, or if it was limping – anything that was lame or looked kind of rough,” Mr. Tolton says.

If the environment here changes enough, he says, there may one day be questions about the viability of this way of life. “Eventually those margins get so thin,” he says, “and something else has to take place in those areas.”

The cowboy has been a particularly strong filament in the fabric of American identity, a horse-riding avatar of ruggedness and individualism that has defied decades of premature obituaries. The pickup truck and the ATV and the side-by-side vehicle have all arrived. So, too, have the environmental regulations that prioritize fish, tech companies that have turned pasture into data centres, and modern land barons more interested in hunting on a trophy acreage than raising cows.

Still, the buckaroos ride.

Their particular style of cowboying has typically made its home throughout the Great Basin of the western interior, from Northern California through Nevada and Oregon; in British Columbia, too, some consider themselves buckaroos – cowboys with a reputation for cantankerousness toward work that doesn’t involve riding.

“When I was a kid, buckaroos wouldn’t deign to fix a fence or drive a tractor. They were horsemen,” says Matt Smith, whose family owns the GI Ranch, one of Oregon’s largest.

“They’re not universally loved. It’s pretty aggravating when you got someone that won’t drive a tractor.”

That attitude has generally been accompanied by great skill. Branding, a 2010 documentary, shows an array of rope throws, each suited to a different circumstance.

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“The buckaroo considers himself sort of the white collar,” Gwynn Turnbull says. “They’re a very prideful group.” (To a buckaroo, lesser-skilled ranch workers are “rosin jaws” – a slang that isn’t always complimentary, but evokes a particular view of the world. Texas cowboys, by contrast, are “cowpunchers,” deemed “a little bit more barbaric,” Ms. Turnbull says.)

“The buckaroo is known for a bit more finery with regards to the horse’s equipment,” she says. They can be “almost Amish” in rejection of personal flourishes, such as big belt buckles or ornamental chaps. “They won’t adorn themselves,” Ms. Turnbull says. “They put it all on the horse.”

Drought has brought new attention to the value of this way of life. “Horses are never obsolete,” Mr. Smith says. “They’re always the most user-friendly, sustainable way to do stuff.” In delicate high-desert environments, in particular, a motorized vehicle is “hard on the landscape, it’s hard on everything. It’s just not a good program,” he says.

In good years, horseback ranches, which rely on cattle grazing natural forage, can be among the best ways to raise beef. “They’re able to keep their livestock out year-round, or close to it, without supplementing with expensive hay,” says Todd Nash, a rancher who is president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association. “Sometimes, those can be the most profitable.”

But that also makes them particularly vulnerable to changing weather patterns. In the 2021 drought year, “we had about a half to a third of normal forage growth,” Mr. Nash says. “It was extremely challenging.”

Cowboying has never been an easy way of life, and it’s grown more difficult with the internal combustion engine and changing economics.

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Buckaroos are labour, and ranches, like other corporations, have sought to trim costs. Even a couple of decades ago, the West was home to dozens of cookhouses that offered food to those on horseback. Today, only a handful of cookhouses remain (including several in B.C., operated by the Douglas Lake Cattle Company).

At the GI Ranch, trained dogs are now used for some cattle herding, taking the place of cowboys.

“We always used to think about having one cowboy per 300 head or so,” Mr. Smith says. “We’re more than double that now.”

Or as Dave Mcmichael, a well-known central Oregon buckaroo and rodeo rider, puts it, drought did not arrive at a time of sunny prospects.

“It’s a dying deal anyways,” he says. “Nobody wants to do it because there’s no money in it.”

For now, though, the chief lesson from the drought has been endurance – those buckaroos still riding horseback becoming images of a new era, of resilience against the depredations not just of technology but of environment.

“Cowboy culture is not going away,” Ms. Turnbull says. “It’s adjusting to what’s going on” – including the vagaries of climate.

When the recent drought parched fields, Mike Smit, cowboss of the Kueny Ranch, pumped water onto meadows, creating an artificial rain. “It was a good idea. We were able to raise a little more grass,” he said. They bought hay to fill the gaps, and trimmed numbers by about 100 head.

Mr. Tolton has begun managing his herd differently, too. He’s raising more of his own heifers. When they grow up on their own land, they are better able to self-navigate to water and good grass. “That way, we can just improve on the efficiency of the ranch,” he says.

Doug Smith, a fourth-generation rancher in Prineville who was the grand marshal of this year’s Crooked River Roundup, switched the crops he planted, eschewing thirsty alfalfa for wheat and peas.

Drought “made us better at managing water than we’ve ever been,” he says. “If you aren’t a good steward of the ground, you aren’t going to be on it very long. And I want to be on it forever.”

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His son, Zach, 26, is a high-school science teacher. But he, too, has found his way onto the back of a horse. When school gets out for the summer, he switches his gear and his schedule, rising at dawn to ride. On one recent day, he joined the cowboys working with Mr. Tolton and the White Butte Ranch. It’s not, for now, a reliable way to make a living. But “it feeds something that’s more important than money,” he says.

Zach has begun building his own saddles, too. The first one, he made for himself, in the buckaroo style. “I wanted to really honour that old-time tradition of the vaqueros and that era – the old way,” he says. “And I love it to death.”

The Smiths aren’t convinced that a warming planet is to blame for recent drought. Neither is the right wing of the state’s political establishment, which is dominant in central Oregon.

“You’ll hear people talk about a man-made drought, and I think it’s a worthy conversation,” said Vikki Breese-Iverson, who is Doug Breese’s daughter and leader of the Republican minority in the state House of Representatives. “Everybody blames climate change, but I think there’s things that are happening in addition to that.”

The high desert has been transformed in the past century. Forest fires have diminished the ground’s ability to absorb precipitation. And thirsty juniper trees have spread like weeds across the landscape. “The more of those you grow, the less you have in your aquifer,” Ms. Breese-Iverson said.

Oregon has already funded some juniper removal programs. But more effort is needed to sculpt the landscape against drought, Ms. Breese-Iverson believes. “This idea of letting everything be natural and not having any management of it – that is problematic,” she says.

It’s a question, she says, of doing what it takes.

“That is the cowboy way, is it not? It’s always survival for the long term.”

Her father, however, recently sold off his last cows. “I’m too damn old to do anything, and I don’t have anybody coming along to help out,” he says.

Terrel Young, too, sold his cows nearly two years ago. He now operates an excavator. He is 54. “I got tired of running at it seven days a week, and you can’t find help,” he says.

Mr. Tolton, though, has no intention of quitting the range. “You can’t beat the lifestyle. It’s pretty damn good,” he says.

Drought was tough, but there is “no time to feel sorry for yourself,” he says. “You have to keep moving and get it done.”