Read an Excerpt
From the chapter titled “O RO Ranch”
“The O RO Ranch is different.
Many a legendary cowboy has left horse tracks in the shadow of Mount Hope, the imposing peak at its center that presides like an ancient pyramid over a grassy plain, flanked by high mountain ranges and rugged, gaping canyons. Those tracks, tracing back to an old Spanish land grant, have been swept away by time,but they live on todayin the memories of a new generation of men who still spend their lives looking between the ears of a horse and following a cow.
At 257,000 acres, the O RO Ranch north of Prescott, Arizona, is certainly one of the largest, roughest, most remote ranches in the state. Separating it from its neighbors to the south is Burro Canyon, a mere jagged line on the map, but it may as well divide two different worlds. Cowboys still tell tales of the orejanas, wild unbranded cattle that dwell deep in the canyon, and since it’s mostly inaccessible, even horseback, the whispered legends of these old mossybacks live on in the imagination.
Partly because the ranch is, for the most part, closed to the public by locked gate, there’s an intangible mystique surrounding it. Anyone who’s ever lived or worked here feels it.
Life on “the big outfit,” as former manager Bob Sharp called it in his 1974 book by the same name, might be more modernized today, but the people who live and work here are still a special breed, “more independent, carefree, proud and loyal,” as he put it.
The “RO’s,” as local cow people know it, is still strictly a horseback outfit, and it’s one of the few ranches left that runs a wagon, spring and fall – out of necessity, not for show. This is no place for “wanna-be” cowboys. A hand here had better be able to live in a tepee five to six months out of the year, shoe his own horses, mount a snorty horse at daylight, and spend a hard day in the saddle, come rain or shine.Men like these are a dying breed.”
