The worst drought in Texas history is forcing ranches to resettle 1,000 miles north — one truckload at a time.

by Stayton Bonner

After 150 years, some of the last surviving Texas cattle ranches are pulling up stakes. Fighting the worst single-year drought in state history and wildfires that have claimed close to 4 million acres, Texas ranchers have begun selling off their herds or shipping them north to greener pastures, in numbers not seen since the Dust Bowl days. At the Four Sixes Ranch — the largest individually owned ranch in the state — more than 4,000 Black Angus cattle are being trucked via 18-wheeler 1,000 miles to new pastures as far north as Montana. King County, Texas, has been like a sandstorm-blasted vision of hell. Just over an inch of rain had fallen in 2011, compared with an annual average of 25. Summer temperatures exceeded 100 degrees for weeks. Cattle dropped from heat exhaustion, their malnourished calves eaten alive by coyotes and picked clean by vultures. Grass withered to a combustible carpet the color of straw, and then ignited into 15-mile-wide wild­­fires. State agriculture losses tallied $5.2 billion. Ranchers were left with a choice: Flee or slaughter everything you own.

In Texas, the country’s largest producer of beef, it’s considered impolite to ride another man’s horse, let alone touch his cattle. But with the drought predicted to last through 2020, ranchers are relocating their herds to unfamiliar pastures they’ve leased up north. Working throughout the autumn to move thous­ands of cattle before snow falls in Montana, the men have just a few months to navigate a growing deluge of federal forms, frightened cows, and worried wives while preparing to hand over herds they’ve spent lifetimes cultivating to strangers with funny accents and a different way of wearing their hats.

“Some ranches are even moving herds south into Mexico,” a Sixes hand says. “I guess everything in the middle just isn’t worth a durn.”

At 73, Anne Marion — known as “Miss Anne” by the ranch’s 16 full-time cowboys — is the sole heir to the 275,000-acre Four Sixes. The ranch was founded in 1868 by her great-grandfather Burk Burnett, a cowboy-cum-cattle-baron who once took President Theodore Roosevelt and Comanche chief Quanah Parker on horseback to hunt for Mexican gray wolves. Just a year before his death, Burnett watched oil spout on land he’d bought for $2.65 an acre, a still-gushing discovery that allows Miss Anne, worth an estimated $1.5 billion, to live however she damn well pleases.

The only child of an only child, Miss Anne exercises unusual autonomy over her reign. Although her private jet rarely touches down at the Sixes outside quail season (when friends like former President George W. and Laura Bush may be found roaming the property with as many as 20 hunting dogs), she has arrived to oversee the shipping of her cows.

“My mother made a big mistake when she sold her cattle during the 1950s drought,” Miss Anne says from behind Jackie O. sunglasses. “It took forever to get the herd back up.”

Like racehorse breeding, the Sixes cattle operation is all about genetics. When a rancher sells his herd, he doesn’t just lose those specific cows. He also loses decades of breeding, years spent corralling a top-notch gene pool to produce a muscle-to-fat ratio (for example, marbled rib eye) that qualifies as prime and fetches top dollar.

World-class DNA means squat, however, without green grass for the cattle to graze. Last September, the Texas State Climatologist predicted the drought could last until 2020. The cooling Pacific, the warming Atlantic, and the overall global carbon-dioxide binge have created a perfect non-storm over Texas. When it became clear that the heavens might not part for the next nine years, Sixes general manager Joe Leathers, a dead ringer for Dale Earnhardt, called a posse of the other ranches that make up 1.5 million acres of Texas’s fabled “Cowboy Strip” and volunteered to head north in search of new land. While neighboring ranches routinely lend one another a hand for branding or fighting fires, this was different. If they couldn’t save the cattle, the cowboys stood to lose much more.

Leathers crisscrossed the West in search of land he could lease for the bulk of the ranch’s 6,500 cattle, motel receipts and crumpled fast-food containers settling like snow on his passenger-side floor. While no one property was large enough to hold the entire Sixes herd, he patched together eight leases flung across Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska. He shared his findings with other ranchers back home, prompting them to sign leases of their own.

Though the underpinnings of prepping cattle for shipment have changed little over the years — the main goal is to ensure that each mother is paired with her calf because a cow won’t suckle another’s baby — the Sixes setup is more Silicon Valley than Red River. Electronic tags are punched into ears, allowing cowboys to swipe wands across the herd like TSA staff at an airport pat-down, with individual cows popping up on iPad screens. Horseback conversations shift from 401(k) plans — all Sixes cowboys have retirement plans, health care, and two weeks’ paid vacation — to golf scores. Men text or post shots of newly found Comanche arrowheads to their Facebook pages.

Like most Sixes cowboys, Leathers lives with his wife in on-site housing provided by the ranch, which also covers their utility bills. Although an average cowboy salary tops out at $25,000, the Sixes Ranch takes care of its own. Miss Anne covers the college education of any employee’s child who keeps up his grades. Once a year, a cow culled from the herd is butchered to each cowboy’s specification and loaded into his freezer, a tradition dating back to when trail cooks hung freshly killed calves from chuck-wagon hooks. On average, the men eat two helpings of beef a day.

Cowboys talk little, preferring to sit and stare into their coffee cups or spit tobacco juice into the nearest soda can. I know the drought is serious when a young hand pauses from working cattle through a chute to discuss the possibility of moving to Montana. “I haven’t told my kids, and I hope I don’t have to,” he says quietly, taking care the others won’t hear. “My wife doesn’t want to go. I don’t want to either, but I will.”

In a few weeks, when the Sixes finishes shipping its cattle, Leathers will head north to Montana to help oversee the herds. While the cowboys will swap out two-week shifts through the winter, most of the leases are for five years, meaning the ranch will move some men and their families for the duration once the spring thaw hits. For Leathers, choosing who stays and who moves 1,000 miles from home will be difficult. Cowboys tend to work a specific patch of land their entire lives. The decision makes concrete a looming fear that the men are facing the end of an era in Texas.

Despite an inch of rainfall during my visit — roughly what the region’s seen in the entire year — it won’t make a difference for the cattle. King County will need extended rain throughout the year, closer to its usual 25 inches, for the grass to gain a foothold. For now, whenever a storm is spotted, the cowboys drive across the ranch looking for rising smoke from where lightning has ignited the pastures. (A ranch hand dubbed Sparky was recently struck by a bolt while driving his truck — the electricity shorted his engine and caused his hair to stand on end.)

While droughts occur periodically — the worst on state record was from 1950 to 1957 — rising global temperatures are ensuring they remain hotter and drier than before. With a new La Niña emerging over the Pacific, Texas may likely have another dry winter. If the drought doesn’t end soon, the Sixes cowboys, nearly all of whom have lived within 100 miles of the ranch their entire lives, may have to choose between Montana or a new line of work. Living amid six-foot rattlesnakes, 2,000-pound bulls, and truck-frying lightning bolts, the Sixes cowboys survive by expecting the worst. Ranch lore is rich with stories of men undergoing reversals of fortune. After Philip Morris shot a cigarette commercial on the ranch during the 1970s, one of the original Marlboro Men, a working Sixes cowboy, died not from cancer but by drowning in a shallow stock tank when his horse fell over. By comparison, the slow, methodical removal of the Sixes herd is non-lethal but unnerving, a reminder of life’s impermanence playing out in real time.