Cattleman shows land 'respect'
....By Bill Whitaker
The choice of 71-year-old Albany rancher Bob Green as marshal
of tonight's Western Heritage Classic parade makes good sense.
Some of us think Bob epitomizes what western ranchers should be
rather than what they too often are.
Although no one's about to label this hero of bloody Pacific campaigns
in Leyte and Okinawa as some mere "tree-hugger," Bob
Green's life as a rancher has treated this stubborn land and its
fragile eco-system with a heaping measure of respect.
Certainly, our area has seen ranchers who held no such respect.
"My father would refer to those kind of people as 'enemies
of the grass,'" Bob told me. "But then those people
probably had big notes at the bank and ran more cattle (on the
land) than they should have. And then there's just greedy cattlemen
like there's greedy everything else."
The Greens have always done things differently. They might not
have taken root along Hubbard Creek if they hadn't.
By now, the story has been told well and often: T.H. Green, a
Confederate veteran living down in the Hill Country, dispatched
young son Henry to Shackelford and Stephens counties in 1885 to
sell some horses they had there, then return with the money.
Henry, however, took a strong liking for the open range fast disappearing.
So, with the money he'd gotten for the horses, he leased some
land, set up camp near picturesque Hubbard Creek and nervously
dispatched a letter to his dad telling him just what he'd done.
Later Henry went out to meet his father upon the latter's arrival
by train in Albany. He described his old man as "the maddest
man I'd ever seen."
Even so, everyone in the family was soon won over and the Greens
have remained tied to the land.
Bob has certainly weathered trying times, including the terrible
drought of the early 1950s that inspired Elmer Kelton's classic
novel The Time It Never Rained. Bob still has home movies of his
kids feeding some of the few cattle left during that drought.
"I can recognize where those locations are on the ranch and,
in those old movies, there's not a blade of grass. You could see
every pebble, every rock."
After the drought, Bob's brother Bill went to Wyoming, bought
some heifer yearlings and brought them back to West Texas. Bob
remembers it was raining when the cattle finally arrived.
"I'll never forget those heifers scattering off into the
muddy pasture," Bob said, "because that's when I knew
we were back in the cattle business."
Other hard times came when the West Central Texas Municipal Water
District selected Hubbard Creek Valley for a new lake providing
much-needed water for area towns. Alas, this meant taking out
of production a fourth of the original Green Ranch - an episode
Bob today views with wry stoicism. "We were such babes in
the woods," he said of efforts to fight the water authority
in the 1950s. "If we had found some danged snail or minnow
or snake, we could've held 'em up for years.
But back then we didn't even know enough to get 'em to pay our
legal expenses!"
Many ranchers today find it most lucrative to lease out stretches
of their land to hunters, but Bob Green resists the notion. While
he acknowledges the need by some to lease their land to hunters,
he wins plaudits for protecting the deer and turkey populations
on his own spread.
He also remains diligent about regular mesquite-dozing operations
and prescribed burnings to improve the land.
Possibly more ranchers might be this way had they been raised
by a John Waynesque rancher whose cattle call boomed across the
land - a spread so alluring it was worth bucking parental authority
for.
Maybe, too, other ranchers might be that way had they grown up
in a stretch of land as enchanting as the place Bob Green knew
as a child.
"It's a lucky kid that gets to grow up on a creek or river,"
Bob said. "We had trout lines in the water all the time.
There's just something about a flowing creek that makes your imagination
wonder where it all comes from."
Much of the old Green Ranch is covered by Hubbard Creek Lake now.
Still, long-ago memories run deep, as is obvious in so much of
what Bob Green does today.
Now you can e-mail Bill Whitaker at WTWARN@aol.com.
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1997, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps. Publications
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