Owyhee Rustling Today
While putting together the “Moonshine and Long Ropes” chapter for “Early Life in the Owyhee” (see sidebar), I wondered to what extent rustling still occurs and whether it is of the same sort as that described by the BLM interviewees. Rustling in their day was mostly small scale–stealing a single animal for food or perhaps a dozen or so animals to build up a herd for oneself or maybe to spirit across the border into Nevada to sell. The lack of big trucks and paved highways limited larger scale theft.
Cattleman-historian Mike Hanley IV begins his history of the Owyhee describing how a rancher happened upon a couple of men butchering a cow on a remote road. Realizing they’d been discovered, the men “dropped the meat and took off in a small plane they’d landed on the dirt road.” From the plane’s number, it was determined to have been rented in Salt Lake giving aliases. Hanley goes on to describe much of the West as plagued with rustlers who have replaced the “long rope and running iron” with refrigerated trucks, motorcycles, campers, pickups and planes.” Ranchers suffer losses running into the thousands of dollars. The region is so sweeping and remote that it is difficult to patrol. Standard procedure, wrote Hanley, is to shoot an animal along an isolated road and, if large, butcher it in place taking only the hindquarters, and if small, load it into a truck or camper to be cut up later. Calves are taken by motorcyclists who run them down, hog tie them and stuff them into a sack lashed to the bike. Refrigerator truck operators “methodically butcher several beefs at a time, then market them in the big cities through their own special outlets.” He describes losses from his own herds and a case in which two men were caught with nineteen head of stolen cows and admitted to having butchered another seven, which they had sold to a Seattle restaurant. He laments the light sentences such men have received. (Owyhee Trails, pp.1-5.)
Hanley’s descriptions are echoed by others. A 2009 Oregonian article reported that 1240 cows worth $1.2 million had been stolen over the previous three years. One ranch had 150 head valued at $150,000 stolen from a remote area reachable only by a road that passes through rural Nevada. A little over a year later a followup article still gave the number of stolen animals at 1240 valued at $1.7 million at current prices. Interestingly some twenty of the missing 150 cows were found among the victimized rancher’s herd when they were gathered that winter from a remote high-desert grazing allotment. The conclusion of the deputy sheriff investigating the stolen cows–and who’d had two of his own animals come back–was that they had been returned by the thieves, who didn’t “want to get caught with them. They don’t want to do time. It’s a felony.” The thieves were disposing of branded mother cows that could be used as evidence, and the easiest way was simply to turn them loose on the range. No unbranded calves had been returned. BEEF magazine reported in 2012 that rancher Bob Skinner had come up short 200 head, far more than normal death loss. He found then that many of his neighbors were also missing numbers. It was at this point that the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office stepped in and increased back-country and aerial patrols. Ranchers who owned aircraft flew deputies over the area several times a week. The costs were borne by the BLM and Malheur County. Back-country and livestock patrols were performed by volunteers. Rustling declined.
So, who are the rustlers? Interestingly, although no one has been arrested, local law enforcement and residents have a pretty good notion of what sort of men are taking their cows. They say that what makes these men unusual “is the scale and duration of their operations, their use of horses to reach areas inaccessible to car or truck, and the fact that they sometimes drive their plundered herds for days, carefully sweeping around ranches and people.” According to the investigating deputy, on the rare occasion that the thieves have been spotted out on the desert, they usually appear to be cowhands out for a short ride. They’re never seen with bedrolls or halters on their horses that would indicate they plan to camp and picket their horses, giving the impression they are locals just out for the day. He suspected the thefts were being carried out by a single group of four to six men familiar with the area, though some thought there might be more “The way these cattle are ending up missing, those guys grew up tough. They lived the life all their lives. They aren’t outsiders.” They seem to wait for bad weather when no one is on the range to carry out their thefts. And while the Owyhee range is vast, the ranching community is small making it easy for rustlers to know when people will be occupied with social activities such as funerals, weddings or ball games, leaving herds untended.
If it is known with such certainty what sort of people are stealing the cows and how they are doing it, why aren’t they being caught? Ranchers interviewed in an “Oregon Field Guide” report broadcast October 7, 2010 offered some clues. One reason is the physical landscape. The cows are simply scattered over hundreds of miles of roadless sage brush desert making it impossible to keep track of them without a plane, which most ranchers don’t have. Those that do can only go up when the weather is good. And simply spotting them doesn’t mean they can be caught. In the 2009 Oregonian article cited earlier, a brand inspector for the State Dept of Agriculture described how a pair of rustlers driving a herd of 125 cows in Oregon’s remote southeast were spotted by a plane. Though the pilot descended, he didn’t get a look at the men’s faces and eventually had to break away.
Another reason is cultural. Owyhee cattlemen are describe themselves as proud and independent, and they are reluctant to admit to the loss of cattle “under their watch.” Consequently, reports of thefts do not reach law enforcement in time enough to find and apprehend the culprits. By the time law enforcement learns of a theft, the stolen beef has been transported out of the area to be sold. Selling the cows may be the easy part. According to Andy Bentz, sheriff in 2010, the cows could be shipped to the Midwest where brands are neither required nor checked when cows are sold. “You get back there far enough, you have an animal, you’re the owner. It’s as simple as that.”
Using microchips to identify cows and maintain a database of owners could help to track stolen animals, but there is skepticism about that possibility. Some say the chips are easily removed, but the biggest objection is how government–especially the Federal government–might use the information. They point out that unless it was mandated, “chipping”probably wouldn’t work. At present there is no national database of who owns what; ranchers keep their own information on how many cows they have and so forth. The ranchers express distrust of the government to hold that information in a national database. Even the sheriff, who encouraged the ranchers to think about chipping, thought it might be too intrusive and even “un-American.” While one rancher opined that if the technology could be shown to be reliable and unintrusive they might consider it, the OPB reporter observed, “That may be a hard sell in a place, where as long as there’s been cattle, people have been known more for tradition than for change.” That characteristic is apparent in another explanation for the reluctance to move to chipping: Hot iron branding is more than just burning a rancher’s mark into a calf’s hide. For neighbors that live so widely separated, the annual branding of calves is also an important annual social occasion when entire families gather to help one another brand their animals.
In the end, however, the answer to the question of how much rustling or moonshining is occurring now remains unclear. Most of the foregoing is speculation or based on an assumption that missing cattle are stolen cattle. I have heard suggestions that missing cattle are reported as stolen in order to collect insurance, and that those who lose cows are the ranchers who do the poorest job of looking after them. The decline in reports of rustling following the increased patrolling described above could be in part the result more of the closer eye being kept on the whereabouts of one’s herd than the scaring off of thieves. In any event, when I inquired of the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office a few weeks ago about the incidence of rustling or moonshining in the past five years, the response was “Malheur County has not had any rustling or moonshining in the past five years. We have had missing cattle but it has not been determined as rustling….”