The Heart Of Cowboy Camp

Lantern light illuminates a small dining area, creating a glowing oasis in the gray almost-light of early morning on the high desert of northern Nevada. Seven buckaroos sit around a long white table eating scrambled eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes. After they eat, they saddle horses and trot out from camp to gather cow/calf pairs for the day’s branding.

The cowboys have been camped out for several days, and they have several more weeks to go until all the work is done. The year isn’t 1885, though; it’s well into the 21st century. While modern technology has altered many aspects of ranching, camping with no electricity and cooking in a chuck wagon remains the most efficient way to complete the spring works on some big cattle outfits.

- Jolyn Young

Riding out with the Span Legendary cattleman Charles Goodnight is credited with inventing the American chuck wagon in 1866. He needed a way to keep his crew fed as they trailed cattle from Texas to various northern points. He bolted a wooden box to the back of an Army Studebaker wagon and added compartments for utensils, bedding, food, and other necessities. The chuck wagon caught on and was used by ranches all over the West, evolving with the industry as the cattle drive era ended and cowboys began camping on individual ranches.

These days, the use of horse trailers, coupled with the diminishing size of the average ranch, has turned the tradition into more of a novelty. More meals are cooked in chuck wagon cook-off competitions than out on the range. However, big ranches such as Texas’s Four Sixes, Montana’s Little Horn, the Diamond A of Arizona, Nevada’s Spanish Ranch, and others still maintain the practice of pulling a wagon each spring.

A century and a half after Goodnight’s invention, the Spanish Ranch uses a renovated Army truck to feed its cowboy crew during the spring works. Located 60 miles north of Elko, in the Independence Valley, the “Span” encompasses 76,000 deeded acres in addition to its leased public allotments to run 3,400 mother cows, plus additional stocker and replacement yearlings. Like all of its neighbors, the Span is big by necessity. It lies in the arid, high-desert climate of the Great Basin, which covers most of Nevada and little slivers of eastern Oregon, southern Idaho, and western Utah. In this country, at least 10 acres are required to run one cow. Often, several times that amount is needed.

“This is a big, rough ranch,” says lifelong cowboy and Spanish Ranch buckaroo Jim Young.