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One of the State's Oldest Cattle Ranches Faces An Uncertain Future
By Zsombor Peter
Albuquerque Journal; Journal Staff Writer
BELL RANCH— Forget coal or cotton. Beneath the big blue skies of northeastern New Mexico's Harding County, cattle is king. "There's more cattle than there are people," said Bert Ancell, the burly general manager of the Bell Ranch, 292,000 acres of grassland stretching between Tucumcari and Roy.
One of the oldest ranches in the state, the Bell has been earning its way by cattle for generations. And though its current owners— the Lane family of Illinois— put 250,000 acres of the sprawling spread on the market in March, Ancell hopes it stays that way.
The odds are against him.
As president of Ranches of the West, a Montana outfit that helps ranch owners manage their land, Reid Rosenthal has seen it happen time and again.
"It's highly likely that if a ranch changes hands today that it's going to metamorphose from a working ranch to a combination working/recreation ranch," he said. "The trend is overwhelming."
There's a strong incentive to sell the land off in bits and pieces— money.
Smaller plots tend to earn more per acre. Rosenthal heard of a 1,800-acre Montana ranch that recently sold for $200 an acre. A 20-acre spread next door sold for $600 an acre.
"I mean, that's a huge impetus," he said. "So naturally, the developmentally minded guy is going to split the land."
But the Lanes, to hear the people around them tell it, are not those guys.
The Lanes declined to comment for this article. But according to Bill Keating, vice president of Lane Industries, the family "believes that selling it as one big piece is important to the integrity of the ranch and preserving the history,"
The Lanes won't consider offers to buy anything less than the whole 250,000 acres, said Rye Austin of Orvis/Cushman & Wakefield, the brokerage firm helping the Lanes sell the ranch.
But that hasn't kept minds from wandering.
"I think everyone's on edge," Austin said. "I think everyone would prefer to see the status quo."
On the Bell, where the only roads are made of dirt on which even FedEx won't venture, one can be forgiven for casting a wary eye at change. But even a man like Ancell, who first stepped foot here in 1968 as an eager 16-year-old ranch hand from Texas, has trouble articulating what its loss would mean. He speaks earnestly, if vaguely, of the Bell's long, storied history.
"You take that away," he said, by selling the ranch off piece by piece, "you lose something."
'You're not gonna believe this'
There aren't many pieces of private land left in this country where a man can stare for miles in any direction and see nothing but his own domain. The Bell is one.
The person who buys it will be the 22nd-largest landowner in the country, according to a ranking The Land Report magazine published in August.
But whoever saddles up to the $115 million asking price will be buying more than just land. They'll be buying a piece— a very big piece— of history.
The Bell Ranch started to take shape in 1824 when a newly independent Mexico granted 655,000 acres of Indian hunting grounds to Pablo Montoya, a former captain in the Spanish army. It wasn't until 1872 that cattle were brought to the ranch by its third owner, Wilson Waddingham. A "flamboyant Canadian" who fancied himself an Englishman, Waddingham personified cattle barons of the era and registered the Bell brand in 1874.
In 1947, a subsequent owner sold the ranch off in six parcels. William Lane bought his first, a 130,000-acre spread including the ranch's historic headquarters, in 1970. He spent the next seven years piecing the rest of the 292,000 acres together.
Today, the Canadian River skirts the Bell's western boundary. The ranch— most of it sits in San Miguel County now— lurches northeast from there following the water table, taking in everything from rolling prairies to canyons and mesas along the way.
In a northern corner, among the cottonwoods and a mesa wall, is the whitewashed, 10,000-square-foot hacienda. Built in the 1930s by the son of a Texas oil tycoon, it once hosted the likes of Clark Gable and Howard Hughes, who used the still-functional airstrip to fly in for the odd gambling weekend.
Among the rustic period furniture of the vaulting main hall, they would hardly look out of place today.
They'd still have a commanding view through the front windows of the ranch's namesake, a lonely butte in the uncanny shape of a giant bell.
A jarring 20-minute drive south sits the ranch's headquarters, a complex of more modest buildings.
Inside the longest, dubbed "The White House," rests a small museum's worth of artifacts, human and otherwise. There's the mounted head of a bison on one wall, from the days the herds still roamed this part of the state. The skin of a 6-foot rattlesnake lies stretched out on a table like the sleeping ghost of its former occupant. Arrowheads and Civil War-era munitions cover the top of a nearby mantel.
Ancell seems to have a story for them all.
"You know the difference between a fairy tale and a cowboy story?" he asked after telling a few, a faint, mischievous smile flickering across his face. "A fairy tale begins 'Once upon a time.' A cowboy story starts with 'You're not gonna believe this.' ''
Ancell sticks to cowboy stories. It's a reminder that for all its varied history the Bell remains, at heart, a working cattle ranch.
'We're doing all right'
It's the tail end of the fall season on the ranch. That means it's time for Ancell and crew to brand the calves born since their roundup last spring. It also means they have half as many cattle to brand as in the spring, about 1,000, so Ancell has only seven men on hand.
Their day starts cold and early, well before dawn. By the time they've polished off a breakfast of bacon and eggs with biscuits and coffee, the sun is still only a hint of washed-out blues on the horizon.
Ancell seems to prefer a sunrise over a sunset. Up by 4 every morning, he can't remember the last time he's missed one.
By seven, the roundup is in full swing. The cowboys mount up and scour one of the dozen or so pastures on the ranch, driving the cattle east with the occasional hoot and holler.
Riding a giant quarterhorse to match his tall, heavy frame, Ancell cuts a romantic figure against the iconic landscape— so iconic, in fact, that the ranch was chosen as the backdrop for "Rawhide," the 1960s Western series.
But Ancell and his crew are no actors. For anyone who thought the days of the cowboy were over, they're living proof to the contrary.
By a quarter after eight, crew and cattle reach the pen. Ancell's men prepare for the branding.
After thinning the herd of most adults, one man rides into the bunch to lasso a calf by the hind legs. He drags the calf out and the team descends like a well-oiled machine. Two men drop the calf on its right side and grab the front and back legs.
While someone vaccinates the calf on the neck, a plume of thick white smoke reeking of burned hair rises from the hip where it's just been branded.
Someone moves in to clip the nascent horns, no more than little white nubs yet. Finally, if the calf's a male, a few quick strokes of the knife have it singing falsetto.
The castration makes the meat more tender by taking testosterone out of the system.
Between calves, Berl "Button" Ancell, Bert's son, grabs what might pass for a working lunch on the range.
After castrating one young bull, he lays the white testicles atop the fire-hot branding pot. He carefully flips them over a few times until they're charred to a light crisp on the outside but still tender underneath.
In a matter of minutes, he picks one out, gives it a few cooling puffs, and digs in. Some prefer their "oysters" deep-fried or otherwise seasoned beyond recognition. Button likes his hot off the branding pot.
"Best way to eat them," he said.
By high noon, they've branded all the calves for the day— 97 in all. They'll visit the other pastures over the next few weeks.
Once weaned, the yearlings will go to market, some to range, but most to feed lots.
The de-horning lets the lots pack the cattle in closer. Ancell says he's no fan of feed lots, but at a $15 loss for every yearling that still has its horns, he can't argue.
Despite the image of the fat- cat cattle baron of yore, he said, "cattle isn't a get-rich business."
The way Ancell sees it, he's not even working with cattle so much as grass.
"We grow grass, not beef," he said. "We're out here trying to take care of the land. The people in the feed lots, they grow beef."
But the recent drought has made growing that grass harder. The Bell has taken its hits. Ancell said there were once as many as 5,500 Red Bell cattle roaming the ranch, bred exclusively on the Bell for optimum fertility in these climes.
The Bell is down to about 3,500 today. It takes care of another 1,000 cattle for other ranches.
Asked if the Bell had been paying its way lately, Ancell smiled a little uncomfortably.
"We're doing all right," he said. "We're doing all right."
'Looking to diversify'
Though his group does little work in northeast New Mexico, Rosenthal said it's a tough business all over.
"You can't make cattle ranching pay if you have any debt whatsoever and you don't have kids to be your full-time staff," he said.
Ranches that do manage to make ends meet also tend to combine their cattle business with other ventures, like recreational hunting.
The Bell has had its losing years, conceded Lane Industries President Forrest Schneider. But over the decades, he said, it has turned a profit.
Ask about the Lanes' reasons for selling the ranch, though, and talk of profit margins disappears.
When William Lane bought his first parcel of the Bell, the family would visit monthly. Only Jeff Lane, the second- eldest of Bill's sons, made the move permanent after graduating from college in the mid-'70s. For the rest of the family, the visits grew more rare.
As the third generation of Lanes has come of age, Schneider said, "there's been less and less reason for them to go out there."
"They're looking to diversify ... and the ranch doesn't really fit into their overall plans," he said.
Said Austin, "$115 million is a lot of money to have in one place, especially if you're only going to use it a few times a year. The third generation just isn't as interested in running the place."
They're looking for someone who is.
Probably no one hopes they succeed more than Ancell. He's been here longer than the Lanes, and he doesn't particularly relish the thought of moving on.
"Yeah, we're worried," said Debbie Ancell, Bert's wife, eyeing the morning's branding from a perch along the pen. "But it all depends on how Bert gets along with whoever buys the place."
However he feels about the sale, Bert Ancell doesn't sound worried. To his credit, he knows the ranch, all 292,000 acres of it, better than anyone.
"I know how to turn the water off," he said with another smile. "I'm teasing, but it's true."
As president-elect of the New Mexico Cattle Growers' Association, he's also learned his way around Santa Fe. Without missing a beat, he can switch from waxing poetic about the rainbow of colors the Bell's mesas run through at dusk to debating the finer points of the state's water laws.
Ancell has only one request of the Bell's next owner.
"I hope it's just someone who wants to continue this place the way it's been run," he said, "the cowboy way."
By Zsombor Peter
Albuquerque Journal; Journal Staff Writer
BELL RANCH— Forget coal or cotton. Beneath the big blue skies of northeastern New Mexico's Harding County, cattle is king. "There's more cattle than there are people," said Bert Ancell, the burly general manager of the Bell Ranch, 292,000 acres of grassland stretching between Tucumcari and Roy.
One of the oldest ranches in the state, the Bell has been earning its way by cattle for generations. And though its current owners— the Lane family of Illinois— put 250,000 acres of the sprawling spread on the market in March, Ancell hopes it stays that way.
The odds are against him.
As president of Ranches of the West, a Montana outfit that helps ranch owners manage their land, Reid Rosenthal has seen it happen time and again.
"It's highly likely that if a ranch changes hands today that it's going to metamorphose from a working ranch to a combination working/recreation ranch," he said. "The trend is overwhelming."
There's a strong incentive to sell the land off in bits and pieces— money.
Smaller plots tend to earn more per acre. Rosenthal heard of a 1,800-acre Montana ranch that recently sold for $200 an acre. A 20-acre spread next door sold for $600 an acre.
"I mean, that's a huge impetus," he said. "So naturally, the developmentally minded guy is going to split the land."
But the Lanes, to hear the people around them tell it, are not those guys.
The Lanes declined to comment for this article. But according to Bill Keating, vice president of Lane Industries, the family "believes that selling it as one big piece is important to the integrity of the ranch and preserving the history,"
The Lanes won't consider offers to buy anything less than the whole 250,000 acres, said Rye Austin of Orvis/Cushman & Wakefield, the brokerage firm helping the Lanes sell the ranch.
But that hasn't kept minds from wandering.
"I think everyone's on edge," Austin said. "I think everyone would prefer to see the status quo."
On the Bell, where the only roads are made of dirt on which even FedEx won't venture, one can be forgiven for casting a wary eye at change. But even a man like Ancell, who first stepped foot here in 1968 as an eager 16-year-old ranch hand from Texas, has trouble articulating what its loss would mean. He speaks earnestly, if vaguely, of the Bell's long, storied history.
"You take that away," he said, by selling the ranch off piece by piece, "you lose something."
'You're not gonna believe this'
There aren't many pieces of private land left in this country where a man can stare for miles in any direction and see nothing but his own domain. The Bell is one.
The person who buys it will be the 22nd-largest landowner in the country, according to a ranking The Land Report magazine published in August.
But whoever saddles up to the $115 million asking price will be buying more than just land. They'll be buying a piece— a very big piece— of history.
The Bell Ranch started to take shape in 1824 when a newly independent Mexico granted 655,000 acres of Indian hunting grounds to Pablo Montoya, a former captain in the Spanish army. It wasn't until 1872 that cattle were brought to the ranch by its third owner, Wilson Waddingham. A "flamboyant Canadian" who fancied himself an Englishman, Waddingham personified cattle barons of the era and registered the Bell brand in 1874.
In 1947, a subsequent owner sold the ranch off in six parcels. William Lane bought his first, a 130,000-acre spread including the ranch's historic headquarters, in 1970. He spent the next seven years piecing the rest of the 292,000 acres together.
Today, the Canadian River skirts the Bell's western boundary. The ranch— most of it sits in San Miguel County now— lurches northeast from there following the water table, taking in everything from rolling prairies to canyons and mesas along the way.
In a northern corner, among the cottonwoods and a mesa wall, is the whitewashed, 10,000-square-foot hacienda. Built in the 1930s by the son of a Texas oil tycoon, it once hosted the likes of Clark Gable and Howard Hughes, who used the still-functional airstrip to fly in for the odd gambling weekend.
Among the rustic period furniture of the vaulting main hall, they would hardly look out of place today.
They'd still have a commanding view through the front windows of the ranch's namesake, a lonely butte in the uncanny shape of a giant bell.
A jarring 20-minute drive south sits the ranch's headquarters, a complex of more modest buildings.
Inside the longest, dubbed "The White House," rests a small museum's worth of artifacts, human and otherwise. There's the mounted head of a bison on one wall, from the days the herds still roamed this part of the state. The skin of a 6-foot rattlesnake lies stretched out on a table like the sleeping ghost of its former occupant. Arrowheads and Civil War-era munitions cover the top of a nearby mantel.
Ancell seems to have a story for them all.
"You know the difference between a fairy tale and a cowboy story?" he asked after telling a few, a faint, mischievous smile flickering across his face. "A fairy tale begins 'Once upon a time.' A cowboy story starts with 'You're not gonna believe this.' ''
Ancell sticks to cowboy stories. It's a reminder that for all its varied history the Bell remains, at heart, a working cattle ranch.
'We're doing all right'
It's the tail end of the fall season on the ranch. That means it's time for Ancell and crew to brand the calves born since their roundup last spring. It also means they have half as many cattle to brand as in the spring, about 1,000, so Ancell has only seven men on hand.
Their day starts cold and early, well before dawn. By the time they've polished off a breakfast of bacon and eggs with biscuits and coffee, the sun is still only a hint of washed-out blues on the horizon.
Ancell seems to prefer a sunrise over a sunset. Up by 4 every morning, he can't remember the last time he's missed one.
By seven, the roundup is in full swing. The cowboys mount up and scour one of the dozen or so pastures on the ranch, driving the cattle east with the occasional hoot and holler.
Riding a giant quarterhorse to match his tall, heavy frame, Ancell cuts a romantic figure against the iconic landscape— so iconic, in fact, that the ranch was chosen as the backdrop for "Rawhide," the 1960s Western series.
But Ancell and his crew are no actors. For anyone who thought the days of the cowboy were over, they're living proof to the contrary.
By a quarter after eight, crew and cattle reach the pen. Ancell's men prepare for the branding.
After thinning the herd of most adults, one man rides into the bunch to lasso a calf by the hind legs. He drags the calf out and the team descends like a well-oiled machine. Two men drop the calf on its right side and grab the front and back legs.
While someone vaccinates the calf on the neck, a plume of thick white smoke reeking of burned hair rises from the hip where it's just been branded.
Someone moves in to clip the nascent horns, no more than little white nubs yet. Finally, if the calf's a male, a few quick strokes of the knife have it singing falsetto.
The castration makes the meat more tender by taking testosterone out of the system.
Between calves, Berl "Button" Ancell, Bert's son, grabs what might pass for a working lunch on the range.
After castrating one young bull, he lays the white testicles atop the fire-hot branding pot. He carefully flips them over a few times until they're charred to a light crisp on the outside but still tender underneath.
In a matter of minutes, he picks one out, gives it a few cooling puffs, and digs in. Some prefer their "oysters" deep-fried or otherwise seasoned beyond recognition. Button likes his hot off the branding pot.
"Best way to eat them," he said.
By high noon, they've branded all the calves for the day— 97 in all. They'll visit the other pastures over the next few weeks.
Once weaned, the yearlings will go to market, some to range, but most to feed lots.
The de-horning lets the lots pack the cattle in closer. Ancell says he's no fan of feed lots, but at a $15 loss for every yearling that still has its horns, he can't argue.
Despite the image of the fat- cat cattle baron of yore, he said, "cattle isn't a get-rich business."
The way Ancell sees it, he's not even working with cattle so much as grass.
"We grow grass, not beef," he said. "We're out here trying to take care of the land. The people in the feed lots, they grow beef."
But the recent drought has made growing that grass harder. The Bell has taken its hits. Ancell said there were once as many as 5,500 Red Bell cattle roaming the ranch, bred exclusively on the Bell for optimum fertility in these climes.
The Bell is down to about 3,500 today. It takes care of another 1,000 cattle for other ranches.
Asked if the Bell had been paying its way lately, Ancell smiled a little uncomfortably.
"We're doing all right," he said. "We're doing all right."
'Looking to diversify'
Though his group does little work in northeast New Mexico, Rosenthal said it's a tough business all over.
"You can't make cattle ranching pay if you have any debt whatsoever and you don't have kids to be your full-time staff," he said.
Ranches that do manage to make ends meet also tend to combine their cattle business with other ventures, like recreational hunting.
The Bell has had its losing years, conceded Lane Industries President Forrest Schneider. But over the decades, he said, it has turned a profit.
Ask about the Lanes' reasons for selling the ranch, though, and talk of profit margins disappears.
When William Lane bought his first parcel of the Bell, the family would visit monthly. Only Jeff Lane, the second- eldest of Bill's sons, made the move permanent after graduating from college in the mid-'70s. For the rest of the family, the visits grew more rare.
As the third generation of Lanes has come of age, Schneider said, "there's been less and less reason for them to go out there."
"They're looking to diversify ... and the ranch doesn't really fit into their overall plans," he said.
Said Austin, "$115 million is a lot of money to have in one place, especially if you're only going to use it a few times a year. The third generation just isn't as interested in running the place."
They're looking for someone who is.
Probably no one hopes they succeed more than Ancell. He's been here longer than the Lanes, and he doesn't particularly relish the thought of moving on.
"Yeah, we're worried," said Debbie Ancell, Bert's wife, eyeing the morning's branding from a perch along the pen. "But it all depends on how Bert gets along with whoever buys the place."
However he feels about the sale, Bert Ancell doesn't sound worried. To his credit, he knows the ranch, all 292,000 acres of it, better than anyone.
"I know how to turn the water off," he said with another smile. "I'm teasing, but it's true."
As president-elect of the New Mexico Cattle Growers' Association, he's also learned his way around Santa Fe. Without missing a beat, he can switch from waxing poetic about the rainbow of colors the Bell's mesas run through at dusk to debating the finer points of the state's water laws.
Ancell has only one request of the Bell's next owner.
"I hope it's just someone who wants to continue this place the way it's been run," he said, "the cowboy way."
