Trailing cattle across a meadow
Pause for refreshments
A little green starting to show
Water on the meadow is a good sign.
Branding later in the morning
Girls make a great crew.
As long as Brady keeps dragging in the calves.
Two heels and comin' in.
Lock and load
Company came to visit us.
They had ringside seats to watch the action.
Ruth and John Burton. John has been one of my heroes ever since I was a little kid. He will turn 86 years old on the 11th of May. When John was a young man 24 years of age, he rode horseback and led a packhorse from Ellsworth, Nebraska to the Grand Canyon in Arizona. When he was near Granby, Colorado one of his horses came up lame. As the dude ranch summer season was just starting, John got a job as a wrangler on the Devil's Thumb Guest Ranch near Fraser, Colorado. After Labor Day, when the guests had left the ranch and John's horse had healed, he started riding again towards the Grand Canyon. He camped at the North Rim on a November night in 1947, and the next day he rode down to the bottom. He had dinner at the Phantom Ranch and rode up to the South Rim that afternoon. The next day he sold his horses, packed his saddle in a gunny sack, and boarded a train back to Nebraska. On November 8th of 1997, Peach and I, and our three kids rode mules to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. We coerced John into riding a mule with us. This was fifty years later to the day from when he rode his own horses across. In 1997, we spent the night at the Phantom Ranch and rode out the next day. It was a fun trip which was made even more special because John was with us.
John worked on some of the big cattle ranches in Utah and Nevada where they used chuckwagons and camped out for several weeks each spring and fall. I would just about bet that John had the first pair of chinks that were seen in Nebraska. He put up hay and fed it out with horses, which always inspired me. Through the years, I have been in on several cattle drives and other adventures with John. John's first wife, Ardith, died in the fall of 1995. He later married Ruth, who is from Arizona. John and Ruth are great people, and I am proud to have them for friends.