Cowboy Heaven

Story and photo by Michael Pearce

Norman Caudill already has seen what he hopes cowboy heaven will be like.

He grew up in it, amid the part of Palo Pinto country where Possum Kingdom Lake now sits.

“My gosh, it was special,†said Caudill, who turns 90 in October. “You had to be there to believe it. You could ride a horse in any direction as far as you wanted to go. We had very few fences. On my grandad’s ranch, the Brazos River was about the only fence. There probably weren’t 10 families within 20 miles.â€

Caudill has been told his great-grandfather was one of the first to settle and ranch in Palo Pinto country, and a prominent mountain bears the family name.

During a recent visit, Caudill recalled riding horses across the free-flowing Brazos River where the lake now sits. The grass was often good, and the cattle fat, he said. He also talked of his family driving cattle 20-plus miles to the railroad in Graford.

For Caudill, his memories contain details few others can describe.

“I’ve outlived about everybody who was there,†he said. “That’s a long time ago, and back then the population was pretty thin.â€

That population he spoke about got thinner as the lake filled. His grandfather’s ranch and home were swallowed by the lake’s rising waters, and Caudill’s ancestor moved from the area rather than try to start anew nearby, just like other families did that lived in the same area.

The lake added obstacles on top of an already challenging occupation, Caudill said. He recalled a time when his dad had about 40 head of cattle on the north side of the just-filled lake, but the herd needed to be on the south side, where his family lived.

A traditional cattle drive wasn’t a viable option because of the new lake and its backed-up tributaries, and the limited road system of the time meant a 100-mile trip might be necessary to relocate the herd.
“Back then, you just had to do what needed to be done,†Caudill said. “We had to figure something out to get those cattle across.â€

So, rather than a cattle drive, they had a “cattle float,†he said. In groups of three, the cattle were loaded on a barge borrowed from the Costello family, of which a large island in PK is still known by their last name. A small motor pushed the heavily laden barge across the lake again and again until the entire herd had crossed.

Caudill also remembered taking a small boat across a tributary to get to the one-room school he attended, sometimes with just two other students. His mother was the teacher, he said.
But the lake hasn’t been all disappointment for Caudill.

The used boat his dad bought, sporting a 35-horsepower Johnson outboard motor, was the first ski boat on the lake, Caudill said. He said he learned to ski behind it, then helped many neighbors, family and friends learn to ski, too.

“Seems like I drove a million miles, just going around and around,†he said. “They’d get up for a bit and then fall. I’d have to turn around, and we’d start over.â€

The coming of the lake heralded the arrival of Camp Constantin, the scout camp that drew Boy Scout troops from hundreds of miles away. Caudill was hired as the manager in charge of upkeep, and it was a job he held for 20 years.

Still, he found time to work at what his family had been doing in the Palo Pinto region for a century: ranching.

“My daddy gave me my first cow when I was 7,†Caudill said. “Every day since, I’ve owned and worked cattle.â€

He said he worked as a cowboy on just about every ranch in the region. Sometimes he was paid to “day help,†he said, but other times he did it for free because it was the “neighborly way†among cattle ranchers.

The wide-open pastures of his youth are gone, though, and the long fingers of civilization have reached first from the lakeshore, then out into what used to be prime grazing prairie.

“I sometimes drive down towards Sandy Beach (near where he lived growing up),†he said. “Driving down the road, I can look at a spot and remember so many things that happened there when I was a kid. It can be kind of depressing, but I don’t know any other way to go but forward. We keep going.â€

Every other morning, Caudill and his wife, Kay, leave their home outside Graford and head out in a weathered pickup to feed cattle at several locations. Sizable tracts are almost impossible to find to rent for grazing, he said.

“I used to have 6,000 acres here, but now we’re down to 1,400,†Caudill said as his wife opened a gate. “These things get split up when somebody dies. It’s mostly grandkids that sell. They don’t have any attachment to the land. Their main attachment is for the money they get for selling it off.â€

Caudill owns 200 cows, which calve annually. The lineage of every calf goes back through several generations of cattle Caudill has owned.

Even though he’s almost 90, Caudill said he has no plans of quitting. Bad health is the only thing that could make him do that, he said.

“I just know that I really, really like my cattle,†Caudill said. “It keeps my mind busy wondering what we should do next. I don’t know anything better than pulling into a pasture and blowing that siren (to call cattle to feed.) I love to watch all of them coming, all those cows and their baby calves running with them.â€

There’s no doubt that there will be plenty of cattle in Caudill’s version of cowboy heaven.