Letter from Gary Boyce
May 1997 edition – June 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
The 7½-page preface to Sam Bingham’s new book, The Last Ranch, is one of the most intriguing and promising introductions I have had the pleasure to read. By contrast, the epilogue underscores a miserable failure of 342 intervening pages.
Bingham spent 13 years in the deserts of the Navajo Reservation, yet rejected that environment (his work would be critiqued by Navajos) in favor of Colorado’s San Luis Valley for the purpose of exploring a thesis. Bingham “supposed that a fresh understanding of nature might save the world from becoming a desert.”
It remains a mystery precisely what information or results Bingham sought in a valley of 4,000 square miles with an elevation of 7,500 feet, 99-day growing season, and 8½ inches of annual precipitation; where a newcomer can live for 20 years with “outsider” status. In any case, Bingham took less than a year in his search.
I’ve not been to the Sahel and I do not understand the correlation, if any, to the San Luis Valley. While I have not attended any of his courses, I have read some of Allen Savory’s work — and this point, I tend to view Savory as ranching’s John Frémont (the lost pathfinder). Also in the San Luis Valley, I am not aware of one rancher who identifies with the Whitten brothers’ ranch management techniques. Bingham had my attention.
I eagerly delved into Chapter One with great anticipation. My expectations were that between the covers of this book would be knowledge and insight which very well might guide me toward my desire that if there were, indeed, to be a “last ranch,” my ranch would be that ranch.
A cover-to-cover reading of The Last Ranch left me pondering a curious mix of emotions. The story itself was a curious mix: excellent style of writing, errors and misinformation, insightful dialogue, unquestioned dogma, transitions, and inconclusive endings. I felt I had read a highly acclaimed murder mystery that contained no murder.
Naturally, the book’s inclusion of my persona caused me a large amount of distraction (the author’s portrayal of my association with Donnie Whitten was greatly exaggerated and I found many of Whitten’s recounts of past events to be erroneous).
But in the end, it didn’t matter. The book itself is a long series of distractions — distractions that taught me little while making me somewhat sad for some of my neighbors.
By the beginning of Page 5, the reader has recognized that old, wearisome dilemma: An increasing number of people competing for limited (and in many cases diminishing) resources. Certainly by now we surely understand that regardless of the length of the snake, you don’t get more snakes by chopping the snake into pieces — you merely get a dead snake.
And this is what is presented to us by Sam Bingham. Two economically marginal ranchers, each with his allotted portion of a dead snake, will demonstrate in less than nine months’ time that the world can be saved by putting more cattle on the land! I gained some appreciation for the distraction.
There are hundreds of thousands of acres of rangeland in the San Luis Valley. The point that Bingham could have made is that there will indeed be a “last ranch.” By definition, ranching is a grazing enterprise and within the terms of economics, ranching has no future — particularly in the American West. Ranching will survive only in the form of pretext relegated (or elevated, depending on one’s point of view) to maintaining a lifestyle or insuring the conservation of natural resources and wildlife.
Bingham almost, but not quite, told the story of a lost ranch, but did little more than squander a great title with The Last Ranch.
Gary Boyce
Crestone
The Last Ranch: A Colorado Community and the Coming Desert (Published in 1996 by Pantheon Books, ISBN 0156005395) was reviewed by Allen Best in the May, 1997, edition of Colorado Central.