SARITA - They call him "Blacky," but at some point during decades sitting in a saddle, Jose Salazar

June 4, 2006, 1:16AM
Old cowpokes refuse to let go of the reins
Men long past retirement make a ranch an old age home on the range

By JESSE BOGAN
San Antonio Express-News

SARITA - They call him "Blacky," but at some point during decades sitting in a saddle, Jose Salazar, a twig of an old cowboy, forgot where and how he got his nickname.

Having ridden fences for so long, Salazar, 88, wheezes from boredom at home and refuses to retire.

He's that rare type, a man who relishes the thought of Monday morning. It is then that co-workers at the San Pedro Kenedy Ranch Co. boost him onto a mare's back for the start of another workweek.

"I will die sooner at home," he said in a voice slightly higher than a whisper. "I am there just thinking all the time. That's not good."

Salazar, who weighs 110 pounds and has had a prosthetic foot from a long-ago car wreck, is the oldest of a crowd of about 20 other hardened cowboys who work at Kenedy's. Several of them are wrinkled by age, making the 200,000-acre ranch a sort of cowboy nursing home.

Some continue to work the ranch out of an addiction to the lifestyle, some out of financial need.

"We have family, so we are spending money," said Romulo Camacho Martinez, 70, a cook from San Luis Potosi, Mexico, whose staples include molasses, jalapenos and apricot jelly.

Passing into history
But even as they cling to this way of life, it is passing into history, fading with the death of each elderly cowboy. Salazar's workload and that of other hands on the ranch has been drastically cut back to a shift that ends at noon instead of nightfall as cattle increasingly are rounded up by helicopter and the popularity of deer racks has eclipsed that of longhorns.

Mike East, who owns a large neighboring spread and leases the ranch from the John G. Kenedy Jr. Charitable Trust, has neither the intention nor the heart to let the old-timers go.

"They've worked there all their life," East said. "How can you tell them they can't come to work anymore? They want to come."

East is 62 and knows the value of experience. Besides, he said, even as times are changing with new technology, the skills of the old cowboys come in handy.

"They do more than you think," he said. "They move cattle around on horseback and don't scare them. They get them gentled. You put new cattle in a new place and they don't know where the water is. They head them in the right direction."

As a young buck, Salazar earned a reputation for being able to handle any kind of fussy or pitching horse, his colleagues said.

These days, however, his spurs are mounted to soft-soled hiking boots and he's like a slow reaching shadow alongside a newer breed of ranch hand such as 20-year-old Leroy Lerma Jr., who wears sneakers, plays heavy-metal music on his guitar and eschews a cowboy hat for a baseball cap.

The tattooed Lerma is one of the youngest cowboys on the ranch, and he doesn't see a future in this; with a high school diploma in hand, he hopes to attend college to study architecture.

But he sees a quiet strength in these cowboys that appeals to him.

When Salazar fell recently, he busted his lip on the concrete kitchen floor.

Lerma was impressed by what Salazar did next.

"He just got back up like it was nothing," he said.

Israel "Rey" Mendietta and Javier de la Cruz, both 70, look after Salazar, picking him up in the morning from a house in tiny Sarita that the ranch provides rent-free.

Stiff with age

Salazar used to ride at the ready like his pals, with one hand through the reins, the other free primed to reach for a rope, gate or tree branch.

But this day, riding a horse he knew only as "the mare, nothing more," he held onto the back of the saddle with what would have been his free hand to stay balanced.

The hand that was looped through the reins was locked stiff and flat with age, fingers unbent. No longer can he form a tight fist.

Salazar walked the horse, never ran, apparently because of a lesson he learned years ago.

"The boss gets mad," Salazar said. "He says, 'What's the point of running them?' "

Circling behind seven brown heifers, Salazar shooed the animals toward water.

Salazar doesn't speak much, and when he does, his words come in Spanish.

As his father did before him, Salazar has worked the same land since he was a boy. The ranch, near the tiny town of Mifflin, lies along U.S. 77.

"The ranch might change supervisors or owners, but he's been here," said Juan Cuevas, an accountant for the ranch who has Salazar listed in the books under laborer. "In other words, he goes with the ranch."

Jaime Peace, director of the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, said there are fewer and fewer old veterans. Those who keep working do so to stay young.

"If they are true cowboys, they are relentless," Peace said.

"They will continue to do that until they have their cowboy funeral."

Or, perhaps, an incapacitating injury. A lame knee finally forced Salazar's rival, Paulino Silguero of Riviera, to face reality at age 87.

Born on the ranch
For years, Silguero lived and worked on the ranch all but four days a month. Now he's home full time with his wife of 68 years, Mercedes, who's quick to laugh and give him a hard time.

Both she and her husband were born on the King Ranch. Neither had much formal education.

That didn't prove an obstacle to the cowboy. But the shower in the ranch house did. Paulino had to retire after he fell and couldn't get back up until somebody found him two hours later.

"I want to ride a horse, but I can't do it," he said, sitting on the couch in reach of a cane. "She's fussy."

"Salazar beat him," Mercedes said.

"Ah," Paulino protested, "he doesn't work."

Indeed, Salazar doesn't work nearly as hard as he used to.

But it's not all about the work, anyway. It never was.

The old ranch hands, several past retirement age, gather together early each morning for coffee and camaraderie.

Then the fog lifts and another workday begins.