Why, yes, Texas has mountains – the Davis Mountains, to be exact, in the Big Bend of Texas near Fort Davis.

My trip to the area October 1-4 was a part of The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame’s Legendary Ranches tour through its Cowgirl U program.

The real focus of the weekend was a tour of the Kokernot/o6 Ranch, which takes up the bigger portion of three of the biggest counties in Texas. The o6 stocks cattle at the rate of one head per 40 acres and considers a pasture of less than 2,000 acres a “trap.”

At the o6, cowboys go out on the rocky ranges for a month at a time, eating at a chuckwagon and sleeping on the ground. During the fall, they’re gathering the cattle to wean the calves and prepare them for shipping. The cowboys are mounted on o6 horses bred especially to deal with the rocks and the long-horned registered Herefords that roam the property.

Owner Chris Lacy made us all welcome and even allowed us to eat at the chuckwagon one day at lunch. Or maybe I should say the cooks allowed us to eat at the chuckwagon, as we learned during a session on chuckwagon etiquette.

Besides learning more about ranch practices, the other Cowgirl U participants and I also got to hear about Hallie Stillwell, an inductee into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame who is known as the “Queen of the Big Bend.

We also got to hear cowboy poetry and singing by moonlight. It was a great weekend. I can’t wait to tell you more about it in an upcoming issue of The American Quarter Horse Journal.

Larri Jo Starkey
The American Quarter Horse Journal