It isn't easy to find common ground on the West's rangelands.

Orion, November/December 2005
Written by Michelle Nijhuis
Photography by Lisa M. Hamilton

Excerpt:
"JIM WILLIAMS, it is safe to say, is used to doing things his own way. Williams grew up on a ranch a few miles south of tiny Quemado, New Mexico, in a sun-cracked, juniper-edged valley not far from the Arizona border. Now in his early sixties, he has lived and worked on the place all his life.

"These days, he and his ebullient, dark-haired wife, Joy Williams, own about fifteen thousand acres of private ranchland, and live in a lowslung house with a fading Bush-Cheney Farm and Ranch Team sign at the gate. While Jim manages the ranch, Joy runs a onewoman beauty parlor in a trailer next to the house. In this lonely country, some of her customers will drive more than fifty miles each way for a trim or a perm.

"Williams learned to ranch here, on the north end of Catron County, which covers almost seven thousand square miles but is home to fewer than thirty-five hundred people, and he absorbed the old-fashioned ways. Like his father and others before him, he grazed cows on his private land in the spring, letting them congregate in the willows and grasses on the banks of Largo Creek. In the early summer, he moved his herd uphill to fourteen thousand acres of land he leased from the U.S. Forest Service, rounding up the wandering cows in the late summer or fall. It's a time-honored strategy some ranchers call 'the Columbus method,' since cowboys must 'discover' the cattle on the range...."

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