Cowboys are part of local heritage

Gil Ticoulat has seen 57 years of the cattle business.

Come June each year, cowboy hats and boots pop up all over Sisters like tumbleweeds on the prairie. But it wasn't that many years ago that cowboy fashion was just the way most people dressed around these parts. Some still do.

The Sisters cowboys aren't as numerous as they once were, and they're getting older, too; but the cattle business is still a part of life here.

Just ask Gil Ticoulat how long he's been in the cattle business.

"Well, I got into the cattle business when I was 18, and I'm 75, now," Ticoulat said, "so that would be 57 years."

Most of that time has been spent right here in the Sisters area.

He had been working out of Northern California, when -- in 1957 -- he caught wind of a promising cattle sale up in Oregon.

He was 31 back then.

Ticoulat came to Oregon and bought those cows -- all of them. Then he bought some more. And more still.

He found Oregon and the cattle prices to his liking, and he's been here ever since.

"After I'd been here a couple years," Ticoulat said, "we had a forecast for a real dry year; so I came to Sisters and wanted to rent some meadow.

"A fellow named Howard Morgan owned Black Butte Ranch back then, and I ended up running cattle on it when there was nothing there but his house."

As it turned out, that's the kind of ranching that Ticoulat ended up doing most of the time -- running cattle on land that he leased, rather than owned.

"Oh, I've owned ranches from time to time, but I decided I'd rather put my money into cows," he said.

Ticoulat scaled back his operation a couple of years ago, perhaps in part due to a serious leg injury that he experienced three years ago. After multiple surgeries, he's been getting around on crutches. Even so, last week he was hobbling around an Indian Ford pasture stretching wire fencing, all by himself.

He has a new boot, now, that elevates and supports his bad leg and he hopes it will allow him to get rid of the crutches soon.

It's a busy time of year for a cattleman, and last week was roundup time -- one of the many that take place after the calves start appearing in February.

Most are born by April, but some take a little longer.

"A summer calf is better than no calf," Ticoulat says.

Even after "scaling back" his operation, Ticoulat still rides herd on several hundred head of cattle.

He doesn't count the calves in that total, and he figures he has almost as many calves as adult animals.

He says there were a lot of twin calves this year and that's always a good thing for a rancher.

Some of the calves don't survive, and the ones that don't are usually lost in the birthing process. When a calf dies like that, the rancher will sometimes skin the dead calf and tie the hide to one of a set of twins. That way, he says, the mother of the dead calf will adopt a different calf and help the herd by raising one of the others.

Round up time is when the branding, worming and vaccinating take place. It's also when the bull calves are "cut." That's the process by which they become steers.

"Branding has always been a kind of a social thing," says Ticoulat.

In fact, most of his help last week came from volunteers, people who work at other jobs but like to keep up their skills as cowboys -- and cowgirls.

One of the ropers was a woman named Lisa, and Ticoulat said she was "a darned good hand."

For the most part, the steers are destined for a relatively short life span, and are usually in the grocery store by the time they are "long yearlings" (about 1-3/4 years old).

Livestock husbandry isn't the only aspect of cattle ranching these days. Like any other way of life, there's a business side to things, too.

Financing a cattle business is harder than ever.

"Just like good cowboys are hard to find, good bankers are hard to find, too," says Ticoulat.

"The bankers don't have the experience like they used to," he says. "They don't know you anymore. They used to have field men, but now they just look at your financial statement on a computer.

"Some of the big banks, now, are cutting farmers and ranchers off because the banks don't understand the business. You can't judge a man by looking at a computer screen."

Sisters cowboys brand a calf during spring round-up.

Ticoulat also has some observations about "environmentalists."

"They sit in their big cities, and try to say how things should be run out here," he said. "Truth is, they don't understand nature, at all; and they don't know where the gates are, either."

By not knowing "the gates," he means that they don't take the time to become familiar with the land.

"Grass is the mainstay of the business," he said.

"A lot of people feel that cattle shouldn't be on the land; but, just like these forests that build up to the point where they burn -- all that thatch builds up on the ground and the grass dies. If you don't pasture it, eventually it'll all burn, too. Better off to use it as forage."

Making a living off the cattle business is more complicated than most people know, and there's a lot more to Gil Ticoulat's business than chasing cows.

Still, somebody has to chase them. He'll be taking some time off to go see the cowboys at the Sisters Rodeo. He always does. As a team roper, he used to rodeo, himself; and he was on the Sisters Rodeo Committee some years back.

That was when the events were held right in town off North Pine Street.

But, before Ticoulat is able to head over to the rodeo, he'll most likely have a little cowboying of his own to take care of and that's as it should be.

After all, things have been that way for a lot more than just the last 57 years.