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Good Years for the Buzzards
by John Duncklee
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Univ of Arizona Pr (1994-07)
ISBN: 0816514542
EAN: 9780816514540
Dewy Decimal #: 636.213092
Hardcover: 165 pages
SKU: BX048-071021015
Condition: Collectible: Very Go
Comments: Signed/inscribed by Author --Dick always go well and have fun, John Duncklee-- 1 on # line. Very minor wear, near new. Pgs crisp, clean, tight, unmarked. No remainder mark.
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Customer Reviews
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Well written, informative, entertaining . . .
Rating  (5)
Date: 2006-07-28
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Ranchers are not the mythic figures that cowboys became as the cattle industry spread across the American West 100 years ago, and the stories of ranchers make up a smaller part of Western literature. But for readers interested in the business end of raising cattle, there are several good books to entertain their curiosity. This is one of them.
Duncklee, while a young man in his twenties, leased a small ranch south of Tucson for three years during the long drought of the 1950s. This well-written account of that experience, building a herd and keeping it fed and watered, provides a fascinating look into the heart and mind of a rancher, whose intelligence is pitted against a number of challenges: unpredictable weather, less than scrupulous stock buyers, the fluctuating markets for both cattle and feed, the vagaries of government programs, untrustworthy neighbors, and the risk of loss as disease and mischance threaten to make any of his cows a meal for buzzards.
Ths story is told with good humor, intelligence, and some sentiment, and the men whose work lives engage with the author's come to life on the page, especially the 80-year-old vaquero, Chico, who works with him and becomes a dearly loved friend. Also recommended: John Erickson's "Panhandle Cowboy," David McCumber's "The Cowboy Way," and Linda Hasselstrom's "Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains." Also, for a good history of the cattle industry, read David Dary's "Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries."
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A RANCHER WHO WAS PUT TO THE TEST
Rating  (4)
Date: 2005-05-01
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
According to Duncklee, the drought of the fifties that affected the entire Southern tier of states and Northern Mexico was good for the buzzards and not much else. Describing one of the greatest challenges a cattleman can face in that manner tells you a lot about the author.
Raised in the East and rocked in the cradle of Ivy League tradition, Duncklee had wanted to be a cowboy since the day his father took him to a rodeo at Madison Square Garden. At the age of 12 he was sent to a private ranch school in Arizona, where he studiously applied himself to helping the neighboring ranchers. Later, he turned his back on Dartmouth, worked his way through college as a horse wrangler, then leased an Arizona ranch in the middle of the Southwest's greatest drought in 400 years.
"Good Years for the Buzzards" is a chronicle of how he maintained his herd during the drought, learned much about the forces of nature, and a great deal about the importance of neighbors.
The author lived his dream of becoming a cowboy and rancher and, evidently, became a fiercely independent individual along the way. He later earned his living by writing and making furniture.
- Gail Cooke
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an engaging ranch memoir by a real cowboy, john dunklee
Rating (5)
Date: 2004-10-09
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I actually got more out of my second time through Good Years for the Buzzards because I kept referring to the sketched map of John Dunklee's O Bar J Ranch opposite the preface as I was reading. This is helpful because Dunklee's chief concern in this engaging ranch memoir is the practical problem of managing the O Bar J cattle ranch through the drought of the late 1950's-- the worst period of drought, we learn, in the Southwestern United States in 400 years.
Little rain meant scarce feed for Dunklee's cattle. This confronted Dunklee with the problem of optimizing the forage and water of the harsh desert range to keep his cattle fed and his cowboy dream alive. The trick was keeping his cows on the move to where the forage was, and keeping the precious water flowing from the ranch's two deep wells, the mellifluously named Pozo Hondo and Pacheco wells. Navigating the map gives one a feel for the logistical difficulty of Dunklee's problem.
After studying agriculture in college and adventures serving in the Navy during the Korean War and cowboying for wages in Alberta and Wyoming, Dunklee learned that the O Bar J ranch, two large desert pastures on the slope of the Sierrita Mountain range southwest of Tucson, was up for lease. Dunklee signed a lease in the spring of 1956 and bought the owner's cattle, thus beginning a four year battle with drought, cunning order buyers, thieving neighbors, drunken cowboys, careless hunters and miners, wild heifers, government drought relief scams, and various other crafty characters of all types.
Apart from being an entertaining portrait of the cattle industry in the Arizona border country in the late 50's, the text is a minor classic of applied, or practical operations, versus academic theory. As such the book would be useful as a narrative companion to theoretical texts in university level business, economics, agricultural economics, or business law courses.
After a particularly contentious sale of O Bar J calves pursuant to a contract calling for "weighing the calves at the Southern Pacific yards off the trucks" during which the buyer-because of currently falling prices-tried every trick in the book to shrink the calves before weighing (calves lose weight while being shipped on trucks or standing in corrals with no food or water, costing the seller money), including showing up a half hour late claiming a flat tire and telling the truck drivers to take extra time driving to the stockyard, Dunklee reflects:
"While attending the university I had enrolled in a course called Livestock Marketing taught by the chairman of the department. I remembered how his lectures were straight from the text. Neither professor nor textbook mentioned such things as pencil shrink, finagling order buyers, or Twinkie-eating rodeo-hand truck drivers-probably because the professor had never marketed any cattle."
Dunklee won that battle, however, as the stockyard boss put the cattle in a corral with a trough of water, letting the cattle drink back the lost weight and then some.
"Get those (...)out of that wet corral!" yelled the buyer, seeing too late that his flat tire ruse cost rather than saved him weight.
This memoir deserves a far wider audience than it has heretofore gotten-perhaps a general business audience, as it recounts an informative history of entrepreneurship and risk taking, determination, work, and sound management. As a young cowboy riding for wages, Dunklee had naively believed that the first concern of the rancher was caring for cattle and riding. After leasing the O Bar J, however, Dunklee shortly learned otherwise. During his years managing the ranch, the husbanding of the herd became something of an afterthought to be fit into early mornings, late nights, and spare time, while his primary duties concerned the finances, marketing, contract negotiations, and general wheeling and dealing necessary to keep his operation alive during the drought.
If you were a cow, however, you could have done far worse than being in John Dunklee's herd, as ranching was plainly more than his business, it was a calling-Dunklee was constantly occupied during his tenure at the O Bar J looking after the cows, tending to their health, and working them with the objective of disturbing the herd no more than absolutely necessary. The yielded the result that even during the drought, the average weight of his calf crop increased significantly over the prior owner's. The drought, however, took a toll on the herd in spite of Dunklee's best efforts, and the book contains more than one heartbreaking scene when the buzzards of the title get the upper hand.
Leasing the ranch thrust Dunklee into the actual business of raising cattle, with opportunities and problems in all directions. His first responsibility became making good decisions: To cut his losses and sell the herd, or risk everything in an attempt to outlast the drought? Who to hire? Who to trust? Which calves should be sold at auction? Which cattle should be kept? It was a second education in self reliance, lessons that plainly served Dunklee well in his subsequent careers as a cattle order buyer, college professor, furniture designer, and author-some of the history of which is recounted in the author's other memoir of the U.S./Mexico cattle trade in the early 1960's, Coyotes I Have Known.
It was touch and go at first on the O Bar J, as Dunklee learned his trade and came to understand how truly tough it would be surviving this drought. But he learned on the job, and slowly he gathered the information and skills to tough it out. One summer day in June, 1956, just as Dunklee was beginning to think his situation hopeless, as he was scanning the Arizona Cattlegrowers Weekly Newsletter, sort of a pre-Internet message board used by ranchers for sharing rain reports and tips, he came across a "note from a rancher in the Prescott area which mentioned that he was paying fifty-three dollars a ton for 2:1, including delivery, from Western Cotton Products in Phoenix," far less than the going price of range supplement in Tuscon (2:1 being a type of feed for when there's no forage). The following day Dunklee was in Phoenix checking it out, and when the quoted price turned out to be valid, his mind was made up.
"I was going to fight the drought!" he writes. It's a triumphant moment.
Dunklee's book is moreover an entertaining chronicle of the wild cattle markets of the times, as prices careened up and down in reaction to the drought. He plainly relishes recounting the details of the cattle auctions, contracts, and freewheeling negotiations which were his primary activities as a rancher managing a going concern.
Though raised in New York and New Hampshire, Dunklee writes with the plainspoken, independent voice of the westerner. His prose is direct and spare -plainly a product of self reliant western culture-and at times wryly humorous.
One day Dunklee came across a bull which had become addicted to prickly pear, a cactus plant which slowly and surly kills cows by puncturing their innards, as prickly pear spines don't digest like the spines of cholla cactus. One of the symptoms is really bad, black diarrhea. As Dunklee drove the bull off to auction, a brand new white sports car driven by an impatient young woman pulled up behind the truck, beeping the horn . . . and you can guess what happens next. There's a lot to laugh at in Good Years for the Buzzards -Clearly, John Dunklee was the kind of cowboy who kept his sense of humor no matter the hand he was dealt.
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An excellent account of the arizona "wild days"
Rating (5)
Date: 1998-04-22
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I have read this book and enjoyed it immensely. John Duncklee tells a simple tale, woven in his own unique manner, speaking eloquently of the early days in Arizona/Sonora territory. Thank you for such a vivid and realisitic approach: Even kids from New York can become the kindest of Cowboys.
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