#2 - Ray Marxer - Life In A Saddle & Words In A Book - PART 1

Living Western Podcast - Episode #2  - Ray Marxer - PART 1

For this inagural interview here on the Living Western Podcast, I chose a man who has accomplished more in life than I could ever dream to.  

 He is the long-time former manager of the famed Matador Cattle Company in Southwest Montana.  He is also the author of a popular new non-fiction book called, "Cowboy in a Corporate World".

In this conversation, we cover many topics around ranching, agriculture, and life in the American West.  Ray's life journey is inspiring and his insights are powerful.  

This interview lasted for hours, so I split it up into two parts.  Obviously, this is Part 1, but Part 2 should air next Tuesday morning.

Connect with Ray at his website www.raymarxer.com

Living Western Podcast website: https://livingwesternpodcast.com/

Adventure Cowboy/Living Western webpage: https://adventurecowboy.com/living-western/

Living Western Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100095602268804

Living Western Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/livingwestern_podcast?igsh=NXFudHF6amxiZmfu

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to Living Western, a show dedicated to telling the real story of the rural American West through individual stories of the amazing people who call this part of the world home. The guest on today's episode is somebody very special to me. You might say he's a personal hero. So I figured what better way to start off the interviews of the Living Western podcast than to have him be my first guest. This man once managed one of the largest ranches in the country for many years, and he did so being profitable every year, which is kind of unheard of in the ranching world. But not only did he manage the ranch in a profitable fashion, but over the years of his management, the ranch won many state, regional, and national level environmental stewardship awards, proving that ranching and conservation go hand in hand. This man is a dedicated father, husband, Christian, and he's the author of a book. Cowboy in a Corporate World. The interview you're going to see today will be a highlight of why this book is so important and why you should get it. This man is a wonderful person, an amazing human, and he's my father, Mr. Ray Markser. Before we start today's episode, I'm going to read something I wrote back when he released his book. And I'm going to do this before I sit down with him, because I know that he would be uncomfortable with me reading this. He does not like to be praised publicly like this, and it would make him very uncomfortable if he was in the room as I read this. But I think this is a really important introduction into why this interview is going to be important and why his book is important. So let me read this to you really quick. There is quite possibly not a more misunderstood and underappreciated industry in all the world. Besides producing one of the main sources of food protein for the entire planet, ranching is also responsible for producing the beef byproducts that are used to create the common products that every person uses every single day. Products like the leather seats in your car, Adhesives, plastics, medicines, sheetrock, plywood, plaster, insulation, shampoo, rubber, antifreeze, perfume, fabric softener, anti-aging cream, and even chewing gum are all produced with beef byproducts. This list is much more extensive, but just the examples that I have listed in the previous sentence should be enough to make you stop and think about just how much everyone depends on the ranching industry. And yet, at this point in history, there has never been such a disconnect between the consumer and the agricultural producer. The amount of people who have no idea where their food actually comes from is absolutely shocking. Even more stunning is the fact that less than 2% of the population of the United States produces the food for the other 98% of the population. And that small percentage of the population who are agricultural producers is dwindling more every year. Interestingly, at a time when much of the urban population has never even considered that their food comes from somewhere other than a grocery store, An unexpected phenomenon has exposed many millions of people from all around the world and from every walk of life to the ranching industry and the American cowboy. That unexpected phenomenon arrived in the form of a smash hit TV series that shares the name of our first national park. Many real ranching folks cringe at the thought of that quite vulgar and violent TV show representing our culture and our way of life. But the fact is undisputable that this TV series has introduced more people to the concept of the American cowboy and the ranching industry than any other influence in modern history. So, while most ranchers do not want the public to think of the ranching industry in such a drama-filled, violent, and unrealistic way, it is important to recognize the opportunity that the ranching industry now has that can allow them to connect with the masses of previously disconnected public. As an industry, ranching should capitalize on the massive interest that is now being generated by that TV show and use that massive new interest as our opportunity to tell the real story of ranching, a story that is the very fabric of what has made America so great. This book you're about to learn about could not have been written at a more crucial time. You see, this book is a real-life look at what life on a massive Montana ranch, ironically similar to the fictional ranch depicted in the aforementioned hit TV show, is really like. The true-life story that Ray Markser writes about in this book will not have the shootouts, fistfights, and romantic drama that is necessary to entertain a worldwide TV audience, but Ray's story does have drama, romance, and trauma, all its own. In this book, you will see the progression of a timeline of American agriculture. You will see stories of fear and insecurities, triumph and success, love and loss, mentors and villains, government overreach, corporate politics, national level accolades, gut-wrenching betrayal, and the ever abundant grace of God. You will learn much about the history of the Matador Cattle Company, a ranch around 340,000 acres in current size. The ranch was founded by the pioneer cattlemen Poindexter and Orr. way back in the year 1865. In 1951, the Koch family bought the expansive ranch and called it the Matador Cattle Company, a name tied to the original Matador Ranch in Texas that the Koch family also owned. Internally within Koch Industries, the ranch was known as the Beaverhead Ranch to differentiate it from the Texas operation. Ray Markser's career at Montana's Matador Cattle Company spanned over 37 years, and all of his career took place during Koch ownership. For 21 of those years, held the position of General Manager. Ray retired from the ranch in 2011. In December of 2021, it was announced that the Koch family had sold the Matador Cattle Company Beaverhead Ranch to media mogul Rupert Murdock for the price of$200 million, which is the largest land sale in Montana state history. The announcement of the historical sale closed a chapter in the history of one of the largest and most productive ranches on the North American continent. And since much of our Marksville family history had taken place during the Koch chapter, I was inspired to write a nostalgic Facebook post to commemorate our time on the Matador Cattle Company. That post went viral and was shared all over the country, even all over the world. Messages and comments began rolling in asking us to write a book of ranch stories. Soon a reporter came and interviewed Ray and his wife Sue. The next thing we knew, the Associated Press had picked up that article and it was subsequently published in nearly every major newspaper in the country. It was at this point, after all of the media attention and the interest it generated, in addition to all of the comments and messages requesting that a book be written, that Ray finally decided to sit down and write a book to document and share the fascinating stories of his time at the Matador Cattle Company. It is incredibly serendipitous that Ray's wife Sue is an accomplished Western photographer and throughout our family's life on the Matador Cattle Company she has captured one of the largest collections of ranch photographs that exists and certainly the largest collection of images captured on the Matador Ranch. A small sample of Sue's amazing ranch photographs will be included in Ray's book, Cowboy in a Corporate World. What was originally intended to be a book containing a collection of entertaining ranch stories eventually morphed into one of the most wonderful memoirs that I have ever read, even though I admittedly may be a little bit biased. In these pages, Ray has thoughtfully and honestly taken us on a real deep and revealing journey into his own life's path from a young farm kid with a dream to to having successfully achieved that dream and much more beyond what he could have even imagined. Readers of this book will be able to see the realities of ranch life and what it truly means to be a cowboy. On an educational level, readers will learn principles of land, business, livestock, and personnel management from one of the most successful ranch managers in American history, which is something that Ray would never say about himself. Ray's ranch management expertise is well proven by his consistent, sustainable profit over the entirety of his career, while simultaneously managing to improve the ranch's environmental resources to a level that was awarded with more national, regional, state, and local recognition than any other ranching operation that I could find during my research for this introduction. However, if you were to ask Ray, personally, about how he was so successful, He will always credit his success to the people who worked with him and for him, to his family, and to the grace of God. Ray's formula for success is a simple concept that is a recurring theme throughout the entirety of his book. He calls it a three-legged stool, and the concept, though simple, is so powerful that every person who reads the book will be able to apply the concept to their own life, and in so doing, find a real balance in their life that will positively affect themselves and everyone around them. Sincerely, Clayton Markser, an incredibly blessed and grateful son. Welcome to the Living Western Podcast. and my guest, Mr. Ray Markser.

SPEAKER_03 11:16

Well, I'm Ray Markser. I'm 70 years old and left employ there at the ranch in Dillon in 2011. Sue and I bought a little place over here by Sheridan, between Twin and Sheridan, and we do our... live our life right there sharing it with our kids and grandkids we have a small place where we can still we grow hay and we run some cows we still are our horses we got arena and operate our ranch services west business out of there which uh is uh We offer some consulting services, which I haven't done a lot of. I didn't intend to do a lot of that. I just wanted to be able to help people if they wanted to help. And then still wanted to be actively involved in production agriculture, helping people, whether it be day working or AI a lot of cows. It's tapered off some in the last couple of years. years, but Sue and I were AI in about up to a couple thousand cows every spring and early summer for several years for a number of different people around the state and still do that and enjoy it. I mean, that has opened quite a few doors and reacquaintances with people that I'd been uh kind of separated from just from logistics and and also being busy running a ranch for so many years but uh see the ai is something i i went to school my dad was pretty progressive and he let i and my brother go to ai school with him when i was 14 years old and that was a long time ago and i can still remember we went to Bozeman to the college there and did classroom work and studied there for a day or two and then we went to Billings and they still had a packing plant in Billings then and we just bunched cows, culled cows that was there. We bunched them in a corner. Alderman never had them captured, just pushed them all up in a corner and we had to learn to pass the Then pipettes, big old flexible pipettes, wasn't any of this new modern stuff like these nice guns that you use now.

SPEAKER_02 14:08

Well, I want to get into that a little bit later and talk about– I just wrote it on my notes here that I want to talk about the technology advancements that you've seen both in your lifetime but also in your career. But back to what you're doing with Ranch Services West, you mentioned your AI. So for those of you who aren't from our culture, AI stands for artificial insemination. It's a way of breeding cows without– putting a bull in them. So if you want to talk a little bit about that and talk about why it's done and the benefits.

SPEAKER_03 14:44

There's a number of benefits. Of course, still, you know, God intended things to be done naturally, and I still believe in that. I keep a bull with my cows, but I AI my heifers. And simply it's because it gives you an opportunity to breed those cows specific animals to a specific bull for either for calving ease in heifer's case or else you want to get a specific product and using two known genetic sources. So that allows us to do that. And in commercial terms, I mean, on big picture, I mean, you can breed 1,000 cows to one bull. I mean, if you want to get consistency.

SPEAKER_02 15:30

As opposed to how many cows usually get bred by a bull naturally in a season?

SPEAKER_03 15:35

When I ran the ranch there, you usually figured with yearling bulls, 1 to 20. One bull per 20 cows, mature bulls, one to 25. And generally, though, we push that. We did one bull per 28, regardless of the age.

SPEAKER_02 15:54

So how does that cost figure out to, I mean, I don't know what the average price for a bull is in 2024, but the cost of a breeding naturally versus AI? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:07

Well, AI, you have some costs as far as the semen itself, and that, if it's registered, it goes up quite a bit more, but you can buy a lot of really good quality semen for$10 an ampule, maybe less, but say$10 to$20. Let's just say$10 an ampule, and if you're doing it on any scale, You know, my services aren't that expensive, like three bucks or five, well, I guess five bucks per heifer. And I provide all the thawing and all that and breeding. And so, you know, you've got$15, but you take a bull, he's going to cost six, seven thousand bucks pretty easy now. And that's just a, an average bull, probably$7,000 to purchase him, he's going to be able to service 25 cows. You just divide that$7,000 by 25.

SPEAKER_02 17:15

How many years are you generally getting out of a bull?

SPEAKER_03 17:21

A lot of people only try and get four or five. When I ran the ranch, my expectations with those bulls is I was going to get seven years out of them. And we did most of the time. But to do that, you have to have a pretty stringent selection criteria as far as you need your criteria as far as traits and performance and that sort of thing, birth weights, weaning weights, yearling weights, and carcass traits.

UNKNOWN 17:55

Right.

SPEAKER_03 17:55

That bugger better be sound, and that's the first thing. It's just like a horse. I mean, if they ain't sound, they ain't going to hold up or last. But we did very well with all three breeds that we used.

SPEAKER_02 18:11

Gotcha. Well, I wanted to highlight on that because I know that the AI services is probably something that you're the most involved in with your Ranch Services West business, but you also do a lot of day work.

UNKNOWN 18:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:25

Can you explain to the listeners who might not know what day work is and what that means for you?

SPEAKER_03 18:30

Day work in this day and age, especially with smaller operations, they can't afford to have full-time help, stockman's help. Or maybe they don't have that in their crew, somebody that's experienced handling stock or got the skills and talents. And so day work and it goes on all over the country. They'll hire you for the day or for the task at hand. to come help them for that day and then you go home at night and they don't and like in my case and and sue's when we started ranch services west we we went and helped quite a few different people and and we charge them for it and pretty nominal but uh you know we try to be fair and uh for what service we're providing, but we're also providing transportation there, our horses, our skills, everything, a lot of things. Insurance. Yeah, and then in our case, because we're doing it that way as an independent contractor, then I, of course, have to go out and get an independent contractor's license through the state. It's a lot of... red tape and hull blue but you you gotta have you gotta meet in a lot of different criteria and and generally one of the you have to have so many points to qualify and you have to recertify every two years and there's a fee goes along with it i think it's about 175 bucks every two years just to be able to do that but what that does what it centers around the independent contractors deal is it's based uh around health insurance and and like workman's comp where if i'm a independent contractor then it's it's i'm i'm making the decisions i'm as to what i'm doing they give me a task or something to do and then i decide how to do it and and it's my responsibility to do that safely if i get hurt it's my responsibility not theirs where if i was a part-time employee for them or a full-time employee for producer, then they would be giving me instructions as to how to do things, but also I would be their responsibility as workman's comp. You know, I can understand how it's gotten to that point. To me, it's kind of pointless to me in that I always felt like I was responsible for my own safety.

SPEAKER_02 21:26

Right. You could go to somebody's place and help them brand or move cows without having to, you know, there was trust. And anymore, there's a lot of risk involved and liability with that.

SPEAKER_03 21:37

Yeah, and liability is something that kind of runs our country. Risk of liability, it kind of runs our country. You know, it's a real thing, but it can have... kind of negative side to productivity, certainly. But on the same token, I can also say quite honestly that agriculture is one of the most dangerous professions there is as far as accidents. And part of it is, I've said this many times throughout the years, that if our country needed to... to have a group of people in our society to look to to go get something done. It would be agriculture. If you had a job that needed to be done, go have agriculture. Folks in agriculture do it. The unfortunate part is some of them wouldn't live through it because they don't weigh the risk. They're going to get the job done, and that's kind of the American way or kind of the cowboy mentality and Western mentalities out there. They'll go get the job done. But historically, they haven't always weighed the risk.

SPEAKER_02 22:57

There's

SPEAKER_03 22:58

been a a lot of

SPEAKER_02 22:59

injuries. I think statistics across the country show agriculture is one of the top sources of injury, work-related injury, for sure.

SPEAKER_03 23:10

But if you think about it, you know, you're doing work out on a varying landscape. You're not on a concrete floor, you know. So you've got varying landscape. You've got hazards, you know. And then you've got... You're dealing with animals that all have their own will. Yours, most of the time, yours is the biggest problem, you know, your own. But you've got a horse that's got a will. You've got a cow or a group of cows or sheep or whatever that's got their will. And so there's a lot of balls in the air that offer plenty of opportunities for injury.

SPEAKER_02 23:54

So when you're talking about... that subject right there of will, what you're saying is that in agriculture, anything to do with livestock, generally, your biggest liability is usually yourself. I mean, there's always a risk with any living creature that has its own will, its own moods, its own attitudes, its own fears, but generally, it's the humans that they can affect that. They can bring about negative issues

SPEAKER_03 24:28

we have we have the choice to put ourselves at risk or not and you know years ago we went for a lot of years running the ranch where it was a typical ranch we'd have our share of workman's comp claims and injuries most of them weren't too bad we had a few pretty bad ones but but in the 90s and certainly in the 2000s, Koch Industries, the Kochs that owned the ranch, they really had a concerted effort. They had a lot of employees throughout the world, and their big goal was they wanted to have businesses that could operate safely. if we couldn't prove to them that we could operate safely so that our employees could go home to their families at night knowing that they were healthy and well, if we couldn't operate a business without having accidents, they didn't want to have the business. And they got out of some businesses. Right. But they really... That was one of the big, really... kind of breakthrough things for us as a group of people together there was when we came to the genuine realization and belief that we could operate that big ranch with all those acres of risk and animals we could operate without having an accident until we decided in our own minds as a crew that we could do that, it wasn't going to happen, but we did. And all three ranches did very well. I think, if I recall, there was a period of two and a half or three years where all three ranches went without having a recordable accident, which is monumental. It's unheard of in our industry. But we had some good cokes. They drove that. Because, you know, Charles Koch himself told me one time, he said, you know, when I asked about the longevity of the ranch and, you know, what was our biggest threat, you know, we had to be a profitable operation. That was the goal. We had to be profitable in a lot of different ways, but we had to be profitable. But he told me that the biggest threat to the ranch going out of their ownership while I was there was if we couldn't operate that ranch without having accidents. If we couldn't operate it to where our employees could go home safely to their families at night, that was the biggest risk of them selling the ranches. they had no intention of they didn't want to but but they recognized and and they were in all of us too it was a milestone when those three big ranches could could meet that safety uh threshold uh it was something unheard of but but they they gave us a lot of um tools to use and and they uh You know, we're ranching, but they used DuPont, the DuPont company. They felt like DuPont was probably the safest company in culture in U.S. business. And so we used a lot of their different techniques to get there. Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 28:19

We can get into that a little bit more later, but to touch back on what you're currently doing, one of the things outside of your... consulting business, Ranch Services West, and day working and AI, everything else that's included with that. You also are now an author. So can you talk a little bit about, well, tell us what your book is. It's actually on the shelf up behind your head. It's called Cowboy in a Corporate World, but tell us what it is, what inspired it, and what you've gotten to experience because of that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 29:01

It's been awesome, Clayton. Far being... I'll be the last to tell you, the last thing I ever dreamed I'd do is write a book. You know, I've spent my life living life, but never ever dreamed that I'd have the desire to write a book. And... But I was blessed. I've always been enamored with history and the West. And, you know, I grew up with grandparents that homesteaded. And my grandpa Marks are homesteaded. Well, his folks came from Lichtenstein. They immigrated from Lichtenstein. And then they homesteaded out on the prairies south of Great Falls in the Eden country and raised 16 kids. Yeah. They're homesteading. And they all grew to be, except for one that died when they was younger, all of those siblings died. They were in their 80s, most all in the 80s and 90s when they passed away. But at any rate, I got to grow up 25 miles from where my grandpa homesteaded. And then his wife, my grandma Hazel, she came across the Canadian border when she was like six weeks old with her mother and siblings in a covered wagon from Alberta and went to the prairies south there. So You know, that's ingrained in us and it's in you too. So, long story short, then when I went to the ranch and spent all those years at the ranch, there was a number of old-timers and people that had, you know, like my great-grandparents' age or my grandparents' age or my folks' age. I grew up in this country, and they knew so much history, and they'd lived it. And I just gobbled that stuff up every time I got a chance to visit with one of them guys. And it's kind of fun for me to just reminisce about. One of my favorite sources of history was Hans Anderson. Keith Anderson's dad. His wife was Georgiana. Everybody around here knows they were unique, wonderful people. But at any rate, he had built up quite a place. They'd gone through the Depression, and he'd built up quite a place, and ranch, and sheep, and cattle, and everything. But Hans was getting older and kind of retired, but he'd still help Keith all the time. But many times i'd get to i'd be up on the road three or four in the morning getting gates set and everything set up before the crew ever was up and going so that we would be set up for what we were going to do that day whether it start to the trail to the centennial or to the sage creek or whatever and hans couldn't sleep so he'd be up there They might have cows on the road, or he might be just up there driving. Four o'clock in the morning, here he'd be, hands tootin' long, and he might be just stopped alongside the road. We'd stop and visit. And I got so much history from him. You know, he'd tell me different places. So-and-so homesteaded here. Or the Jake Flatt School was here. There used to be a shearing plant there. Just so many things that he shared. And then just living. I mean, they lived in some of those old homestead cabins and leased places. But I valued those stories that he told me. And then another one was Bill Hawkins, who was a vet, a veterinarian. And he was like a walk in history book. Excuse me. His father was Hap Hawkins, and he was of the same generation as Hans Anderson. But they went through the Depression when all the homesteads folded up. They couldn't make a living. The people had to walk away from them and move to town. And some of the ranches, a lot of the bigger ranches, they folded up too because they just couldn't make it. Times were tough. And he was involved in... and gathering up those places that went back to a bank. And the bank didn't want them, but they had them. I mean, they're yours. So he would take, he had quite a few of those places, and Hans was the same way, where they took over and ran them for the bank for a while until they could, the bank could sell them to somebody, portions of them to somebody or something. But they knew so much history and lived such a, amazing life that I got to learn a lot of that history from them I remembered I mean remember I can remember the days where we were sitting when they told me some of those stories but about the book Jimmy Campbell from Dillon, who's a longtime brand inspector and friend, he has the same love for the history and all. But he spent countless hours up the Blacktail and the San Antonio sitting there with Bill Hawkins while we were weaning, you know, and waiting for us to get everything sorted so they could inspect them and everything. And they sat there for hours telling stories. And anyway, Jim and I always said, we need to get Bill Hawkins and Hans Anderson in the truck, turn on a tape recorder, and drive up to Blacktail and Centennial. We never did that. They're both gone. So now it's us. We've got that. And Hans' son, Keith, is a... He's got so much history in him.

SPEAKER_02 35:29

But it's in you. It's in your minds. And it doesn't get passed down unless you tell it.

SPEAKER_03 35:34

It doesn't. And, you know, some people are going to remember it, some won't. But nobody will remember it if it's not told. And so, you know, I just felt like, especially after the ranch sold, And then we got COVID in 2021. We dodged it for a year and a half and led our kind of a normal life. And then COVID hit us pretty hard. I was pretty sick for quite a while. But when we got over it, and it's about the time that the ranch sold, and then you put up a you put up that Facebook post about kind of the end of an era about the ranch selling, you know, and it had been, you know, it was a big part of all of our lives. Right. It was 10 years after you retired. Yeah. But it was a big part of our life, whole life, you know, and you spend nearly 40 years of your life. Some people don't live that long, you know, but, uh, so, you know, I spent more to this point, I spent more than half of my life there. And, uh, not share that is it's pretty selfish actually but it's also I recognize that in this day and age with electronics that you know you could tape things like we're doing here now but it's kind of like the Bible you can get it on on tape and recording and all but if something happened with electronics I want to have that I want to have that physical thing and a written word like the Bible. And so I felt compelled and with a lot of urging, you know, to write that book. And originally my intent was I wanted to write fun stories. You know, I just really, I've got so many stories I could go on and on and on and on. You know that. But I wanted to tell those fun stories. That was my original intent. And then we took a self-publishing. We entered a self-publishing course because we'd never written a book. Sue was very talented that way as far as technical and gifted writer and everything in her own right. But it became very apparent once I started writing. writing the book that I needed to write the hard parts. The good parts, but the hard parts too. First, I'm still, I'll still write another book. I've got so many stories. I've written quite a few, but I've been kind of on a hiatus for almost a year now where I have, I was writing a story a week and then I decided, I just needed a break from it, and I wanted to be fresh and want...

SPEAKER_02 38:46

Inspired. Inspired, exactly. It's hard when it's forced. Yeah, it's

SPEAKER_03 38:53

different.

SPEAKER_02 38:54

Or when you feel obligated to create all the time or to meet a deadline, it can be hard to continue to stay inspired and to tell the stories with the same enthusiasm and fervor.

SPEAKER_03 39:07

It's kind of interesting, though, because once we started writing... on that book. And I did it sitting in my chair with a laptop. And to start with, I'm no blazing fingers with a typewriter, you know. But I took typing one when I was a freshman in high school in like 1968. And it was manual typewriter. But at any rate, it was about the first week in January when I started writing that. And I got on a roll. I mean, I really got on a roll. But there were some things. We joined that publishing school, so we had some help as far as keeping us on track and keeping us accountable holding us accountable for you know like deadlines or but the other thing with that is and i had an an outline we i just couldn't put down but they had a mind map and those sorts of things that really helped us kind of stay in track but i made a promise to sue unto myself first but then to sue that when i started writing that book I would not do one thing on that book until I'd read my Bible and I'd prayed that day. And I never missed. I started writing that book about the 7th or 10th of January. I had everything, virtually all the content written by the 15th of March. And then Susie had to go to work and putting, arranging it and putting it together to where it was, you know, really flowed and was good. And she really put the

SPEAKER_02 40:55

book together for us. Well, mom has tremendous writer skill as well. Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_03 41:02

Yeah. Yeah. So, but that is how it came about. Our publishing, self-publishing school, we had coaches and stuff like that. We'd meet once a month. But at any rate, we had a goal. They asked us to write a goal. And I said, well, I guess this was in January. I said, I got a goal. I would like to have a book written that's ready to be published and go to the public in a year. And I thought that was realistic. But maybe... we were going to have to push ourselves. And the 18th of August, we published that book. It went to the printer and out to the public. Even the self-publishing school, the coaches and the people with it were just amazed at how we'd done. And it's been very humbling, but but so encouraging to see how that book is done. I

SPEAKER_02 42:10

think that the results that you got is largely attributed to the passion that you had about the subject matter. You weren't just writing something that you were interested in. You were writing something that was you. It was your heart. It was your soul. It's

SPEAKER_03 42:32

not all warm and fuzzy. I laid it out. And that's just me. I'm not going to change that way.

SPEAKER_02 42:46

No. But when you're talking about when you laid it out, you did. And if you folks get a chance to read the book, I really encourage you to, because you're going to get to get a glimpse into real ranch life, real, the human experience of ranching that sometimes gets overlooked. We, We as an industry, and I talked about this in my last episode, we're very good at telling stories to each other. We're very good about educating each other. There's a million podcasts and videos and books from ranchers to other ranchers or, you know, within our own culture.

SPEAKER_03 43:25

Singing to the choir.

SPEAKER_02 43:26

Right. But that's comfortable because those are the people who understand us. What I... appreciated a lot about your book when it got done. And I didn't know what to expect, because you're not a writer. No. But what I appreciated about it is that it was told from such a human perspective that anybody who's not even into ranching can appreciate what came out of it. And the other thing, too, sometimes in popular culture when people write memoirs, it has this... tell-all connotation and a big expose. And you didn't write it that way. There was hurts and there was hard things where you could have thrown some people under the bus, but you never said a bad word about anybody. Anything that was negative towards maybe a group of people, it was that way. It was towards the suits. But you told it in a way that was very anybody can identify with?

SPEAKER_03 44:37

Well, probably one of the guiding principles for me and how I approached that book and how I told the story and what I told and what I continue to tell the stories came from advice. And this is in the book. It came from advice that we got, a number of us, Corporate managers in Coke, about 400 of us sitting in a room one morning, got from one of the higher executives in Coke. His name was Bill Caffey. I have utmost respect for him. He was a good businessman. No crap. You know, you knew where he stood. It wasn't any hidden thing. But he... His advice to us is don't be a victim. Don't live your life like a victim. And I don't feel like I was ever a victim. You're in charge of your own self. And so I don't have that victim mentality or belief in me. And so I don't tell anything or talk about that in any way. that people would think that I was a victim. That was not my intent in the book. Sure, there's hard times. There's good times. There's hard times. That's life. One of the neat things, though, Clayton, I would share with you that's been real fun for me is throughout my career, whether it was When I was young in 4-H or FFA, you know, I did plenty of public speaking. I had plenty of leadership stuff and involved in a lot of things when I was young. But I've always really enjoyed sharing my life or the Western lifestyle and our culture out here with the others that don't know it. And one of the most inspiring things that we've ever gotten to do, Sue and I was part of– a group that went, uh, I'm having a senior moment right now. Provider Pals. Okay, so Provider Pals was a deal started by Bruce Vincent up in Libby. His family were loggers for a long time, and they got put out of business. And it was government intervention and regulations and that kind of hoopla that kind of put them out of business, along with other loggers all throughout the state. And so he started this deal being proactive and So what he wanted to do was expose people and kids, seventh and eighth graders, from the inner cities throughout the United States to what really it's like out here in the West or where we're harvesting natural resources, whether it be logging or mining or oil production. production or fishing, commercial fishing or ranching or farming, any number of those kind of things, dairying. So he put that together and he'd get together a group of four or five different producers from different walks of life. And we'd go spend two days in these inner cities at a certain school. And in our case, we showed slideshow and then spent time with those kids, visiting with them about our life and the life on the ranch. But with inner city kids that probably never get exposed to the real thing, much like what your podcast is about. Yeah. It was reaching people that weren't in our normal audience. And so that was some of the funnest, most inspiring things to me, to see those little kids. And one of the most memorable ones was Washington, D.C. We went to a school there. I still remember. It's Maryvale. I still have a cup that I use every day that has Maryvale on it. and and that was from a long time ago but anyway it was a little middle school there about two and a half blocks from the capital their school building wasn't near as good as shape and modern as ours are out here in these rural communities even but those those kids were You know, they were from a completely different culture. They didn't have any concept. They had no inkling of what life was like, you know, especially in a setting like ours. But most of them came from single-parent homes. Very few of them had even a yard around their house, grass, a lawn. The fact is, there was... They told us at the school that most of those kids, the only lawn that they were accustomed to, there was a 20-foot strip of grass along one side of that school building, and that was probably the only grass or lawn that a lot of them kids really had been exposed to. So we got to expose them to the West, and... And it just fascinated those kids. I mean, they were so interested in our way of life, which we take for granted. And it's just like you, somebody asking you as a kid, you know, what's it like to be, you know, kid on a ranch i don't know anything else you know so you don't and and so they that was our opportunity to share life out west with with those little kids and then we had they had a deal set up we had a little rope and dummy there and and i took ropes and stuff and with me and and we got to try and teach all them little kids how to rope, and they all got to swing and try to learn to swing and rope a dummy. And then some of the funnest parts, that one in Washington, D.C., was after we'd kind of finished and I was sitting outside on this bale of hay that the dummy was on, the families pulled up there, a dad and his other little kids, to pick up their other siblings from school. And they stopped, came out, and they sat there and visited with me and them little kids. We had so much fun. They just ate it up. I mean, I had them in my hat and everything, you know. I'd like to think that that made an impression on those kids.

SPEAKER_02 51:38

I would imagine it did. It made an impression on us because we were quite a bit younger then, but I can remember when you guys came home from that. Mom, of course, she's always taking pictures. The smiles and the joy on those kids' faces. You guys had a bunch of little cowboy hats, and they had some little bandanas on, and they were just eating it up. And it was striking to me even as a kid kid myself how you know that was just normal for us but for those kids it was like the highlight of their life

SPEAKER_03 52:12

and some of those uh bruce had that set up and and to where um you know throughout all those different cities they could they could apply for us like a scholarship and and I don't know how many kids got to come out, but they brought about 20 or 40 kids out for a week during the summer from those to Libby and got to be in a camp.

SPEAKER_02 52:39

They brought them to Montana.

SPEAKER_03 52:40

Yeah. So that was pretty special. The other one that I remember so well, and it's from a different perspective, was Little Rock, Arkansas. And Sue and I went there and... And it wasn't as much the kids there as it was fellow presenters. And we went there and they brought a logger from Arkansas. And I thought I knew what a redneck was because I kind of are one. I had no concept of redneck until I ran into that gentleman that was the logger from Arkansas. It was entertaining. But those kind of things, you know, it's been inspiring. You see what effect you had on those kids or could have had and the immediate effect you could see. You know, they were enamored with it. And that's part of the thing I We've always known, but you could see firsthand. There's a romance about the West that people just like. I mean, there's a reason why the Westerns were so popular. Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, I mean, and the Lone Ranger. I mean. I can remember, you know, playing cowboys and Indians, there was nothing against the Indians or nobody was offended. It was just, that was just the American way. And, and there's, there's a romance about that. And, uh, it's part of America. Yeah. That kind of is going away. Yeah. And, and I think that's why, you know, people are so enamored with, with a deal like Yellowstone. I'm repulsed by a lot of it because it's so foul, but, uh, that there's still that romance of the West. But it's not so much the West, it is the American spirit. We don't want to lose that. So that's part of the big reason why I wrote the book. I wanted to share that so it's in print and people can look at it years from now and see what it was like. And it was pretty unique. I mean, even in my age and from my generation, what I experienced on that big ranch, you know, the transformation that I witnessed and lived there was pretty amazing, even in my generation.

SPEAKER_02 55:18

Well, let's talk about that. I mean, you were at the Matador Cattle Company, otherwise known as the Beaverhead Ranch, for 37-plus years. And you were the general manager for 21,

SPEAKER_03 55:32

correct? Yeah, from 1990, fall of 1990 until June of 2011. But when did you start there? October 7th of 1974, I went there. I was 21. So,

SPEAKER_02 55:49

back to something we touched on in the very beginning about technology and the way things have changed.

UNKNOWN 55:56

Ha!

SPEAKER_02 55:56

Talk a little bit about what your realities were, your day-to-day realities, whether it's transportation, food, housing, at the beginning of your career to the end. What was the change in 37 years?

SPEAKER_03 56:16

What just came to my mind was high-tech then was a hammer. uh no it it changed so much but but you know i want to keep this in perspective my my grandparents my grandpa and grandma marxer and endless they they experienced way more change than we did i mean they went from literally horse and buggy days and to to cars to electricity to man on the moon. I mean, to planes. And then to man on the moon. And what we've experienced is very small compared to that. The change is very small. Those were breakthrough things. The telephone. Yeah. But even, yeah, communication. And that... Well, when the telephone was used for a long time, it was actually a benefit. I see a lot of communication now that's more negative towards the human culture and society. But it also is technology that allows us like this to share a lot of that with a lot more people. But when I went there at the ranch, I was 21, and I was... youngest, greenest kid on the cowboy crew. He ran a fairly good sized cowboy crew when they could find the help. But they had 6,000 plus cows and then in 1974 they still had 7,000 sheep too. And so the sheep, there was a farm, kind of a farm crew and then a sheep crew and then a cowboy crew. But uh things were pretty primitive i mean the summer camps like in the centennial sage creek was a permanent camp they did have power but the summer camps didn't have power i mean there was nothing i mean there was an outhouse out back uh you had a shack to live in or a tent most of we had mostly we had mostly shacks uh there they were old like railroad work shacks you know they had no they were just um ship lap lumber on a two by four studs no insulation no inside walls just a small the one uh little shack that we three of us lived in during waning two of us for the fall and then during waning another one moved in with us and helped single guys but or all of us up there as single men are even though we were married but it was room for three cots basically had a barrel stove in the end of it just an old stove and no insulation so i mean you're you're either roasting you know you're sweating or freezing you know and it was just how well the stove held the heat because the building wasn't going to hold it at all but there was no no power or anything there we had did everything we if we had a lantern Some of us took flashlights, but the batteries, you know, were run out. So we might use a lantern, but a lot of times we didn't use any. We just wandered around in the dark. We very seldom took a lantern or light to the barn. And almost always wrangled, somebody wrangled horses always in the dark. And I should explain that. Wrangling horses, because that's something that a lot of people don't have any concept of what that is. You know, on smaller operations, they may not do that or have the need for that. Because they have horses just in

SPEAKER_02 1:00:27

individual pens right around the barn, close by.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:30

Yeah, but there where you've got a crew, we'd have 60, 70, probably 70 or 80 head of horses for the crew. in a wrangle pasture, and then the horses that we weren't using at that time, they were turned out in other pastures. There was probably 150, 160 head of horses in a working cavity. But, so the crew did everything together. You stayed in a camp together. You ate at the same time. You went to work at the same time. You got off at the same time. But, So it was in order to do that, then those camps like that, you had a wrangle pasture, and it was probably about a section, the one up there at the start of your... Which is a mile square. A mile square, yeah, which, you know, for most people, that's a lot of country, and that was one of the smaller pastures. But at any rate, and it had a couple of cricks running through it and willows and everything, sagebrush holes and everything. So those horses would be turned out there during the night, and And then somebody would go out. We'd keep a wrangle horse in around camp, and we switched off, and everybody had to take their turns. So he'd have to get up before everybody else. And before breakfast and everything, you had to go out, saddle the wrangle horse, and then head out into the wrangle pasture, I mean into the horse pasture, and find all those horses gathered in the dark. I mean in the dark, yeah. And you had to trust that. that wrangle horse and he'd usually go find them but uh you go out there and gather them up and bring them back into the corral and pin them and then most of the time the guys would show up about that they'd hear you coming and hear the horses coming they'd get up and we'd go saddle our horse have to catch some horses in the dark and that's something a lot of people don't have any you know in this day and age you know everything's lit and you but you learn your horses, you know, you've got 75 of them to pick from, you've got to find, you might have three or four or five head horses in that bunch that are yours, you've got one particular one that you want to ride that day. You've got to figure out how to pick them out of 75 in pitch dark. And it might be a silhouette, you can still, you know, if your eyes are adjusted, you can still see, but to some extent, but, you know, there's a lot of bays. But you could tell by the shape, their silhouette, or I can think of a number of them, of mine that I rode throughout the years, that they had a certain way when they got in the pen, when somebody started walking in the pen, they had kind of patterns, like macho, horse macho head patterns. he he'd go around the pen you know that kind of the outside of the the corral about three times he'd take three laps he just and it wasn't fast or anything but he he'd move around that girl outside of that girl about three times and then he stopped somewhere and and that was one of the ways i told him in the dark but and then you go get them caught make sure you got the right horse and then you lead them into the barn and it's dark enough outside but The barn is darker than old Coley's butt. You know, and there's literally, you can't see your hand in front of your face. Throw a little grain in the box in the stall and go find your saddle and brush them off and everything. And, of course, you've got to, it was real important, you develop habits that I still use every time. I never saddled a horse without currying them and brushing them all over and have my hand all over him because you didn't know what he might have on him or it was hurt or anything you couldn't see it so you had to go by feel

SPEAKER_02 1:04:35

right so for those of you that you know aren't from our culture what he's talking about is when you have a horse that you're going to put a saddle on you want to make sure that there's no dirt mud cockleburs anything like that or sores or yeah sores on them where there any friction or contact from the saddle that you're putting on could cause more injury or just could... Might get you bucked off.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:03

Yeah. So the other thing that that did, you know, you developed habits and a pattern of how you did everything, how you caught your horse, how you put them in the stalk, how you saddled them and unsaddled them. To this day, I have a specific way that I, and even though I've got lights and everything, there's a specific way that I'll saddle a horse. I'll put my latigos and everything, my cinches up so that when you're in the dark and you go pitch that on there, you know exactly where everything is. And in all likelihood, when you lead that horse out in the dark, you may load in a trailer or you might leave. Then we just left from camp.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:51

Because you didn't have a horse trailer.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:52

Yeah. They had gotten a horse trailer the year before I came was their first one.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:58

Not everybody that was working there had access to the horse trailer.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:03

No, no. We had one horse trailer.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:05

For the whole ranch? For the whole ranch. How many cowboys?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:08

Oh, anywhere from 10 to 12.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:10

Spread across 250,000 acres at the time.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:14

Yeah,

SPEAKER_02 1:06:14

yeah. So a lot of guys didn't have vehicle transportation when they were going out.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:20

Oh, no. In the crew, when you went to camp, there was maybe two pickups. Maybe the jigger boss and the cow boss each had a pickup. But very seldom, we didn't take our pickups up there. No, we just didn't. I mean, you were there to work. Yeah. And you're dang sure tired enough at the end of the day, you know, that you weren't looking for extracurricular activities.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:50

Well, your horses had to have been different then, too. I mean, we've always had hardy horses out here, but I imagine back in the day when you didn't have trailer, some of those pastures are 10, 15, 20 miles across. You've got to go a long ways just to get to the cows to gather before you can even work them.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:09

It was nothing to trot 10 or 12 miles before you got to where you were going to work all day. Then when you got done, you trotted home.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:18

And people these days can't appreciate that if they never lived it because we trailer everywhere.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:23

Yeah, but the trailers actually made ranching more efficient. They really did. As does most technology. Yeah, a lot of technology makes it more efficient. but it doesn't make better horses or horsemen. You know, I can still remember, and this is even after when I was a cow foreman there in the late 80s, and... We still, we use trailers more, but still, there's lots of times where you trot it a long ways, you know, to do your work and then trot it home. And I still remember there's a lot of horse people will recognize the name Bruce Sandifer. Bruce worked for me as a young married guy in the late 80s for a couple years and a really good hand. But I can still remember those times trotting out of Sage Creek. challenging each other and and the others of the crew see how long we could trot without our feet in the stirrups you can try a long ways if you push yourself and bruce could trot a long ways but bruce will listen to this yeah he he could trot a long ways without his feet in the stirrups he was an exceptional hand then and i'm so tickled that he's gone and developed that into what he has and shared that with others It's a big deal. He's gifted.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:51

Well, you've had a lot of gifted people that work for

SPEAKER_03 1:08:54

you. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of times when you're living it, you don't recognize how gifted they are. And they may not have developed all that either. And maybe they weren't in the right situation. We didn't have the situation where that gift could be expressed. We probably held some of them back because we were there to do a cowboy job and be profitable. But But that tickles me to see people go on beyond and experience life and work with us, and yet they've gone on to way bigger things, and they're sharing it with others. That's inspiring.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:41

Thank you for joining us on episode number two of the Living Western Podcast with guest Ray Markser. This concludes part one of the episode. Part two will air next Tuesday. As always, if you would like to find out more about Living Western and what we're all about, please go to livingwesternpodcast.com. You can also check out Living Western on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. We'll see you next time.