New Mexico, 1958. A feed store on the main street of Cimarron in the high country south of Taos. A cattle baron named Vance Prudhomme has been offering Esteban Maestras $800 for his grazing permit and the 40 acres of deeded land around his lambing pens for 6 months. Esteban is 73 years old and has run sheep on that range since 1921.
He has refused the offer six times. On a Thursday morning in October, Prudhomme stops refusing to take no for an answer. He’s still talking when a man in a tan Stetson walks into the feed store for a bag of oats. Here is the story. The 40 acres that Esteban Maestras held in fee simple deed in Colfax County, New Mexico, had been in his family since 1887 when his grandfather Aurelio had received a land patent under the provisions settling the old Spanish land grants of the Sangre de Cristo country. Aurelio had run sheep on the high range north of Cimarron and had built a stone lambing pen in the low draw where the ground stayed warmer in April and the spring grass came in first. And that pen was still standing in 1958. Its stones mortared by Aurelio’s hands. Its gate hung by his son. Its latch replaced twice by Esteban himself. The 40 acres around the pen were not
much to look at in any season. They were in a draw between two ridges and the soil was thin and the grass was grama and blue grama and a little side oats and it was grazing land, not farming land. And it was exactly what Esteban needed because it was where his sheep came through the winter and where they lambed in the spring and where the draw gave them protection from the north wind that the open range above did not.
Esteban Maestras was born in 1885 in Cimarron, the son of his grandfather’s son, which is to say the third generation of Maestras men to know the draw and the lambing pen and the particular quality of the morning light on the east-facing ridge in October when the aspens turned and the air came down from the Sangre de Cristos with the first smell of winter in it.
He had been running sheep on his family’s range and the adjacent federal grazing allotment since 1921 after his father died and left the operation to him. He had a thousand ewes at peak and ran them on the high range in summer and brought them down to the draw in October and lambed them in April and sheared them in May and sold the wool through a Taos broker and the lambs through a buyer who came up from Albuquerque in June.
He was a thin man with the deeply weathered face of someone who had spent 60 years outdoors at altitude and the hands of a man who had worked with animals and rope and stone for all of those years. He spoke English when necessary and Spanish always when it was possible and the particular New Mexican Spanish of the high country that carries Castilian sounds from 400 years of mountains.
Vance Prudhomme had been building a cattle operation in Colfax County since 1939 buying land parcel by parcel with the methodical approach of a man who understood that range is power and that power accumulates slowly and that the men who tried to accumulate it quickly usually failed because they overpaid.
He was 55 years old in 1958 and owned approximately 14,000 acres in the Cimarron country most of it deeded some of it under long-term federal grazing lease. He was not a cruel man in any general sense. He was a man who had a plan for the Cimarron range and Esteban Maestas’s 40 acres were in the middle of it.
The plan was to consolidate his holdings on the east side of the Cimarron River into a single contiguous range of roughly 20,000 acres that that could run as one operation. He owned the land to the north of Esteban’s 40 acres. He owned the land to the east. He had recently purchased at some considerable expense the parcel to the west.
Esteban’s 40 acres and the federal grazing allotment attached to them sat in the center of what would otherwise be Prudhomme’s consolidated eastern range. Without them, the plan required moving cattle around Esteban’s land on a narrow access corridor that was inconvenient in good weather and impassable in a wet spring. With them, the plan was complete.
He had first approached Esteban in April of 1958 with an offer of $800. Esteban had said no. He had approached him again in May with the same offer. Esteban had said no. The offers in June and July were the same figure with different language around them. Esteban had said no each time. In August, Prudhomme had suggested that the federal grazing allotment attached to Esteban’s deeded land could face a challenge if the Bureau of Land Management received a complaint about overgrazing on that section.
Esteban had looked at him for a long time and said nothing and walked away. In September, Prudhomme had stopped by Esteban’s lambing pen and observed that the pen’s east wall was showing its age and that old stone walls had a way of coming apart in hard winters, sometimes of their own accord and sometimes with assistance.
Esteban had asked him to leave his land. On a Thursday morning in October, Prudhomme found Esteban at the feed store counter on Main Street in Cimarron picking up a bag of trace mineral supplement for the ewes going into the breeding season. He had decided that 6 months of patience had been enough and that it was time to make the nature of Esteban’s choices clear.
He stood beside him at the counter and spoke in the flat, reasonable tone of a man who has not raised his voice to anyone in 20 years because he has not needed to. He said the $800 offer was still on the table. He said if Esteban did not take it before the first snow, the offer would be $600. He said if Esteban did not take the $600 by spring, he should begin thinking about where he planned to live after the spring, because the federal allotment challenge was going to proceed, and a man without his grazing allotment could not run sheep on 40 dry acres at altitude, and both of them knew it. Esteban looked at his trace mineral supplement on the counter. He did not look at Prudhomme. He said, “This land is my grandfather’s land.” He said it quietly. He said, “I will not sell it.” Prudhomme said he understood that was how Esteban felt, and the feelings did not change the arithmetic of the situation. The bell above the feed store door rang, and a man in a tan Stetson came in. He went to the oats bin at the back of the store, and filled a bag, and carried
it to the counter, and set it down. He looked at Prudhomme. He looked at Esteban. He had heard enough from the back of the store to understand the conversation. He asked Prudhomme what he was buying. Prudhomme looked at him. He placed the face, and managed his reaction, which was the reaction of a man who had not expected to have a witness.
He said it was a private matter. Wayne said, “I heard enough of it to know the 40 acres in question.” He said, “I know that draw.” He said, “I came through it filming 10 years ago.” He looked at Esteban. He said, “How long has your family held the deed?” Esteban said, “Since 1887.” Wayne said, “71 years.” He looked at Prudhomme.
He said, “And you are offering $800?” Prudhomme said the offer was based on the land’s market value given its limitations. Wayne said, “What limitations?” Prudhomme said, “It is thin soil, poor water, access problems on the north and west.” Wayne said, “Your land is on the north and west.
” He said, “Those are not natural limitations.” He said, “Those are limitations you created by buying around him.” Prudhomme said he did not see that this was any of Wayne’s business. Wayne said, “It is my business now.” He told the feed store owner he would be back for the oats in an hour. He walked out. He drove to the Cimarron real estate office on Collison Street. The agent was in.
Wayne introduced himself and asked to use the office telephone, and the agent said yes without needing to think about it. He called his business manager in Los Angeles. He told him to find out what parcels were available for purchase in the section east and south of Esteban Maestas’ 40-acre deeded parcel in Colfax County, and to find out if there were any parcels in that section that Prudhomme did not yet own.
And to find out the asking prices, and to find out if they could be purchased by noon. His manager called back in 40 minutes. There were two parcels. One was a 60-acre section to the southeast, available from the estate of a deceased rancher. Asking price $2,200. The second was a 30-acre section to the south, available from a family that had moved to Albuquerque and wanted to sell.
Asking price $1,400. Both parcels were on the south side of the draw below Esteban’s lambing pen. Together they controlled the only practical access route from Prudhomme’s western holdings to the federal allotment land east of Esteban’s property. Without them, the 20,000-acre consolidation plan was a plan for a range with an impassable hole in the middle of it.
Without those two parcels, Prudhomme’s eastern consolidation plan required routing cattle through Esteban’s land or abandoning the eastern range entirely. Wayne told his manager to make offers on both parcels at asking price, and to close by Friday. Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments.
I want to see how far this story reaches. He drove back to the feed store. Prudhomme was still there, standing at the counter with a cup of coffee the store owner had poured him, looking at a map of the county section he had brought in his coat pocket, calculating something.
He put the map away when Wayne came in. Esteban was still at the counter with his trace mineral supplement. Wayne told Prudhomme that the 60-acre section to the southeast of Maestus’s Draw and the 30-acre section to the south of it were under contract as of that morning. He said that the access route Prudhomme’s eastern consolidation required ran through both of those parcels.
He said that once those parcels transferred, any cattle movement from Prudhomme’s western holdings to the federal allotment east of Maestus’s property would require crossing land that Prudhomme did not own and would not be permitted to cross. Prudhomme looked at him. He said, “You bought those parcels this morning.
” Wayne said, “I put them under contract this morning.” He said, “The transfer completes Friday.” He said, “Your eastern consolidation plan depends on those two parcels and on Maestus’s 40 acres.” He said, “You can have neither.” He said it without heat, the way a man states a conclusion he has already verified.
Prudhomme looked at Esteban. He looked at the feed store owner who had found somewhere else to be in the back of the store. He said, “This is not finished.” Wayne said, “The land part of it is finished.” He said, “The other part of it, meaning the grazing allotment complaint, he would advise Prudhomme to let that go.
” He said he had also spoken that morning to his attorney in Santa Fe who had made a call to the Bureau of Land Management regional office in Albuquerque and that the regional office would be interested to know the context of any complaint filed against an allotment held by a 73-year-old multi-generation rancher with a clean compliance record in the same season that the adjoining landowner was attempting to acquire his property below market value.
Prudhomme said nothing. He walked out of the feed store. He got in his truck. He drove north toward his ranch. Wayne paid for his oats. He paid for Esteban’s trace mineral supplement. Esteban looked at him. He said, “You did not have to do that.” Wayne said, “No.” He picked up the oats. He said, “Your grandfather built the lambing pen.
” Esteban said, “Yes.” Wayne said, “It is still standing.” Esteban said, “It is still standing.” Wayne said, “Keep it standing.” He carried the oats to his truck and drove south. The two parcels transferred on Friday of that week. They were held by a production company account for 14 months. At the end of 14 months, Wayne’s attorney contacted Esteban Maestas with an offer to sell the parcels to him at the price originally paid, $3,600 combined, with a 15-year payment plan at no interest.
Esteban accepted. He paid $240 a year for 15 years. The final payment was made in 1974 when Esteban was 88 years old. He signed the final payment check at the kitchen table in the house his father had built and mailed it to the Santa Fe attorney’s office, and that was the end of it. He died in 1977 in that house at the age of 92.
The 40 acres and the lambing pen and the two southern parcels passed to his son Miguel, who’d been running the operation alongside his father since 1965. Miguel’s children ran it after him. The stone lambing pen built by Aurelio Maestas in the late 1880s is still standing in the draw north of Cimarron.
The mortar is the original mortar on the lower courses and has been repaired on the upper courses twice. The gate latch is the third one. The east wall, which Prudhomme had suggested might come apart in a hard winter, hasn’t come apart. In 2001, Miguel Maestas donated three items to the Philmont Museum and Seton Memorial Library in Cimarron, which maintains the history of the Colfax County ranch country.
The first was the original 1887 land patent for the 40 acres. On federal government paper, the signatures faded but legible. The second was the deed transfer for the two southern parcels, dated 1974, showing the sale from the production company account to Esteban Maestas with a handwritten notation at the bottom in the Santa Fe attorney’s hand.
Per client’s instructions, no interest, no penalty, no conditions. The third was a photograph of the lambing pen taken in the fall of 1958, the stone walls in the draw, and the aspens on the ridge behind it. Esteban is in the photograph, standing at the gate. He is not looking at the camera, he is looking at the pen.
The placard reads, “The Maestas family, Cimarron, New Mexico, 1887 to present. Four generations of sheep on the same 40 acres. The pen is still standing.” If this story reached you, pass it on. Share it with a veteran in your life. Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already. There are more stories coming, and unfortunately, they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore.
