John Wayne Walked Into A Wyoming Sale Barn In 1961 — Then He Counted Out $2,500 On The Rail D

October 1961. Albany County, Wyoming. A cattle ranch 11 mi southeast of Laramie on the east slope of the Laramie Mountains where the land flattens out into high plains grass and the wind comes down off the ridge in the afternoons and doesn’t stop until well after dark. The man who runs the ranch is named Del Hooper.

He is 67 years old. He has been running cattle on this ground since 1931, the year his father died and left him the lease and $200 in a coffee tin under the kitchen floorboards. 30 years on the same grass. The same spring-fed stock tank. The same ridgeline in the morning when he goes out to check the herd before breakfast.

In October of 1961, a land development company out of Denver files a claim that crosses the southern boundary of his grazing lease. The claim is legal. The company is within its rights. Del Hooper has 200 head of cattle and nowhere left to take them. Here is the story. The Hooper place is not a deeded property.

It never was. Del’s father, Ray Hooper, came up from Colorado in 1919 with $40 and a horse and took a grazing lease on BLM adjacent land in Albany County the way a man takes what is available when what he wants is not on offer. He ran sheep the first 3 years and then switched to cattle when the sheep market dropped and never switched back.

He built a house, a barn, two stock pens, and a calving shed with lumber he hauled himself from Laramie in a wagon. He sank a well by hand in 1923, 48 ft down into the aquifer, and cased it with sections of pipe he bought secondhand from a railroad maintenance yard. The well is still producing in 1961.

The house is still standing, though the porch sags on the south end where a post rotted out in 1954 and Del has been meaning to replace it ever since. Del Hooper took the lease over in 1931 and the ranch became his the way things become yours when you work them every day for 30 years. He knew every draw and every rise of it.

He knew where the ground was soft in spring and where the cattle would founder if he pushed them east too early. He knew the two places where the fence needed checking after every hard wind because the posts had gone soft at the base and he had not yet gotten around to replacing them, and he knew this about himself and it was one of the few things about the operation he was not satisfied with.

He had run the place alone since his wife Clara died in 1954. His son Bobby had gone to work for the Union Pacific in Cheyenne in 1957 and sent money home when he could, which was not often because Bobby had a wife and two children of his own and the railroad paid what it paid. The development company was called Meridian Land Associates.

It was headquartered in Denver and had been acquiring parcels and grazing rights across southern Wyoming and northern Colorado for 18 months. They were not ranchers. They were buying land ahead of a highway project that was in the planning stages with the state transportation office, and they were buying it cheap because most of the men selling did not yet know about the highway.

Dell Hooper did not know about the highway, either. What he knew was that a man in a good suit had driven out from Laramie in August with a survey map and told him that Meridian Land Associates had filed a valid claim on the southern third of his grazing range, which was the best third, where the grass ran deep and the stock tank never went dry, and that Dell would need to adjust his operation accordingly.

Dell asked what accordingly meant. The man in the suit said it meant he would need to reduce his herd to what the remaining two-thirds of the range could support. Dell asked how many head that was. The man looked at his papers and said approximately 110 to 120 head. Dell said he had 200 head. The man said, “Yes, he understood that and that the remaining 80 to 90 head would need to be sold.” Dell asked when.

The man said the claim took effect November 1st. Dell asked if there was any recourse. The man said the claim had been properly filed and approved and that Dell was welcome to consult an attorney and then he drove back to Laramie. Dell Hooper sat on the sagging South porch after the man left and looked at the ridge line until the light went off it.

Then he went inside and ate supper standing at the kitchen counter and washed his plate and went to bed. He consulted an attorney in Laramie. The attorney’s name was Phil Garrett, a man Dell had known for 20 years. Phil Garrett spent 2 hours with the survey map and the lease documents and the Meridian filing and then sat back in his chair and told Dell what he already knew.

The claim was valid. The filing was clean. There was no procedural error to challenge and no substantive argument that would hold up. He could fight it and spend money doing it and lose. Or he could sell the cattle. The cattle market in October 1961 was at the bottom of a 3-year slide. A beef cow that would have brought $180 at auction in 1958 was bringing $130 that fall and sometimes less depending on the day and the buyer.

80 head at $130 was $10,400. At full market it would have been $14,400. The difference was not nothing. The difference was the winter operating costs and the spring feed bill and the payment on the equipment loan Dell had taken out in 1959 to replace the tractor. He had been counting on a full herd through the winter.

He had been counting on spring prices, which always ran better than fall. He sold in the fall and he sold short and there was no way around either of those facts. He put 83 head through the Laramie sale barn on the third Saturday of October. He stood at the rail and watched them go through one pen at a time.

The auctioneer knew him and nodded at him from the box and Dell nodded back and that was the whole of their exchange. The cattle went for $128 a head on average. Dell drove home with $10,624 and a check folded in his shirt pocket and the check did not cover what he needed it to cover and he knew it before he cashed it.

That same third Saturday of October, a production crew was finishing location work outside Laramie for a picture being shot partly on Wyoming locations. They had been using ranch land 12 miles north of town for the past week and were breaking down the last of the equipment that afternoon. The lead, a large man in his early 50s who had been in Laramie since Tuesday, had finished his scenes on Thursday and had been staying on to work with the second unit on some wide shots that needed his silhouette on horseback against the ridge line. He was done by noon on Saturday. He changed out of costume, put on his own clothes, canvas work jacket, cream Stetson, worn boots, and told his driver he wanted to take the long way back to town. They came down through the ranch country southeast of Laramie on a two-lane blacktop that cut between fence lines and cattle ground. At the Laramie sale barn, the parking lot was full and the cars ran down the road shoulder for a quarter mile. The driver slowed without being asked. The man in the passenger seat looked at

the sale barn and then looked at the cattle trucks parked along the fence and then said, “Pull in.” They pulled in. The man got out. He went in through the side gate the way a man goes into a place he has been before, not asking where things are, moving toward the rail. The sale was running. He stood at the rail and watched two pens of stocker calves go through and then a pen of cull cows and then a pen of mature beef cattle.

Good animals, well-conditioned, selling for less than they were worth. He watched the buyers. He watched the sellers. He watched a man at the far end of the rail, 67 years old, gray at the temples, heavy hands on the top rail, watching his cattle go through the ring with the expression of a man watching something he cannot stop.

He walked down the rail to where Dell Hooper was standing. Dell did not look at him. He was watching the last pen of his cattle circle the ring. The auctioneer’s voice ran over the top of everything, fast and flat. The pen sold. The gavel came down. Dell looked at the number on the board and then looked at his hands on the rail.

The man beside him said, “Those your cattle?” Dell said they were. The man asked how many he had run this year. Dell said 200. The man asked how many he just sold. Dell said 83. The man asked why. Dell looked at him then for the first time and registered the face and then looked away because Dell Hooper was not the kind of man who made a display of recognizing someone.

He said, “Land claim took my south range. Had to cut the herd to fit what’s left.” The man said, “What do you get for your good cows this time of year?” Dell said $128 today. Said they’d have gone $155 to $160 in the spring. The man was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “How much is the difference?” Dell looked at him.

He said, “Mister, I don’t know what you’re asking me.” The man said, “Between what you got today and what they’d have brought in the spring, how much is the difference?” Dell pulled the check out of his shirt pocket and looked at it. He did the arithmetic in his head the way a man does arithmetic he has already done a dozen times.

He said, “Somewhere around $2,500 depending on how spring ran.” The man nodded. He said, “And if you had that $2,500 right now, what would you do with it?” Dell looked at him for a long second. He said, “I’d buy the cattle back.” The man said, “At today’s price?” Dell said, “At today’s price. Put them back on my remaining range and carry them through the winter and sell in the spring when the market’s right.

But I don’t have it. The check I’m holding doesn’t stretch that far after the equipment loan and the winter feed bill. So, where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. The man reached into his jacket and took out a long brown leather wallet.

He counted out 25 hundred dollar bills onto the top rail of the sale barn fence, one at a time, in the open, where anyone standing nearby could see and count along. Dell Hooper watched every bill come down. He did not reach for them. When the count was done, the man put the wallet back in his jacket.

He said, “Buy them back. Take them home. Sell in the spring when the price is right.” Dell said, “I don’t take charity.” The man said, “It isn’t charity. You told me what your cattle were worth in the spring. I’m advancing you the difference between today’s price and spring price. When the spring sale runs, you send me back what I put up.

That’s not charity. That’s a loan and no interest from a man who happens to have the money today, and you happen to need it today.” Dell looked at the bills on the rail. He looked at the man. He said, “I don’t know how to get it back to you.” The man pulled a small notebook from his shirt pocket and wrote an address on a blank page and tore it out and set it on top of the bills.

He said, “Charles Feldman, Famous Artists Agency, Beverly Hills. Send it there when you’re ready. He’ll see I get it.” Dell picked up the bills and the paper. His hand was steady. He said, “I’ll pay it back if I have to sell the ranch to do it.” The man said, “You won’t have to sell the ranch.” He touched the brim of his Stetson and walked back down the rail toward the gate.

He did not look back. Dell Hooper stood at the rail with 25 hundred dollar bills in one hand and a check for 10,624 dollars in the other and watched the man go. By the time he reached the gate, the auctioneer had already started the next pen. Dell Hooper bought 79 head back at the end of that same sale at $127 a head, $4 less per head than he had sold them for that morning because the afternoon buyers were fewer and the prices always soften by the last hour.

He loaded them himself with the help of the sale barn crew and drove them home that evening. He put them back on his remaining range. He fed them through the winter on the feed bill he could now afford to pay. The spring of 1962 ran well. The grass came in strong after a wet April. The cattle went through the summer in good condition.

Dell sold in September 1962, not spring. He waited for the fall run when the feed lot buyers were active and brought $161 a head on his best animals. He held back 16 head as breeding stock. He paid the equipment loan off in November 1962. He mailed a money order for $2,500 to Charles Feldman’s office in Beverly Hills in December, 6 weeks after the fall sale closed.

A letter came back from Beverly Hills in January 1963. It was typed on plain paper with no letterhead, three sentences. It said the money order had been received and the debt was cleared. It said Dell should keep running his cattle. It said, “You knew your market and you knew your animals and you just needed the one bad season to pass.

That is all it was.” Dell Hooper ran the ranch until 1974. He retired at 80 years old, which was not retiring so much as slowing down because he still went out to check the fence line twice a week until 1977. His son Bobby came back from Cheyenne in 1971 and took over the day-to-day operation. Bobby’s son, Dell’s grandson, took it over from Bobby in 1989.

The ranch is still a working cattle operation. The herd runs between 180 and 220 head depending on the year, which is almost exactly what Dell ran in 1961 before Meridian Land Associates filed their claim. Dell Hooper died in 1979 at the age of 85. He was buried on the ranch on the high ground above the spring-fed stock tank with the Laramie Ridge line visible to the west.

His marker says, “Dell Hooper, 1894 to 1979. He ran cattle here for 48 years.” In the house, in the kitchen, in the drawer below the window that looks out toward the ridge, there is a folded piece of paper. It is the page torn from a small notebook, an address written in pencil. Charles Feldman, Famous Artists Agency, Beverly Hills.

It has been folded and unfolded enough times that the creases have gone soft. Bobby knows what it is. His son knows what it is. Neither of them has ever thrown it away. The man who stood at the sale barn rail that October came and went from Laramie without anyone at the barn knowing who he had been standing next to.

The production crew knew he had taken the long way back to town. They did not know why he had wanted to stop. He went back to Los Angeles that Sunday and finished the picture and then made a great many more after it. He never spoke of the sale barn in Albany County. Not to a reporter, not on a set, not in any written record that has been found.

What is known comes from Dell Hooper himself, who told the story once to his son Bobby in the winter of 1974, the year he handed the operation over. He told it the way he told most things, sitting at the kitchen table with his hands around a coffee cup, without embellishment, starting at the beginning and going to the end and not going back.

When he was finished, Bobby asked him why he had never said anything before. Dell said, “Because it was between me and him and it was finished and settled and there was nothing more to say about it.” Bobby asked what the man’s name was. Dell looked at his coffee cup. He said, “I think you know. The cattle are still on that ground.

The spring tank is still running. The ridge line is the same in the morning when whoever is running the place goes out before breakfast to check the herd. Some things about a piece of ground do not change regardless of who tries to take a piece of it.” Dale Hooper knew that. He just needed the one bad season to pass.

If this story reached you, do me a favor. Pass it on. Share it with a veteran in your life. Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t yet. There are more Duke stories coming.