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Outside Magazine, August 2004

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El Último Vaquero Habla Español (The Last Cowboy Speaks Spanish)
On the high plains of the West, tough men still ride herd on the open range. But the new riders are lonely gauchos from Chile and Peru, and their 21st-century frontier is a place where the cowboy myth meets a harsh reality.

By Nick Reding


	ALONE ON THE RANGE: NICANOR FLORES, HERDING SHEEP NEAR FAIRFIELD, IDAHO (Joshua Paul)

When René Alberto Vera Reyes got on a bus to come to the United States, he was 21 years old. He left the village of Cochrane—in Chilean Patagonia, population 2,000—in April 1999, carrying only a duffel bag that contained two pairs of pants, a pair of riding boots, a couple of shirts, a wool poncho, an awl, and several yards of horsehide pita, thin strips used to weave bridles and bullwhips. To say that René had never traveled would be misleading. He'd roamed all over southern Chile and into Argentina, but he'd done much of that on horseback, in a place where cattle drives still take months at a time. Just to reach Cochrane from the cabin where he was born, René had to ride eight hours.

What he wanted, though, was to be an American cowboy. He wanted to wear a big belt buckle and Wrangler jeans, and to make enough money to trade his horse for a pickup and to buy land someday back in Chile. To get these things, he'd signed a three-year contract with the Western Range Association, a 200-member Citrus Heights, California–based consortium of sheep ranchers that imports hundreds of South Americans a year to work on ranches all over the West. René had agreed to sign on with a man he'd never met or spoken to—rancher John Faulkner, of Gooding, Idaho—according to terms for which René, it would turn out, was largely unprepared.

As the bus headed north through the Patagonian state of Aisen, a barely populated area the size of Mississippi, there was little to suggest what awaited René in Idaho, aside from the certainty that it would be a different life—a modern cowboy's life, he hoped—and he imagined walking downtown on a Saturday night and ordering a beer in English. Six hours later, the bus pulled into the Chilean frontier town of Coyhaique. From there, René traveled an hour on another bus to the tiny border village of Balmaceda; an hour and a half on the first plane of his life to Puerto Montt, on the Pacific coast; then another hour's flight to Santiago, ten more hours to Dallas, and two to Twin Falls, Idaho.

There, one of Faulkner's ranch hands met René and drove him the 45 minutes to Gooding. After ten days spent helping unload 10,000 or so sheep trucked home after birthing their lambs in the warmer climes of Southern California, René left on his first sheep drive, traveling north from Magic Valley, on the Snake River Plain, across the Camas Prairie and 25 miles into the 2.2-million-acre Sawtooth National Forest.

In all, the trip lasted two weeks and ended more or less right back where it started: in the middle of nowhere.

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