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Outside Magazine, August 2004

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El Último Vaquero Habla Español (The Last Cowboy Speaks Spanish)

By Nick Reding


	NICANOR AT SHEEP CAMP (Joshua Paul)

FAULKNER LAND AND LIVESTOCK runs 50 miles west and 80 miles east out of Gooding—as far as you can see. Early one morning in September 1999, just before I headed out to camp with René and Nicanor, I sat with John Faulkner in his office. By all accounts, he was a decent boss. The Patrón—or the Lieutenant, as his men sometimes call him, as much for his quiet, disciplined manner as for his Army service—was always described as fair.

Faulkner wore jeans faded at the knees, a broad hat, and photochromic sunglasses. He had small, dark-blue eyes, a white beard, and the carriage of a man who'd worked livestock for all of his 67 years: strong shoulders, a widening belly, and a stubborn walk that didn't hide a ginger back. His desk was covered with bills and affidavits and newsletters explaining updates in environmental and immigration laws—the vast paperwork of an operation subject to regulation by 24 government agencies.

To Faulkner, South Americans are essential, because locals won't work range jobs. "Americans want a shower," he said. "They want a warm bed; and insofar as there are herding jobs anymore, nobody wants them, because it means you can't come in to the bar on Friday night. It's progress."

H-2A, he said, was keeping him in business. (Since then, wool prices have quadrupled, rising from 23 cents a pound in 1999 to $1.06 today. But the reality is that this spike has come at the tail end of two decades of crippling competition from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Argentina.) "In the past 20 years," Faulkner said, "the number of range operations in Idaho—ranchers with more than 1,000 head of sheep—has gone from 60 to 30." He took off his hat and glasses and rubbed his face, cutting right to the point. "René and Nicanor live in pretty primitive conditions. But that's the way it's always been with this business, ever since my father was a boy living in the same mountains. If they don't want to work, fine. A lot of other men do."

Outside, six men in dirty coveralls and cowboy boots worked under the brilliant sun, repairing machinery in front of the equipment shed, their singsong Spanish audible in the background.

Later that night these same men would sit around Faulkner's 20-man bunkhouse, as they did most weekend nights, and drink beer before going to town. It was a ritual that those out on the range, like René and Nicanor, could rarely share. Wearing boots and jeans and snap-front shirts, the hands would set out en masse, as a protective measure. This was for two reasons: Many locals resent the herders—as one Anglo put it to me, "A white man can hardly get a job anymore"—and Gooding, like many western towns with broken economies, has become a much more dangerous place as the methamphetamine trade has moved up the Rockies from Mexico.

"The men live in pretty primitive condiditions, says rancher John Faulkner. That's the way it's always been, since my father was a boy living in the same mountains. If they don't want to work, fine. Other men do."

Around 9 p.m., a brand-new Ford F-350 pulled up to the bunkhouse. In the cab were three Mexican kids and a skinny Anglo from town wearing ruined Lee jeans, a dust-covered denim shirt, and a humongous cowboy hat. Holding a Tequiza among the brown-skinned Mexicans, in their Tommy Hilfiger golf shirts and baggy jeans, the American could not have looked more out of place. In Gooding, the Mexican meth dealer cruised in the F-350, and the drugstore cowboy rode shotgun.

Inside the bunkhouse, it smelled like mildew and backed-up toilets and cologne. The three Mexicans yelled hola to the men who peeked out the doors lining the dark hallways and sang along with the new Carlos Vives song that played on the truck radio and from stereos in every room. One of the truck passengers, a 19-year-old kid I'll call Angel, slouched in the doorway of a room, inside of which a tall Chilean gaucho in his forties, Jorge Silva, was using a homemade knife to cut lonjas, tenth-of-an-inch-wide strings of hide, for a bridle.

Angel told me that he was here to "make some sales," and when I asked what kinds of things might be for sale around Gooding, he mentioned not just meth but cocaine and painkillers. Chances he'd make any deals in the bunkhouse were slim, however, given what his potential clients earned a month, and given that the gauchos tend to disdain Mexicans and stay away from anything stronger than alcohol and tobacco. Still, Silva and the others gave him a friendly greeting, joking about Angel's last illegal run into the U.S. across the Mexican border. In the end, what mattered was that the gauchos and the meth dealers were part of the same picture. Like the wool from Australia, they had been imported into a part of the U.S. that had, as a result, been changed forever.

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