BORN TO THE LIFE of a cowboy, Tom Moorhouse says he would be a better manager if he spent more time in the office and less horseback, but he considers it a calling and feels guilty if he misses more than a day or two in the saddle.

Rancher Tom Moorhouse Born
With Cowboying In His Blood

BENJAMIN — Tom Moorhouse is just turned that way — the cowboy way, that is. And he’s been turned that way since he was just a little kid.

"If you’re turned that way, it doesn’t get too hot and it doesn’t get too cold and you don’t get too old. If you really have it in your system, you just can’t shuck it. It’s sort of like falling in love."

"I’m 56 years old, and it still has me to the point that I’m not near as good a manager," Moorhouse says. "If I would stay off a horse and stay in the office or get in the pickup and go places ... but it’s almost a calling for me. If I don’t ride a horse for a day or two, I almost have this guilty feeling. I wouldn’t call it a religion, because I don’t put it before God, but it’s like a religion in that I feel a calling to do it. There are a lot easier and better-paying jobs, but that doesn’t have anything to do with it."

Tom and his three brothers, Ed, John and Bob, are fifth generation cattlemen. All of them except Ed are involved in the ranching business on a day to day basis, and Ed is involved indirectly because he and his brothers share equally in the ownership of the family ranch.

"I think if you asked any of my three brothers, all would agree that it’s me more so than them that was turned that way," Moorhouse says. "I’m not bragging. That’s just what kind of blood happened to get into me."

Making money has never been that big a deal to Moorhouse. Operating is what’s important to him. By that he means operating lots of country, handling lots of cattle, owning lots of horses and working lots of men.

"That’s what I’ve always felt my place was in this world — handling horses, cattle and men. It’s where I’m most comfortable. I’m not very comfortable at the PCA or the bank. I’m not much of a trader as far as buying and selling cattle, but I am comfortable when we’re working or branding or weaning, or when we’re running behind. I can stand that. It doesn’t have to be easy. I like it when it’s sort of rough."

Tom still likes to do things the traditional way. Some might call dragging calves or taking the wagon out and camping out and driving the remuda with them during the works old-fashioned, but they’re tried and proven methods, and for Tom Moorhouse that’s more than enough.

"I’m convinced that the most economical way is the way we’re doing it," Moorhouse says. "To be quite honest, though, if it were just as economical do it some other way, we’d still do it this way because I like it. I’d have to own up to that, but the truth is it is feasible. It works."

That’s not to say the Moorhouse Ranch isn’t up with the times. They are just as progressive as the other well-known historical ranches of that area.

"I’d hate for someone to get the impression that we’re trying to operate the way we did 100 years ago. I realize that we have to stay up in the world. My policy is the things that work well, that are tried and proven, that still work economically for us, then we still do it the old way. If they don’t, we don’t."

One example of what was best back then and what is still best for them today is that Tom and John still brand with fire. Their father, Togo, never used butane.

"There were two reasons that my dad always gave," Moorhouse says. "One is this country is full of firewood, and the second, and main reason, is that daddy didn’t like that roar in the branding pen when we were working. It’s not the old branding pen, he’d say, where you can hear your partner talking or someone over yonder telling a joke.

"It’s really not the expense, like a lot of people think. They think we’re just too tight to use butane, but that wouldn’t be much of a cost."

The Moorhouse ranch is a family owned and operated business in every sense of the word, but as is typical with most family businesses, as families grow, change is required. Two years ago, the Moorhouses changed things up a bit in that Tom and John split up the "operating" part of the family business. John took part of the ranch and some of the leases and Tom took the rest. The land, however, is still owned by all four brothers. Tom operates in King and Stonewall counties as well as Hall County up near Turkey.

Ranching runs deep in the Moorhouse bloodlines. They are who they are because of their ranching heritage. It’s the cattle business that supported them back then and it’s the cattle business that supports their lifestyle today.

Tom’s grandfather, Edward Moorhouse, pastured cattle in Indian Territory before he came west from Kaufman County a few years after the turn of the century. Moorhouse saw opportunity in this big, open ranch country. It was sparsely populated and unspoiled, and that appealed to Moorhouse and his brothers. They settled near the town of Benjamin.

Tom’s father, J.C. "Togo" Moorhouse, was born in 1905. When he was just two years old his mother and grandfather packed up the rest of the family belongings in their covered wagon and headed west to meet up with Togo’s father and his uncles who were already busy establishing their ranching business in King County.

Togo’s father bought the 30,000 acre Ross ranch, which lies just across the way from where Tom and his family live today.

"It was old, rough cedar country," Tom says. "There weren’t any fences, just perimeter fences. There weren’t any tanks, and this isn’t windmill country. There were a few creeks on it that ran water part of the time, but it was tough sledding."

They got along okay, though, until the drouth of 1917, and that pretty well broke him. Tom says he’s not sure what his grandfather did after that, but a few years later, when Togo was still just a little "cotton-headed" boy, his father somehow managed to buy the Thorman Ranch.

The family lived in town, but Tom’s father often told stories of his early childhood days at the ranch. He had lots of stories about a horse they called Dan Patch.

"They worked that horse as a single and as a double. He was one of those horses that you could do anything with or on, and my dad came out to the ranch lots of times on old Dan Patch. Dad said he could trot it in two hours from Benjamin. I didn’t realize until years later that Dan Patch was a well known trotting horse before the 1900s."

Along about the time of the Depression and the drouth of ’34, Togo’s father lost the Thorman Ranch. He died soon after of heart trouble. Togo’s mother had nine children to feed and clothe, so she took in boarders in her home in Benjamin.

When Togo was old enough, he went to work for the McFaddin Ranch, the Mashdo, today the Spike Box. All the young boys in the area dreamed of working for the McFaddin, Tom says. Up around Guthrie it was the Sixes. At Stamford it was the Swensons.

When Togo finished high school he attended John Tarleton. He worked at the college farm for food and lodging.

Togo didn’t particularly care about education — he never really wanted to leave the ranch in the first place —and years later when Tom was to go off to college his father assured him that he understood what he was feeling.

"My dad told me that he when he went off to John Tarleton, he thought if he stayed any longer than a year the way things were changing there wouldn’t be any cows left to punch."

So he came home and went to work full-time for the McFaddin Ranch. That would have been sometime around 1923. The ranch then was being run by a fellow from the Concho River country named Wayne Dolan.

"To hear my dad talk, Wayne was far ahead of everyone else in that he knew cattle, he remembered cattle, he knew how to work cattle. He got along with men real well. He enjoyed life, and Daddy really admired him," Tom says.

Togo cowboyed there for seven years. Going wages back then were $30 a month.

"No more than they were drawing, you wouldn’t think they would be able to save much, but Togo was a big saver," Moorhouse says of his father.

While at the McFaddin, Togo began venturing out some on his own. He partnered with Dolan on a few deals and he and his brothers leased a ranch in Stonewall County in 1923.

Tom says his father told him that one of the hardest things he ever did was quit working for wages. He had seen what happened to his father during hard times, and the security of permanent wages was something he never took for granted.

"There was a bank in Oklahoma that financed my dad and a lot of other cowmen," Tom says. "He told me once that the bank had 112 livestock accounts, and during the drouth they closed 107 of them. Daddy and his brothers were one of the ones who survived, and the reason the bank didn’t close their account was because they were all drawing wages."

Togo did eventually quit working for wages, and in time was able to save enough to buy back one of the ranches in eastern King County that his father had lost during the drouth. It became his headquarters operation and it remains so today.

Togo and his bride, Lucille Hunter Moorhouse, moved to the ranch that first winter after they were married in 1942. Originally they intended only to stay through the winter so Togo could be close by to feed, but they ended up staying for 32 years and only moved back to town after Tom and his first wife, the late Sue Horne, came home from college.

The house Togo moved his bride into wasn’t much more than a bachelor’s camp. The half dugout consisted of a rock room and a kitchen, and there was no running water and no electricity, but it was home and it was here that Togo and Lucille happily raised their four sons.

Ed was born in 1942, John in 1945, Tom in 1946, and Bob in 1947.

"I remember not having electricity and no running water," Tom recalls, "but we didn’t miss it because we didn’t know to miss it. If we had never gotten it, I’d probably still be plumb content without it."

Money was pretty scarce, Tom says, but the boys never went without the basic necessities. Having been raised during the Depression, Tom’s parents were naturally conservative, and that conservative way remained with them throughout their life. Tom and his brothers were taught to respect that.

"To get to where they were and to exist where they were, they had to be conservative," Tom remarks.

One story Tom tells respectfully about his dad took place years later after his father had mostly turned the operation over to the boys.

"When Daddy got to where he couldn’t ride anymore, he’d bring us dinner. Daddy always wanted to be around where we were working, and he’d always build a fire and have a pot of coffee going for us. One day he brought some sandwiches out to where we were working and he commented how high tomatoes had gotten.

"Well, about a week later he brought us dinner again and I was helping him get things ready and I noticed two cans of tomatoes. I questioned him about it and he said that tomatoes had gotten so high he decided to get some canned tomatoes instead because they were a lot cheaper.

"We had soggy sandwiches that day."

Tom doesn’t have any idea when he started riding, except that it was at a very young age.

"When a dude comes along out here and asks me how he’s supposed to ride, well hell, I don’t know how you’re supposed to ride," Tom says. "To me that’s sort of like asking someone how you’re supposed to walk. If you were raised riding horses, it’s just part of your life."

Tom remembers a time when he and younger brother Bob were still too young to be off horseback by themselves.

"Charlie Dowden was a neighbor of ours. He lived on a half-section between here and the Sixes fenceline.

"Charlie would help Daddy and Daddy would help Charlie, and I remember that Charlie and Daddy would carry me and Bob behind them. We’d ride back there all morning long. They’d work a while and then ride to a point and visit a minute.

"When we stopped, I remember Bob always leaning over and saying, ‘Tom, did you get to lope any?’ I remember that just as plain as day. Bob always liked action."

Tom says his father believed in working his boys, but he always understood that they needed time to be boys.

"We liked to hunt and rope, and when we were young he built a little roping arena for us. That was a big deal," Tom says. "It showed that he really wanted to get along, because Daddy wasn’t the kind to spend the time and effort to do something like that unless he thought it was pretty darn important."

Togo taught his boys how to break horses the way he was taught to break them.

"We ran them in the round pen. We would forefoot one, lay him down, tie a foot up, put the saddle on him, untie the foot and get on," Tom explains.

"Daddy always thought a horse needed to go out of the round pen the second day. That old gate on the round pen still literally squeaks the way it did 30 years ago. I can remember we would be in there riding those colts and I would hear that gate squeak, and I remember thinking, ‘We’re fixing to go for a ride.’

"Daddy had a strong work ethic, as did a lot of people back then, and he gave that back to us boys. He taught us to work and he taught us the importance of quality, no matter the task.

"He wanted us to know cattle and horses, and he wanted us to know how to handle them, and he spent a lot of time teaching us," Tom says.

The Moorhouse ranch has always been a cow-calf operation — Herefords early on, but they also wintered yearlings on wheat and then sold them in the early days to the Cornbelt farmers. Tom admits the farmers didn’t particularly care for those line-back or red-necked Herefords.

Tom remembers when his dad bought some black bulls to put on his first-calf heifers.

"I don’t know how it helped on calving ease, but those calves were the biggest calves we ever raised out of first-calf heifers, so Daddy, like everyone, gradually went to crossbreeding."

The Moorhouse boys could likely write a book about all of their childhood and teenage antics. Tom and his brothers were close growing up, and they remain so today. Tom and John had a ’52 model Chevrolet pickup they took the doors off of. They tied an old cow skull on the front and stuck red lights in the eye sockets. They took that pickup to school and used it to haul hay to yearlings on wheat before and after school.

When John went off to Sul Ross, he told Tom that he could ride his horse while he was away.

"It just tickled me, because Ol’ Dolan was a notch above anything I’d ever ridden." Tom says. "He was out of a McFaddin stud. He was a heck of a horse, but he’d pitched John off no telling how many times."

One day after school, not long after John had left, Tom caught Dolan and trotted him over to a set of pens to feed. He tied him up and threw out a bale of hay. Well, that scared the horse and he sat back and broke Tom’s reins.

"I wasn’t going to stand for that, so I caught him and tied the reins back together and got my lariat and tied a bow line around Dolan’s neck and then tied a nylon rope around the REA pole.

"I thought I’d teach the horse a lesson, so I rolled another bale of hay under him, and that’s when things really started to go wrong.

"Turns out I hadn’t tied a bow line after all. The rope slipped up and around Dolan’s neck, and his neck got big and round and his tongue came out. I tried to get up to him, and Dolan reared up and pawed me plumb under him and out the back, but it didn’t hurt me.

"I really don’t know what I should have done, but I guess I did the worst thing I could have done by cutting the rope loose from the post. The horse took off with that rope still tight around his neck. I figured he would outrun me until he choked down and finally died. I ran and ran and finally caught up with him. He was still up, but just barely.

"I had a sharp pocketknife on me. I knew he wouldn’t let me get close enough to cut the rope, so I jumped and slashed. I cut the rope, but I also cut a long slash in his throat. I didn’t cut his jugular, but I just knew I’d ruined John’s horse."

The horse walked off and Tom set off for the house.

"I was about as low as you could get."

His mom was at the house, and Tom told her what had happened. Together they went back to find the horse.

"We found him, and like my mom had told me, it wasn’t as bad as I had thought.

"I tell that story because it was such a big deal to me. I was lonesome for John. I thought he should have been there, and then it was his horse that I cut up."

There are plenty of other family stories, like the time they set the commode in the bunkhouse on fire. They’d had a particularly cold winter that year, and the pipes stayed frozen up for a week or so. It was getting to be a problem, so one Sunday John and Togo came over to see if they couldn’t help Tom resolve the problem.

It’s a bit complicated to explain how a fire could actually start in a commode, but more or less it involved the use of a five-gallon butane tank. Things just went haywire.

"I went into the bunkhouse to check things out, and I see flames shooting out the commode all the way to the ceiling," Tom recalls. "Me being a 911 kind of guy, hollers to John that the bunkhouse is on fire. ‘Get the hose,’ I say, and John being the good brother proceeds to hook up the hose to the faucet that was still frozen up.

"Meanwhile, John and I are getting the water hose ready — I guess to beat the fire out. Togo comes in, assesses the situation, picks the rug up off the bathroom floor and smothers the fire in the commode."

The summer of ’64, prior to heading off to Sul Ross himself, Tom cowboyed for the Sixes. It was something he’d always wanted to do and his father supported his decision, even though he really could have used Tom’s help on the family operation.

"I was at the height of my glory working for the Sixes that summer," Tom says. "It was different working there. Where my dad might have us boys and a day laborer or two, the Sixes had 12 or 15 men, and all they did was cowboy. The pastures were big and the cattle were wild. The horses would buck, and the cowboys would cuss," Moorhouse says.

There was anthrax on many of the ranches in the area, and like many the Sixes kept the wagon out through the summer because they were always busy moving cattle out of the anthrax country during that time.

"That experience taught me a lot," Moorhouse comments. "I was probably immature for my age, and it matured me. I learned that there was another way of doing things and I learned how to take orders from someone other than my dad."

While in school at Alpine, Tom worked for Gage Holland. He met his first wife, Sue, while he was in college there.

Tom hadn’t been around girls much at all while in high school. In fact, he only had one or two dates before he went off to college, and both were to the junior/senior prom.

Tom tells the story on himself about his first date with the "pretty little ranch girl from the League Ranch."

"All week the boys talked about buying their girls a flower. So I ordered Patty a corsage and I was sure glad I’d done so," he remembers.

"When I picked her up at her grandmother’s house, I handed her the flower and she hands me this little bitty flower. I thought she thought I wasn’t going to bring her a flower so she had bought herself one in case I didn’t.

"Well, I didn’t know any better. I just tossed that little flower into the backseat thinking it was just a spare anyway, and I remember the little gal kind of acted funny.

"The next morning we were all going to church and my mom asked me why I didn’t wear my boutonnière. Well, I didn’t have any idea what she was talking about."

After Tom and Sue graduated from Sul Ross, they moved back to the ranch.

Soon after Tom came home to the family operation, brother John returned as well, and it was at this time that Moorhouse Ranch began to expand. The family has always leased more country than they owned, and that holds true today.

John always ran the farming operation and took care of the buying and selling and the business end of the operation.

"John has always been a better cow man than me. He was always more observant," Tom says of his older brother. "He’s a little like Charlie Goodnight on knowing cattle."

Even though Tom admits that, it didn’t mean that he was about to let his brother one-up him.

"During shipping, John always wanted to make a bet on what the cattle would weigh and I was always willing to challenge him. So we’d bet a dollar. Each of us would write the weight down on our hand or on our glove.

"Well, I figured if I couldn’t beat him I’d outsmart him, so I started writing down a weight on both hands. I didn’t beat him every time, but I beat him most of the time. I did it for years, and then one day he caught me. That ruined that deal."

Tom complemented John’s abilities in that he has always been more of the hands-on man. He’s never been particularly interested in the business side of the ranching operation, so Tom always handled the crew and took care of the day to day part of the family operation. It was a relationship that suited both of them, and it suited the other family members as well.

Like his father, Tom understood that to be a good operator one had to be conservative.

"The business demands that," Tom says. "If you make a lot of money one year, that doesn’t mean you should spend it all that year. You better save some for the next bad drouth or the next bad market. If you don’t do that, don’t figure on being in the ranching business very long.

"You won’t ever be able to do a lot if you live off of cow money alone," Moorhouse admits, "but it will keep you going and we’ve always lived conservatively, and in that way we’ve always been able to put money back into the operation to grow and expand."

A good operator, Moorhouse says, must know cattle and stay fine-tuned to the cattle market. That and taking care of their country have always been top priorities on the Moorhouse outfit.

Moorhouse Ranch Co. is no stranger to tough times, but Tom says the last three or four years have been some of his toughest years ever. It’s not just the weather, though that certainly has been and always is a big factor. It’s the markets, the cost of doing business, and this year the terrorist attacks, Moorhouse says, that have made the last year or so particularly tough.

Making it on cattle alone, he adds, is a lot harder than it used to be. It wasn’t all that long ago that a 100-cow outfit took good care of a family. Today, Tom figures it takes 500 cows minimum to justify one employee, and it’s a whole lot better if one can figure 700 to 800 to an employee.

"The overhead per animal unit keeps moving up, and yet the price we get in the market for that animal has stayed virtually the same."
The Moorhouse ranch has retained ownership of their calves and yearlings through to the feedlot, but they haven’t done any of that these last few years.

"We tried it, and to be quite honest, it didn’t work for us. We lost plenty of money feeding cattle. Plus, it tied up so much borrowed money. Long and short, we’ve decided that our job was to raise the feeders and sell them to someone else to feed."

For Moorhouse ranch, the ideal cow has been the black baldy. A Charolais bull back on those cows produces the best terminal cross, because for Tom it’s still about weight, though he understands that’s changing.

"In the past, weight was all any of us thought about. Now more of us understand that a calf has to work in the feedlot and in the packing house as well. So if I was retaining ownership of these calves, I might use a black bull back on these cows.

"I don’t own up to this often," Moorhouse adds, "but things are changing. We still live pretty much the way we always have and work pretty much the same way we always have, but it’s changing and change is hard for me."

One of the changes to which he’s given a lot of thought lately is the splitting up and selling off of more and more of the big historical working ranches. It’s already happening in his country.

"What hurts is that the land that gets sold isn’t going back into ranching. The people buying the land don’t know anything about the ranching business. That doesn’t mean they’re bad people, just different.

"Some of this country that sold around here sold for a third more than what a rancher could buy it for and make it cash flow. The price will likely double the second time it’s sold," Moorhouse says. "That means it’s out of reach for us ranchers who only have cow money."

It’s the wide open spaces and the people or the lack of that this native King County resident says he loves most about the big ranch country, and he fears that, too, will change in time.

"King County is the second least populated county in the state of Texas. I like that. It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that a lot of people don’t make for real ranch country.

"You can go any which direction for miles before you get to where someone is living, and when you find someone it’s probably a camp," Moorhouse comments. "And getting there, you’re just going to go through a bunch of old cedar or mesquite country and there will be a few cattle along the way, a few snakes and coyotes, and not many REA poles."

He jokes about his friend and neighboring ranch owner, Paul Engler.

"See that light pole over on the horizon? It’s a communications tower. There isn’t a darn thing wrong with it, except that it’s the only light I can see at night."

Tom’s wife, Becky, is the daughter of a retired Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers brand inspector. She was raised on the Waggoner Estate, and like Tom she appreciates the lifestyle they’ve been blessed to live. The couple understands, though, the importance of educating those who don’t understand that lifestyle. It’s for that reason that they’ve recently teamed up with Big Ranch Country Productions out of Guthrie to bring in outsiders who might want to spend a few hours watching them work cattle or brand their horses. They’ll even let folks camp with them overnight at the wagon.

"It is important for people to understand why I do what I do and what I do," Tom remarks. "I guess part of my reasoning is somewhat selfish. I like this lifestyle that I’m living. City folks need to understand that we’re out here trying to make a living. They need to understand why it’s important for rural areas to continue to have a say in how their counties are run, how their schools are run, etc."

Probably an even more important reason for wanting to educate city dwellers is that Tom and Becky want to leave this way of life for their children and grandchildren if they so choose it. Like his father, Tom has tried to pass on to his children the importance of honesty, integrity and strong work ethics.

"I want my children to experience the enjoyment that I get out of ranching, of being in harmony with nature. I want them to understand my love of the land and my love for this way of life. I want them to understand the importance of settling million-dollar deals with a handshake, that your word is worth more than any contract."

It’s easy to see that Tom and Becky are proud of all their children. Becky has two sons, Seth and Brad, and Tom has daughters Jed and Jody through his first marriage, and then Tom and Becky have 11 year-old Gage.

"He’s turned that way too," Tom says of son Gage.

His daughter, Jody, is too.

"She and I had a unique relationship for years," Tom says. "She followed me in every track I made and stayed out in the bushes all the time."

She’s married now to Douglas Lindeman. They have a little one and Jody is a registered nurse and she helps out on her father-in-law’s ranch in her spare time.

Tom is being honored in September as one of the recipients of the Haley Library and History Center’s annual Foy Proctor Memorial Cowman’s Award. He is the youngest cowman to receive the award.

"I guess being nominated by guys like Buster Welch and Ted Gray makes me think that I’ve got along in life sort of like I intended to," Tom says.

"I guess my contribution is that I’ve worked a good many guys, some of them pretty young, and I feel like I’ve helped teach them about handling cattle and working hard. The things that the oldtimers have taught me I’ve tried to pass down to the younger generation.

"I’m thankful that I’ve gotten to live the life that I live and that I’ve gotten to be around the people that I have and that I have the brothers and the parents and the wife and children that I have. I haven’t lived a perfect life, but I don’t have any regrets.

"Yes, some days it’s hard to be optimistic about this life and its future," Tom concludes, "but then, when we start to work in the fall or spring, I think to myself, ‘We’re a long ways from being over with.’"