ALVIN NOSIE is where he wants to be, at home on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, where he is stockman for the tribe’s registered Hereford and Quarter Horse herds. After a few years of working off the San Carlos, Nosie says he’s glad to be back, drouth and all. The only drawback is that all that responsibility leaves him little time to rope.

Running Ranches On San Carlos
Keeps Alvin Nosie From Roping

ARSENIC TUBS, Ariz. — Alvin Nosie appears to be an easygoing, slow walking, slow talking Arizona cowboy, but put him on the back of his roping mare and he comes down that string with the speed of a sprinter and the grace of a ballet dancer.

Here on the R-100 Ranch in southeast Arizona, Nosie has all the horses and cattle he cares to rope. The Apache cowboy is the stockman for the ranch that hosts the San Carlos Reservation's seedstock Hereford herd and horse program. He is also stockman for the tribe's IDT Ranch.

The reservation originated in 1862 when the federal government set aside more than 1.2 million acres east of Globe, Ariz., for the Apache. Initially, much of the land was leased to a few big ranches, but in the 1930s the Apache reclaimed the land and established seven cattle associations that would run individual cattle operations. Five associations — Ash Creek, Slaughter Mountain, Tonto, Point of Pines and Anchor Seven — were organized originally. A few years later, the R-100 Ranch was set up as a purebred operation to provide seedstock for the other associations. Then the IDT Ranch was organized for a tribal herd to help with their welfare program.

The IDT Ranch encompasses about 148,000 acres while the R-100, set against the Gila Mountains, covers about 90,000 acres. Most of the R-100 is open grassland.

The 44 pastures of the R-100 are covered with native grasses — tobosa, grama, wild wheat and oats, and curly mesquite grass.

"Nothing puts weight on them like curly mesquite grass," Nosie says.

The University of Arizona works with the R-100 Ranch here at Arsenic Tubs, developing the seedstock herd and range management programs. All the associations run Hereford cattle, but the R-100 is the only one with a registered herd.

When the R-100 began its purebred operation in 1938, the only way they could identify the herd sires was through artificial insemination. At that time, they had the largest AI program in the country.

It worked well for a while, but then in the 1950s when dwarfism hit the cattle industry, the tribe turned to the University of Arizona to help get rid of the genetic disorder within their herd.

With the help of an Arizona Extension livestock specialist, they found some "clean" cattle from a closed herd at the U.S. Range Experiment Station in Miles City, Montana.

"They had never been show cattle, so they were long-bodied," says Al Lane, the Extension agent who helped the tribe. "We brought some back to the R-100, and within two calf crops, the gene had been eradicated."

Today, the San Carlos Apache are again making changes in the herd.

"We are crossbreeding a little bit now," Nosie says. "There's more money in crossbreeding than there is in straight cattle. On R-100 we have 600 registered cattle, but we also have 600 commercial cattle. We are crossing them with Brangus and Limousin."

Most of the pastures are crossfenced for cell grazing. The fencing goes out like spokes of a wheel. Waterings are located at the center of the spokes to make it easier to move the cattle from one pasture to another.

But they faced problems earlier this year, along with most ranchers in the Southwest, where drouth hit hard.

"Right when I took over, it was pretty dry," Nosie says, admitting he wondered at the time if he'd made a mistake coming back home and taking over the operation in July.

Although born and reared here at San Carlos, Nosie left the reservation. The tribe brought him back to run stock operations on the R-100 and IDT Ranches.

"I went to work at the mines for a while," he says. "I didn't like that."

He also worked at a livestock auction in Chandler, Ariz., for six years. "I was yard manager over there," he says. "I got to know a lot of people. Got to know a lot of ranchers, young and old. Horse traders. Sheep and goat traders."

As the drouth spread over the Southwest the last couple of years, Nosie saw an increase in ranchers selling their stock. And the San Carlos Reservation was not immune from the dry weather.

The reservation normally gets most of its rainfall in July and November as seasonal weather currents bring up moisture from Baja California. This year the rains were late, but they did come.

"We've had more rain in the last two months than we've had in two years," Nosie says, looking out across the pastures. "This was just nothing. No grass. It was all brown dirt."

While the lack of rain decimated the pastures and dried up some of the water tanks, other tanks were filled from springs in the mountains.

"The cattle don't look too bad right now, the ones that survived the drouth," says Marland Norton, a neighboring rancher who leases some of the reservation land and works with the R-100 program, "but we were losing 200 a week dead cattle."

"There's a big spring about halfway up that mountain that throws really, really good water and a lot of it," Nosie says, pointing up to the side of Nantack Mountain. "We pipe it down here."

The spring turned out to be a lifesaver. It never went dry during the drouth, and its output was piped to tanks in other pastures.

The tribe also provides water for a bottled water company in Phoenix, tapping the same springs that the cattle and horses drink and the cowboys wash in.

"Good spring water," Nosie says with a grin. "Our cowboys bathe in good spring water."

All the cattle are worked horseback, Nosie says, a situation he relishes.

"The cattle are roped out in the open when they're missed, but mostly they're brought into corrals and worked," Nosie says. "They're worked four times a year, and the University of Arizona is up here each time."

Depending upon the weather, that's about every three months.

"It does snow up here," Nosie says. "It doesn't stay on the ground very long, but up on the mountain it does. It gets cold up here."

The elevation at Arsenic Tubs is about 5500 feet.

"The summers are great here," he adds. "Down in the valley at San Carlos, it gets hotter than hell. In the middle of the day up here, it might get up to 90 degrees, but at night it cools off."

They average about 16 inches of rainfall in a normal year, although Nosie admits that it's been a while since they've had a normal year.

Nosie began working on the ranch when he was eight years old. He literally grew up horseback, he grins. And he is horseback every chance he gets, particularly if there is roping involved.

"I go to rodeos whenever I get a chance," he says.

Nosie is passing that interest on to the next generation. His 11 year-old daughter, Dana, just won the barrel race at nearby rodeo, he notes proudly.

His daughter's horse, like his roping mare, is from the R-100's horse herd, which the Apaches have developed over a number of years.

The horse program dates to the 1940s when a member of the tribe, George Stevens, centralized the horse operation. The idea was to pool the resources of the different associations, improve bloodlines and provide the needed horses for each association.

Stevens ran the horse program until he retired in the 1960s. Then a tribal member named Glen Bylas took over and ran it until his retirement this past summer.

"It worked out pretty good for all the associations," Noise says. "They could come to this pool of horses and get the horses they needed and the kind of horses they wanted and had to have, which was rock tough."

Those rock tough horses soon became popular not only with the Apache cowboys but also with people off the reservation.

"The R-100 would brand the horses ID," Norton says. "People off the reservation started realizing that they could buy a horse here that would go anywhere in the mountains that they wanted to take it. They were tough and well bred, so people from off the reservation were buying these horses."

"Used to, they didn't like Indian horses," Nosie says. "Now everybody wants to ride one."

In 1978 Bylas started a new bloodline with close attention to the registration of each horse. He went to the Empire Ranch at Tucson, where he bought 40 Redman mares from Bob Boyce, the ranch manager at that time. Bylas also bought a stud named Parker Sabino.

Today, the R-100 has 84 brood mares divided up into four bands.

Tule Tubs, down the valley from Arsenic Tubs, is where the R-100 breaks its horses.

But the drouth has affected the horse program, too. With little or no grass for the horses, the R-100 sold off all the colts, weaned colts and green broken horses this year, and they plan on the same thing next spring.

"We won't go into a green breaking program until 1998 when we have some grass, and we're back in our rotation again," Noise says.

The R-100 has rotational grazing programs for both the horse and the cattle herds.

"We have about 600 registered mother cow Herefords," Nosie says. "We rotate them around, and it has worked really good until we hit this drouth."

The rotational system was originally set up by the University of Arizona in the 1950s.

"They work in conjunction with R-100 real well," Nosie says. "The University of Arizona has been very instrumental in making this successful because of the cross-fencing and the rotation."

Along with the drouth, the R-100 has also run into some other problems.

In 1976, when Glen Bylas bought the 40 mares, they were all registered. An outsider was hired to help with the paperwork on the horses. After a few years, however, the man quit, lost the papers, and now he's disappeared. Nosie is now working with the American Quarter Horse Association to pick up the paperwork.

"These horses have been isolated up here," he says. "There's no chance there's been any outside breeding except the studs that we bought, and we've got papers on them."

Re-establishing the paper trail on the bloodlines was one of Nosie's first priorities when he took over the operation last June.

"You can't give a bad horse away," Nosie says. "You can get out and sell a medium horse, but a good horse, they'll come looking for."

Tule Tubs, where the horses are trained, is self-sufficient. It has its own generator and spring-fed water. It has a round corral, chutes and roping arena. Nosie built the arena himself.

"It's not unusual to see 20 or 30 people here practicing their roping," he says.

But therein lies one of Nosie's biggest problems. The horses, the cattle and the facilities are all there, he says. Now if he only had the time to do more roping.