Brand Inspector Just One Stop
On Jim Cloyd’s Winding Trail

By David Bowser

STRATFORD, Texas — In the movies, the lanky young cowboy rides into town, gets elected sheriff, shoots it out with the bank robbers, falls in love with a beautiful girl and lives happily ever after.

For Jim Cloyd, it's not a movie.

He started cowboying when he was a teenager, working at the 6666's and the Matadors. He was elected sheriff of Hemphill County in the Texas Panhandle where his father had been sheriff before him. He shot it out with a bank robber in neighboring Roberts County, an act that probably prevented several other crimes years later, and spent the next 20 years of his life as a field inspector for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association here in Stratford.

Along the way, Cloyd also served in the Navy during World War II, earned a degree from Texas Tech, where he was the masked rider known as the Red Raider, worked for the railroad — and sold sewing machines.

"I've always enjoyed life," Cloyd drawls.

The tall, slender cowboy and lawman was born in Hereford, Texas, on Oct. 18, 1926.

"That was Dad's home," Cloyd says.

His father, E.R. Cloyd, had cowboyed across West Texas and New Mexico, including the historic XIT.

E.R. Cloyd once broke horses alongside a hired gunman, a fellow known only as Jim. Jim would kill men for the rancher they worked for, Cloyd says, then he'd go to the penitentiary, but the rancher would get him out.

The end of that arrangement came when the rancher decided it was time to cut Jim loose.

"Jim was in Santa Fe in prison, but he was a trustee," Cloyd says.

He found out that the rancher was in Santa Rosa, N.M., at a gambling den and house of ill repute. Jim walked away from prison, went to Santa Rosa, killed the rancher, then returned to the penitentiary.

"Dad said Jim was the best guy he was ever around. He never would let Dad ride a bronc unless he had ridden him four or five times himself. Jim also never let Dad prowl with him because he was afraid somebody'd bushwhack him, and they might kill Dad."

Cloyd's family has been in the cattle business and connected to the Texas Panhandle for more than a century.

"I was raised at Canadian," Cloyd says. "My mother was a Hargrave."

Her father, D.M. Hargrave, brought a herd of cattle down from southeastern Colorado in 1875 to what is now Hemphill County, Texas, and decided to stay.

"My grandmother, she was a Polly," Cloyd says. Her father, E.E. Polly, was 18 years old when he moved to Colorado from Iowa. There he joined the First Colorado Volunteer Cavalry at Central City in 1861. He fought in three battles in New Mexico — Glorietta, Apache Canyon and Valverde. Although they were a cavalry unit on paper, they marched and fought afoot.

"They walked all the way from Central City, Colo., clear down to Valverde," Cloyd says. "The Texas cavalry whooped them down at Valverde the first time and they went clear back to Glorietta, regrouped and came back and pushed the Texans out. My Great Granddad Cloyd was in the Texas cavalry in that battle out there, so they fought each other."

Polly transferred to the medical corps and served as a hospital steward at Fort Hayes, Kan., following the war. That stint as an early-day medic would later serve him well, in an unexpected way.

"He stayed there until 1873 when he got discharged," Cloyd says. "He came to the Panhandle of Texas in 1874."

When Polly brought his family to the Panhandle, they lived in a dugout on Monument Creek. It was there that Cloyd's great-grandmother used up a barrel of flour feeding Indians who were on their way to attack buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls in June of 1874.

"My grandmother was four years old," Cloyd says. "My great-granddad was gone this particular morning. When my great-grandmother woke up, there was a big cloud out in front of that dugout. They were covered up with Indians, 600 or 700 of them, and they wanted something to eat."

Cloyd's great-grandmother mixed up pancake batter and fed them.

The reason the Indians didn't harm the woman or girls, Cloyd explains, is that they considered his great-grandfather a medicine man. As it turned out, he had taken care of Indian captives that George Armstrong Custer brought back from his raid on the Indians' winter camp along the Washita River in Oklahoma in 1868.

"He took care of the sick ones, so he was a shaman to the Indians, and they wouldn't bother him because they didn't want to ruin their medicine," Cloyd says.

And it wasn’t just Indians Polly had to deal with; his neighbor at one time was notorious gunfighter Clay Allison. There again, he had known Allison at Hayes, Kan., and that may have worked to his benefit.

When Hemphill County was organized in 1887, Polly was elected county judge. He authorized construction of the county jail, which was completed in 1890 after he left office. The project was controversial, however, and the county commissioners sued Polly over it. He fought the case all the way to the Texas Supreme Court, represented successfully by Temple Houston.

Cloyd’s connections with Hemphill County government didn’t end there; his grandfather, D.M. Hargrave, later served on the commissioners’ court, and his father was county sheriff from 1945 to 1949. Cloyd himself was elected sheriff in 1965 and served until 1971.

But that came after a long and varied string of "careers."

Cloyd grew up in Canadian. When he was nine years old, he and his brother worked for a local dairy, milking cows, bottling and delivering the milk.

"When I was about 12, I decided I could drive more cows than I could milk," so he went to work on a series of area ranches.

He got his first job as a cowboy on Chicken Creek for $30 a month just as World War II was breaking out.

He joined the Navy in 1944 and was assigned to the USS Providence, a light cruiser.

"I always heard that God takes care of fools and little children," Cloyd says. "When I was in boot camp, I wanted to go to submarines or the amphibious assault forces."

The Navy sent him to radar school instead.

"If I'd made the amphibs, I would have been in the Iwo Jima invasion," he says.

After the war, he returned to cowboying, working for the Brainard Ranch near Canadian.

"I always liked to work for the Brainards," he says. "It's a cow-calf outfit. I never did like yearlings. I don't to this day like messing with yearlings. If I'm going to work, I want to work with cows and calves."

His family put in a slaughterhouse in Canadian, and he helped with that before going to work for the railroad and doing a little rodeoing on the side, riding rough stock.

"I never did have an RCA card," he says. "It was still known as Turtles in those days. I traveled with the Beutler brothers over at Elk City."

When the railroad wouldn't let him off for Christmas in 1951, Cloyd decided it was time to go back to cowboying. He quit the railroad, bought a car and headed south. He landed at the 6666 Ranch in February of 1952, then on to the Matador Ranch.

"From the first of April at the Sixes to the first of September at the Matadors, we branded right close to 14,000 to 15,000 calves," Cloyd says. "I drug calves one day at the Sixes and one day at the Mat, and the rest of the time we were flanking them. There never was more than two sets of flankers, and I was always one of the four."

He says when the works started, the calves weighed less than 80 pounds, but by September they weighed 450 pounds.

"And they brought them all out by the neck," Cloyd recalls ruefully. "There wasn't any heeling. If they were past two and had horns on them, they might heel something like that. Otherwise, it was all get in there and flank them, manhandle them."

Cloyd moved on to California, where he noticed that the big ranches were hiring college graduates to run them. Ten years out of high school, Cloyd returned home to enroll at Texas Tech and earn a degree.

"I entered that thing, went through there and got me a degree," he says. "I never had more fun in my life. I lacked four days of three years getting my degree."

While he was at Texas Tech in 1956, he was the Red Raider, the masked rider on a big black horse that was the school's mascot.

"I had a lot of fun doing that," he grins.

With degree in hand, he found out that he was now overqualified for most of the jobs where he applied, though he did get one job offer in Southern California.

"They wanted me to manage an orange grove," he laughs. "I didn't even eat oranges, so that kind of went down the drain."

He talked to the people at Disneyland about driving a stagecoach, but they told him he would have to join a union, and that would cost $128.

"I told them if I had $128, I wouldn't need a job," he says.

Cloyd returned to college to work on his masters, but that only lasted one semester. He went to the U Lazy S, the old John B. Slaughter outfit south of Post, Texas, to help them brand. The third day he was there, they fired the fellow who was running the crew and put Cloyd in charge.

After the U Lazy S, he went to Midland to see a friend he'd gone through Tech with. They figured they could make a fortune breaking horses.

Just one problem.

"Everybody that was broke was breaking horses in Midland County. I wound up selling sewing machines to pay my rent. You'd be surprised how many sewing machines I could sell dressed in cowboy boots and Levis. I'd show them how to make a blind stitch and a buttonhole, and they'd buy those $400 machines right and left. I worked there a month and wound up the lead salesman."

But he was asked to come back to Texas Tech and teach for a semester.

"It was more money than I was making selling sewing machines, so I did."

When the semester ended, he returned home to Canadian and ran some yearlings. He also ran for sheriff and was elected.

"I was pretty proud of my Dad," Cloyd says of his father's term in office, "but not in my life did I figure I was ever going to wear a gun. I didn't even want any part of it."

It was while Cloyd was sheriff that a young Pampa man and his girlfriend decided to hold up the bank in Miami, the county seat of neighboring Roberts County.

Cloyd found himself in a high-speed chase behind the bank robbers on a ranch road west of Miami. When the robber tried to make a stand, Cloyd put a round through the robber's side.

"When you're shooting at a guy 30 or 40 yards out there and he's lying flat on the ground, you don't have much of a target," Cloyd says. "Finally, I did disable him. I hit him in the right side."

About 10 years ago, Cloyd says, he ran into the reformed bank robber at a local feedyard, and they had a good visit. Cloyd later learned that the robber knew some men who were planning to steal some of the feedyard cattle.

"That night they were making their medicine, and this guy told the leader of the group, 'If you steal them cattle and Jim finds out about it, he might kill you,'" Cloyd says.

The gang's leader allowed as how he wasn't scared of Cloyd.

"'You'd better be,'" Cloyd says the convicted bank robber told him. "'Look what he did to me.' He jerked up his shirt, and he'd been sewn up from his belly button to his chest. They all left that night, and I haven't seen them since."

Cloyd says he enjoyed being sheriff. It just didn't pay very much.

"When I went into office, I made $365 a month, and we lived in the jail," Cloyd says.

After his term as sheriff, Cloyd went to work for a local rancher, then moved to Hereford as the cattle feeding industry was exploding. About the time he got settled, the market crashed in 1973.

"We stayed there and toughed it out," he says. "I was out at Champion Feeders."

Friends asked him to return to Canadian and run for sheriff again, but he would have to run as a write-in candidate.

The day of the election, Cloyd ran into Chumpy Cates, a field inspector for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. Cates told him their man in Stratford was leaving and asked if Cloyd would be interested in the job.

"I said, ‘I can tell you by 10 o'clock tonight,’" Cloyd says. "I lost the election and went to work for this outfit. We moved up here the day after Christmas, 1976, and have been here ever since. I retired the first of October, 1997. Lacked six weeks of being 21 years. I've had a lot of fun. I've enjoyed it."

Cloyd recalls going up to Guymon, Okla., to eat at a Chinese restaurant a few years ago.

"They give you these fortune cookies," he says, "and that's the only one I ever had."

His fortune read, "Life is a bold and dashing adventure to you."

"I thought that described my life about as much as anything, because I've enjoyed life," Cloyd says.