DEEP ROOTS tie the Marks family to their ranch on the Blue River along the Arizona-New Mexico line. At left, Bill Marks holds a picture of his great-grandfather, Henry Jones, who homesteaded the headquarters more than a century ago. Though originally from an New England family, wife Barbara came to the area as a child and now has her own roots; at bottom right she brands one of the family’s calves.

Arizona Ranch Family Facing
Onslaught From Eco-Enemies

By David Bowser

DOWN ON THE BLUE, Ariz. — Environmental activists say they are excited to hear the howl of the wolf once more in the mountains of Arizona. The Mexican gray wolf, hunted to extinction from this region more than a half century ago, was reintroduced last spring.

Bill and Barbara Marks are excited about the howl of the wolf in this region, too, but for different reasons. They lose thousands of dollars each year to predators attacking their cattle. Mountain lions, coyotes and black bears have killed their calves and their cows. Now, they must face the wolves brought to these mountains by the federal government.

"Actually, I've never heard them howl," Marks says.

He has, however, been close enough to hear them make a clicking sound with their teeth — a sound, according to wolf experts, that indicates a high degree of agitation.

It was May 5, only about a month after three packs of wolves had been released in the Apache National Forest, that Marks stopped at a pasture near Beaverhead Lodge off U.S. 191. It was dusk, and at first all Marks could see were elk. Then he saw some of his cattle, about 20 head, bunched tightly together.

"He knew something was wrong," Barbara says. "He got to where he could see a little bit better, and one of the bulls went charging out at something. He saw this large dog-like creature."

Marks got his rifle and walked toward them. He fired a shot in the air and a couple of the wolves moved off.

"It's unbelievable how hard it is to see those things," Marks says. "They're like ghosts."

As he approached the herd, he looked for injuries to the cattle. He caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye. A wolf was angling behind him. They began to surround him and the cattle.

Marks yelled at the wolves, walked toward them and fired another shot into the air.

The smaller ones faded away. The bigger two looked at him and finally took off, he said.

Marks is a fourth generation rancher here. His great grandfather, Henry Jones, came first to New Mexico and then to Arizona from Texas after the Civil War. Jones began running cattle with his brother Sam here along the Arizona-New Mexico state line before 1884. In 1891, he homesteaded here.

At the time, this was open range. Cattle grazed freely. Grazing disputes were too often settled with six-guns. Over the years, laws enacted by Congress divided the range to put an end to the violence. Grazing acts codified agreements between ranchers and the government as to who could graze their cattle where.

Earlier this century, the open range surrounding Marks’ great grandfather's homestead became the basis for the Apache National Forest. Today, Marks runs a cow-calf operation with about 224 mother cows on almost 59,000 acres, most of it public lands. He and Barbara live along the banks of the Blue River with daughter Ginger, son Dustin, a cat named Taz, their dogs Roger, Cujo, Grit and Pistol, and a pickup named Rigor Mortis.

"I've always lived here," Marks says. "This is the only place I've ever wanted to live."

The hours are long, he admits, and the work is hard, but he gets to spend a lot of time with his family. For that, he says, he is grateful.

The morning sun hasn't hit the bluff across the river from Marks’ ranch house when he's already on the phone talking to neighbors, friends and cattle buyers. He goes up to the shop while Barbara starts breakfast. The menu varies during the week, but on Saturday mornings they always have sourdough waffles and, Sunday, they have biscuits and gravy.

Then it's off to one of the four grazing allotments they have to check cattle or to move them. When the kids are home, they each have their chores, but Ginger, 19, is working on a degree from Western New Mexico University at Silver City, N.M., and Dustin, 24, is developing his own contracting business.

On days that their children are gone, it's just Bill and Barbara to run the WY Bar Ranch.

It's not unusual for the evening chores to be done by lantern or flashlight.

Up the road toward Alpine along the banks of the Blue is the big cottonwood known as the Marrying Tree. It was here that Henry Jones married his bride, Mary Keahey, and where Sam Jones married Bertha Mae West. Marks has an aunt and uncle who were married here. Bill and Barbara Marks were also married here.

Down the river is the family cemetery where Henry and Mary Jones are buried with several of their children. It's on a knoll in the center of a horseshoe-shaped pasture. Marks' great grandfather's cabin originally sat on a ridge overlooking the pasture, but floods along that part of the Blue made it difficult for Jones to tend his cattle, so the cabin was moved to its present location. That cabin is now one of the bedrooms at the ranch headquarters. Each generation has added on to the house. At one time the front room was a store. There used to be a rock building in front of the house that was the post office for the tight-knit community along the Blue. Mary Jones was the postmaster. She was also on the school board.

Today, Barbara is president of the school board.

"Bill says you always have to take your turn at things," she laughs.

It was Henry and Mary Jones' daughter Iona, one of 10 children in the family, who married Scott Marks, a forest ranger from Wyoming. After he was taken ill and died in southern New Mexico, Iona moved back to the Jones homestead with her children, where she bought out her brothers and ran the ranch with her children, including Marks’ father, Bill Sr.

"During the Depression, families and single men would come by and chop wood for meals," Barbara says. "She had all these boys who could chop the wood, but she knew their pride demanded they do something, so she wasn't going to turn them down."

Once a family camped below the house down on the river. A fever had been going around, and a little girl in the camp was ill.

"Grandmother knew she would die if she didn't get help," Barbara says, "so she went down there with the wagon and loaded her up. She burned all the bedding and gave them new bedding."

Grandmother Marks nursed the girl back to health.

"That's just the way people were then," Barbara says.

But the Joneses and the Markses weren't the first to live here. On the bluffs across the river, there are inscriptions from the Mogollon culture indicating a field.

"I don't understand people who don't think we belong here," Barbara says. "Man and agriculture have been a part of this ecosystem for over 1000 years."

Barbara, however, came to the Blue by a different route. She was born in New York. Her father, R.C. "Bob" Deyo, is a retired postal inspector. Her family lived in Vermont and Connecticut. They moved to Flagstaff, then to Phoenix.

"I turned five on the trip out here," Barbara says. "In Grants, N.M., Mom went to the store and bought a cake."

Barbara's father came to the Blue on his rounds checking on post offices.

"He fell in love with it," Barbara says. "He came home and said, 'It's absolutely beautiful, and we're going there on our vacation.' That started our love affair with the Blue."

Her parents later bought some land along the Blue. She met the Marks family while she was growing up and her family was vacationing in the area, but it wasn't until she was grown and living in Phoenix that she got to know Bill. She would come up to visit her parents and began dating Bill. It wasn't long before they were making a trip to the Marrying Tree.

"I'm a relative newcomer to the Blue," Barbara says. "I've only been here 20 years. It doesn't take long before your roots just dive into that soil, and they don't want to come out."

Although the roots run deep, times have changed, and so have ranching practices in the region. Twenty years ago or more, the Forest Service and the ranchers worked together. The results were often improved land management and improved livestock production.

In the late 1970s, Barbara says, a range conservationist with the Forest Service, Gary Davis, suggested a rotational grazing system. He also helped Marks build water tanks and fences.

"What we like best is rest rotation," Barbara says, "but because of the explosion of the elk numbers on top, the Forest Service has changed us to a deferred rotation system. We don't like that. We don't feel that we get the desired results we'd like to see in the pasture. We don't get the regrowth in the pastures we'd like to see. It's quite frustrating."

At first, the rotational grazing program increased forage and restored the riparian area along the river.

"When we started on that, it was tremendous," Barbara says. "The weaning weights went up. The range conditions were wonderful. The grass would rebound and be stirrup high."

The Forest Service indicated that if things continued to get better, the Marks ranch could see an increase in cattle numbers.

"We did see an increase in numbers, but they weren't bovines," Barbara says. "They were elk."

But in more recent years, the Forest Service and ranchers in the area seem to be working at odds with each other. Most ranchers lay the blame on lawsuits brought against the Forest Service by self-appointed environmentalists, claiming the Forest Service is afraid to take any action with which the environmentalists might disagree for fear of ending up in court.

The Forest Service is even afraid to tout its successes in working with ranchers, Barbara says.

Many of the lawsuits are aimed at removing cattle completely from the region, supposedly to save "endangered" or "threatened" species of wildlife.

"If cattle grazing and timber harvesting are so bad, why do we have at least 20 owl packs on our allotment?" Barbara asks. "Why, if cows are so bad for the Loach Minnow, a threatened species, do we have the healthiest population of Loach Minnows in the Blue? Ranchers now will see something while they're out, and they're afraid to ask what it is. Or they'll see something they know is endangered or threatened, and they're afraid to tell anybody because it would be cutting their own throats."

The Markses say ranchers need to stop saying that they have endangered species on a permit or on private land and say they have abundant numbers of species that are rare in other areas.

Marks and his forebears have been running cattle along the Blue for four generations, more than a century. Ginger and Dustin have expressed a desire to continue the tradition despite the vagaries of the cattle market, the weather, and the predators. But with increasing pressure to cut the number of cattle being grazed and the introduction of more predators such as wolves and possibly grizzly bears, Marks wonders whether the next generation will even have the opportunity to continue the ranching tradition.

Like many ranchers, Marks is beginning to feel like an endangered species himself.