IN THE PENS instead of the clinic, veterinarian Myron Mays now runs the family ranch while his younger brother tends sick critters. Mays has turned his own healing powers to finding a cure for his small part of an ailing cow country economy. He has a family precedent: his great-grandfather went broke ranching three times before amassing significant personal wealth.

Hill Country Roots Run Deep
For Rancher-Veterinarian Mays

By David Bowser

RICHLAND SPRINGS, Texas — Myron Mays, DVM, is now in his sixth decade and still experimenting.

"Right now, I'm experimenting with economics to see if I can maintain the quality and weaning weights by buying replacements and using Charolais bulls," Dr. Mays says.

Mays' great grandfather brought sheep to this part of the Texas hill country more than a century ago. He later ran corriente-type cattle. Mays' grandfather ran Herefords, his father Angus.

In search of higher weaning weights, Mays put Brangus bulls on his Angus cattle. Now he's using Charolais bulls on his Brangus cattle for a terminal cross.

"My favorite cow in the whole wide world," Mays says, "is still a good Angus, but I've got to sell the most pounds of beef that I can."

Over the years, Mays, using Expected Progeny Differences or EPDs, carefully selected bulls that would increase the size of his dams.

"I was interested in raising replacement females," Mays says, "but I didn't want to sacrifice everything there for the sake of the steer, either."

He is proud of his cow herd, but when he sat down and figured the time and money he had in them, he felt he could buy replacement heifers for less than he could raise his own.

"You breed a cow and you get so many heifers and so many steers," Mays says. "When you save that heifer, you end up tying up an awful lot of country with no cash flow waiting for that cow to become productive. You tie it up for about four years without the cash flow before that cow will produce. It's hard to make that up."

He is also using his buying program to vary the ages of his cows so when the time comes to replace them, it won't be all at once.

"We've still got the numbers of the home-raised cattle," he says. "It wouldn't take one year to get back in the replacement business."

Today, he's buying most of his replacements and putting Charolais bulls on them for a terminal cross.

"Our Charolais will have just about a sixteenth Brahman in them," he says.

He says that still makes an importance difference in the heat and with ticks and flies and other things that bite and stick. He went to Brangus, however, primarily to increase his weaning weights.

The heifers in his calf crop this year averaged 723 pounds at weaning. The steers weighed 770 off their mommas.

"That's an eight to eight and a half month average," Mays says.

There were no calving problems, a fact he attributes to using the EPDs on the dam side to select his replacements. He carefully watched the EPDs for pelvic area on the females. With the pelvic area his cows have, they should be able to deliver a 90 to 100 pound calf unassisted.

"When we started doing this," Mays says, "we were calving heifers that were weighing 650, maybe 700 pounds. After the genetic improvement, our heifers, when we tag them, will weigh 1100 pounds."

Mays' great grandfather first settled here in the late 1860s.

"He was an Irish immigrant," Mays says. "The potato famine in Ireland is what sent him here."

His name was William Henry Gibbons, commonly known as Billy Gibbons or Uncle Billy.

"My mother was a Gibbons. Her name was Mary Elizabeth. She was the daughter of John Gibbons, who was the son of Billy Gibbons."

Billy Gibbons landed in Boston Harbor in the mid-1860s.

"He was somewhere between 13 and 16 years old," Mays says. "He left Ireland with the idea of coming to America and ended up in Texas and becoming a rancher. He was penniless when he first came. He didn't have anything. He did bring over an old brass and mahogany encased telescope that I've got sitting on my mantle."

Billy Gibbons made his way to Missouri, where he joined up with Brigham Young, who was on his way to Salt Lake City to build the Mormon temple.

"Just for existence, he joined that group and went out there and helped build that church," Mays says.

A year or two later, Billy Gibbons made his way to San Antonio, where he worked as an elevator operator in the Menger Hotel.

In the late 1860s, Billy Gibbons found a banker in New York who backed him.

Armed with $20,000, Gibbons went to Mexico and bought 1000 sheep.

"He loaded them on barges on the east coast of Mexico, brought them up the coastline, unloaded them at Brownsville, and started following them afoot," Mays says.

When they got to Brady Creek in San Saba County, Gibbons decided to settle down.

"What I know about this country, it was bound to have been in the spring of 1868 or 1869," Mays says. "The sheep put their heads down, and he said, 'This is home.'"

Gibbons and his wife, Molly Taylor, had 13 children, one individual and six sets of twins. Of the twins, only one set survived infancy, Mays' grandfather and his grandfather's twin sister.

Mays' mother was born and reared on the ranch. Today, she and her husband, Mays' father, are buried atop a hill on the ranch beneath a lone oak tree.

"Her whole life, her birth to her death and beyond, is right here within a mile," Mays says.

Before his mother's death, Mays says he came out to the ranch one Sunday afternoon and took her for a ride.

"She pointed up at that tree and said, 'Son, when I die, I want to be buried under that tree,'" Mays recalls. "That's where she's buried."

The 32,000-acre ranch, typical Texas hill country, consists of predominantly gravelly loam soil.

"Some of the gravel gets as big as pickups," Mays drawls. "It's pretty rocky, pretty rough terrain."

Five hundred acres were once in cotton and corn, but it's been turned back to improved pasture. The rest of the place is native range.

This country, when Billy Gibbons first came here, was very much like the northern plains country of South Dakota, according to Mays.

"When he first came here, he said the grass would stand like wheat in a field, waving in the breeze, stirrup high to a tall horse," Mays says.

But settling here along the San Saba River and Brady Creek wasn't easy in Reconstruction Texas. He had to fight. He fought cattlemen, and he fought Indians.

"When he first came here with sheep," Mays says, "he was strung up three times, but he talked his way out of it each time."

He also had Comanches to combat, but perhaps his biggest problem was the gray wolves in the area at the time.

Gibbons would build brush corrals at night for his sheep, then build big bonfires to keep the wolves away.

He sheared the whole 1000 head by hand for the first year or two.

Gibbons went broke three times, his great grandson says. Gibbons' note came due, and he had no way to pay it, Mays explains. He went back to his banker and offered to turn the herd of sheep over along with everything else, but the banker told him to keep trying because he didn't have any need for a ranch in Texas.

The first time, Gibbons hadn't started buying land yet. He was still working part-time for another rancher to make ends meet.

The last time Gibbons went back to his banker, Mays says, Gibbons was ready to call it quits. He dropped everything on the banker's desk and walked off.

"He said, 'To hell with Texas, I'm gone,'" Mays says.

So the family legend goes, the banker followed Gibbons all the way to the ticket window where Gibbons was going to book passage back to Ireland, and the banker finally talked him into trying it one more time.

Billy Gibbons died in 1932.

"I've got a copy of his financial statement that showed his net worth at $2 million in 1932," Mays says.

Family legend also has it that Gibbons once drove a herd of cattle to Fort Worth and, fresh from the trail, tried to get a room at a hotel there. Not having bathed or changed clothes in two weeks on the trail, Gibbons was refused a room by the hotel clerk. Gibbons hunted up the owner of the hotel, bought it and went back and fired the night clerk.

All of his business was conducted in Brownwood, Richland Springs, Brady and Fort Worth.

"In Brownwood, Fort Worth and Brady, he bought saloons in all those places so he would be able to get a drink," Mays says. All the towns had ordinances that liquor couldn't be served after hours or on Sundays.

When Gibbons died, he owned a farm at Post in addition to the ranch at Richland Springs, and a hotel in El Paso. He also owned the bank in Richland Springs and part of the one in Brady.

"He made lots of loans," Mays says. "There are people still alive that remember when they would come with their daddies to see old Billy Gibbons at his home to borrow money to buy cows with."

When the Depression hit, a lot of people near Richland Springs owed Gibbons money for livestock loans. He told them to forget it until the bad times had passed.

"Some of the people told him they just wanted out from under their loans," Mays says. "They'd bring him their cows or mules or whatever."

There's one pasture on the ranch that to this day is called the Depression Pasture.

"He'd tell them to go over and dump it out in the pasture," Mays says. "That pasture was plumb full of goats, hogs, horses, mules, cattle, everything in the world."

As the years went by, Gibbons diversified the operation and added cattle. For years, he operated on the open range.

"I think he bought his first piece of land in 1906," Mays says.

The first cattle he ran came from South Texas.

"They came about as the result of cattle drives from South Texas to Kansas," Mays says. "That's the way we got all this brush. We got all this South Texas crap right here because the cattle left it here. That's the way all this country got mesquite. There used to be nothing here but an occasional liveoak. There was no prickly pear, no catclaw, no mesquite. None of that stuff. There wasn't even any cedar here."

Mays and his younger brother are both veterinarians, graduates of Texas A&M.

"My brother's name is Glennon," Mays says. "That was Billy Gibbons' mother's maiden name."

Glennon Mays is still practicing while Myron Mays runs the ranch.

"Or the ranch runs me," Mays says ruefully, "and the practice is running him."

Mays was Class of '66 at A&M. His younger brother was Class of '76.

After Mays earned his DVM, he practiced in Uvalde for a year, then got an opportunity to move to Brady, closer to the ranch, and buy into the veterinary clinic there.

"If it weren't for the ranch," Mays says, "I'd probably still be in Uvalde."

His brother, Glennon, practiced in Coleman for a couple of years before joining Mays in the clinic in Brady.

"We practiced together there for a while," Mays says. "At one time, I was trying to operate 10,000 acres of this ranch while I was trying to practice vet medicine."

They finally formed Mays Ranching Company, combining several of the family operations for estate planning purposes.

There is also interest by the next generation in running the ranch.

Mays' oldest son is an M.D. He's put up the website for the ranch. His daughter went to A&M, and she's an assistant principal in the school system at Brady now.

"The youngest two boys," Mays says, "I think they're the ones who are going to have the hands-on experience here.'

He says he's already advised both of them to get a degree in something so they don't have to rely on ranching for a living.