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Page 20
CHAPTER VII
A MODEL RANCH
Any one who has been in Arizona and failed to visit the Sierra
Bonita ranch missed seeing a model ranch. Henry C. Hooker, the
owner of this splendid property, was born in New England and is a
typical Yankee, who early emigrated west and has spent most of
his life on the frontier.
He went to Arizona at the close of the Civil War and engaged in
contracting for the Government and furnishing supplies to the
army. It was before the days of railroads when all merchandise
was hauled overland in wagons and cattle were driven through on
foot. He outfitted at points in Texas and on the Rio Grande and
drove his cattle and wagons over hundreds of miles of desert
road through a country that was infested by hostile Indians.
Such a wild life was naturally full of adventures and involved
much hardship and danger. The venture, however, prospered and
proved a financial success, notwithstanding some losses in men
killed, wagons pillaged and cattle driven off and lost by bands
of marauding Apaches.
In his travels he saw the advantages that Arizona offered as a
grazing country, which decided him to locate a ranch and engage
in the range cattle business.
The ranch derives its name from the Graham or Pinaleno mountains
which the Indians called the Sierra Bonita because of the many
beautiful wild flowers that grow there. It is twenty miles north
of Willcox, a thriving village on the Southern Pacific Railroad,
and ten miles south of Ft. Grant, that nestles in a grove of
cotton trees at the foot of Mt. Graham, the noblest mountain in
southern Arizona.
The Sierra Bonita ranch is situated in the famous Sulphur Spring
valley in Cochise County, Arizona, which is, perhaps, the only
all grass valley in the Territory. The valley is about twenty
miles wide and more than one hundred miles long and extends into
Mexico. Its waters drain in opposite directions, part flowing
south into the Yaqui river, and part running north through the
Aravaipa Canon into the Gila and Colorado rivers, all to meet and
mingle again in the Gulf of California.
Fine gramma grass covers the entire valley and an underground
river furnishes an inexhaustible supply of good water. In the
early days of overland travel before the country was protected or
any of its resources were known, immigrants, who were bound for
California by the Southern route and ignorant of the near
presence of water, nearly perished from thirst while crossing the
valley.
The water rises to within a few feet of the surface and, since
its discovery, numerous wells have been dug and windmills and
ranch houses dot the landscape in all directions; while thousands
of cattle feed and fatten on the nutritious gramma grass. Its
altitude is about four thousand feet above the sea and the
climate is exceptionally fine.
The Sierra Bonita ranch is located on a natural cienega of moist
land that has been considerably enlarged by artificial means. In
an average year the natural water supply of the ranch is
sufficient for all purposes but, to guard against any possible
shortage in a dry year, water is brought from the mountains in
ditches that have been constructed at great labor and expense and
is stored in reservoirs, to be used as needed for watering the
cattle and irrigating the fields. The effect of water upon the
desert soil is almost magical and even though the rains fail and
the earth be parched, on the moist land of the cienega the fields
of waving grass and grain are perennially green.
The owner has acquired by location and purchase, title to several
thousand acres of land, that is all fenced and much of it highly
cultivated. It consists of a strip of land one mile wide and ten
miles long, which is doubly valuable because of its
productiveness and as the key that controls a fine open range.
The original herd of cattle that pastured on the Sierra Bonita
ranch thirty years ago was composed of native scrub stock from
Texas and Sonora. This undesirable stock was sold at the first
opportunity, and the range re-stocked by an improved grade of
Durham cattle. The change was a long stride in the direction of
improvement, but, later on, another change was made to Herefords,
and during recent years only whitefaces have been bred upon the
ranch.
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