[Range War]
(Gun shot)
[Whit Deschner]
(Gun shot)
[Music by Galen Green]
(Gun shot)
Mike: And all through this,
every two or three months he'd call up and he'd say,
"Don't you think we'd have a truce before somebody gets hurt?"
And I'd agree with him.
Yeah, I think we should.
And the next thing I know, we're in trouble.
Whit Deschner: When I first moved to the country,
I thought I knew all about range wars.
I knew about how they started.
I knew about it because it was in my blood.
My great grandfather,
who ranched sheep on the open range out of Durango
once engaged in a small dispute with some cattlemen, the Truebies.
He was tried twice for murder and three times for attempted murder.
He walked.
And even with a hundred years padding of reconciliation later,
the Truebies, what's left of them, still remain sensitive over the issue.
My war started so innocently, I wasn't even aware it had started.
I was too busy doing my chores.
And taking care of my animals.
Here's Delbert, my closest neighbor.
Delbert's dead now.
He loved to fight, and I always expected he'd die with his boots on.
Which he did.
The war didn't kill him, though. A heart attack got him.
Thank God Delbert was on my side.
This is Mike.
And this is his son, Justin.
My antagonists, akin to the Truebies.
They live five ranches away.
Here's Mike.
Mike: So, I was minding my own business.
And him and Delbert started it.
(Gun shot)
WD: Which is Mike's opinion.
It really started when I hired Mike to dig a trench.
Which he did, along with digging up my phone line four times.
Mike: We [all the peace].
We were still friends somewhat at that point.
So we moved down to Delbert's
and these two kids pull in on a motorcycle
and Justin had rolled up there.
So these two boys pulled up there and said,
"Hey mister, have you got any gas?"
And I said, I don't have any,
I said, not a thing.
And they went to get back on their motorcycles.
WD: That's when Justin steps in and says, "Gas? You need gas?
I got all the gas you want.
Just turn right up there at the mailboxes,
go about a mile, and I'm the ranch on the left.
Can't miss it.
I got a green truck in the driveway
and just go ahead and siphon all the gas you want out of it.
The next thing I know,
is two kids on motorcycles racing down my driveway.
I was waist deep in my trench burying water pipe.
They shut off their engines and one yelled over to me.
"Hey man, you got a hose?"
"What do you need a hose for?"
"We're going to siphon gas out of that truck."
"The hell you are!"
"No, we just talked to the owner, he said it was OK."
"Well, I happen to be the owner and it's not OK.
Who said you could have the gas, anyway?"
"The guy up there, helping that guy on the backhoe
told us this was his ranch and to take anything we needed."
(Gun shot)
Waiting until Christmas, I took an ad out in the local paper.
There, I though. Score's even.
(Gun shot)
Or was, until I answered the phone one day
and a voice wanted to know about all the free stuff.
For the next week, the phone never stopped ringing.
Mike: So at the end of the month, Whit gets a bill.
For the ad.
That did bother him.
And it was one of those moments
where, he called them, he says, "I didn't place the ad."
And the lady says,
"Do you have any idea who may have done this?"
(Gun shot)
I said, OK it's time Mike moved.
I had Delbert, who frequented Mike's ranch,
take careful inventory of his equipment and herd.
Mike: And I should have known, because he'd roll in here,
and every day he'd have one question.
He'd drive off the hill to ask me one question.
It was the description
of all my equipment and my cattle and everything was just -
you just can't imagine.
WD: I laid up an auction flyer, set the date for April first,
printed a hundred copies that Delbert distributed throughout the county.
On auction day Mike locked his gate and left.
But word had even traveled to the sale yard, 90 miles away
where the owner approached Mike and exclaimed,
"You've got a lot of nerve auctioning off your place today,
and you're down here buying bulls."
(Gun shot)
Coming home one day,
a real estate sign was stuck in my driveway entrance.
Hardly original, I thought.
But three days later, an old rancher stopped me and said,
"What's this nonsense about you and your marijuana farm?"
"What are you talking about?"
"That sign in your field."
"What sign?"
"The one that says, 'Vote Yes for marijuana'."
Beyond where I rarely went,
Mike had planted a four by eight plywood sign that read,
Vote Yes for marijuana,
and painted a marijuana leaf beside it.
(Gun shot)
I loaded it into my truck and drove down to Mike's.
His neighbor and his tractor loader raised me up in the bucket
and I nailed the sign onto Mike's arch with every nail I had in my shop.
(Gun shot)
A week later, Delbert showed up with a flyer he found in our mailboxes.
"Looks like nuclear war," Delbert said.
Then Mike suddenly arrived.
He apologized and wanted a truce.
He said Justin and a friend had run off a pile of those fliers,
got drunk and distributed them along the mail route.
Mike claimed he had nothing to do with it.
Delbert hoisted his eyebrows.
Mike said, "Look, if this keeps up, someone's going to get killed."
I considered.
I thought about my great granddad.
After his trial, the Truebies hired a killer
who put three bullets through his head.
He survived, but he always remained edgy.
I knew the feeling.
Between worrying and planning out the next attack,
I hadn't slept in months.
Peace, I've discovered, is a good thing.
Although occasionally I get this strange urge
to call up the highway department
and have them make a sign for Mike
and give him a section of highway to clean up.
[Created by Whit Deschner]
[The Delbert Boogie written by Galen Green]
[Keyboards, tenor and soprano sax: Galen Green]
[Bass and drums: Cody Rahn Engineer: Charlie Smith]
[With thanks to: The Western Folklife Center]
[Old West New West Video Taki Telonidis]
[And to you Mike]
[P.S. If you're watching this Mike, I copyrighted your face]
[However you have my permission to go ahead and use it]
Mike: I grabbed the phone and said, "Deschner, have you had enough?"
There was like, dead silence.
He was like, I'm going to kill you.
(Laughter)