With all the offshoots of ranch roping (and if we trace it all back, it did originate on the ranches before cattle were brought to the corrals), for quite sometime, I thought the original style of roping practiced on the ranch should be preserved somehow.
Rodeo had its affect on roping, then the competitions for working ranch cowboys came along in more recent years because rodeo didn’t represent the original style of roping done on the ranch. But then as with any competition, we need rules and judges and stop watches. If we have etiquette and respect for a job well done, we really shouldn’t need rules, judges or keeping track of time.
Such is the way at a good branding. Anybody and everybody there can be a judge of how well you rope. If you are thoughtful of the people you are working with and respectful of them, the cattle and the horses, there shouldn’t need to be any rules. When you try to be efficient, not hurrying, but not wasting time, we shouldn’t need a clock. It takes the time it takes. Spectators many times don’t appreciate things like this, they don’t understand the work it takes to develop the intuition and skill working with stock and people around you.
To try to give some insight to some of the original ranch roping without a stop watch, with you being your own judge, and at the same time making an effort to preserve the traditional part of ranch style roping we made an attempt to record this on a DVD.
We had close to 3000 calves to brand last summer while at the Alvord Ranch in Southeastern Oregon, one of only a handful of ranches that just throw their cattle together wherever its close and handy and start roping calves. No taking a day to move them to a corral, no splitting the calves away from the cows to get a better shot, and yes, someone might rope a cow, but they generally only do that once and the whole point of ranch roping anyway is to be able to adjust and handle any situation! It is an outstanding chance to just rope the calves out of an open rodea as it has been done for 125 years by the real buckaroos doing a real job.
I’m not going to say this is exactly like it used to be, because every generation that passes will testify that “it’s not like it used to be and never will be,” but I can say in my travels, it is as much the way it used to be as I have come across. That is why we wanted to record and explain the details of this style while the opportunity is still present. For five days, in three different locations with several different ropers their were over 500 calves branded because we just started filming as we were doing a job instead of staging a movie. The camera people were learning where to get the best shot and not be in the way of the job, there were no chances to say “cut! can you do that exact same thing again over here?” They just went with the flow and tried to be on top of all the action. Sometimes a camera wasn’t working or the camera was focused on the wrong thing and as a result we lost a lot of good stuff, but we also got a lot of good stuff and so that’s what we tried to bring out in the end product. After 156 hours of editing, this is what we have come up with. We hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it!
