Welcome to the “My Place” page
 My name is Scott
I run the Rope and Wire website.
My original idea for this page was to give those living in the country the opportunity to tell others about the things that made their farm or ranch so special.
Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that either no one likes to brag or no one lives on a farm or a ranch. Whatever the case, no one submitted an article so I felt it was high time to try something different.
So for now this will be literally “My Place.” I’ll use this page to post a western blog or short articles. They will either be mine, or possibly one from a contributing R&W community member.
The theme will remain Western but the content will change weekly, or there about.
If you click on any of the links to past blog's, you can return to this page by clicking on the My Place button across from my picture.
I hope you enjoy it but if not, might I suggest you “stroll the grounds.” Read a story or watch a movie.
Thanks for visiting.
Scott
Cattle rustlers still at work in Oregon | More than 1,200 cattle have been stolen in Malheur County
By Richard Cockle
The Oregonian
Appeared in print: Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
News: Local: Story
JORDAN VALLEY They were spotted from a small airplane, two cattle rustlers on horseback hazing 125 white-faced cows across Malheur County’s forbidding empty quarter in Oregon’s far southeast corner.
The men, sighted last spring, were pushing the stolen herd south through a high-desert tapestry of chaparral, manzanita, juniper and sagebrush. They looked like ordinary cowboys.
The pilot descended for a closer view but the men didn’t look up, said brand inspector Rodger Huffman of the Oregon Department of Agriculture. The pilot finally had to break away, and the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office didn’t hear about the sighting until a week later.
It was one of the few glimpses anyone has caught of men suspected of stealing 1,240 cattle worth $1.2 million over the past three years from Malheur County ranches. Hundreds more cows have been taken in neighboring areas of Idaho and Nevada.
Cattle rustling did not fade away with the Old West. What makes these thieves unusual, investigators said, is the scale and duration of their operations, their use of horses to reach areas inaccessible to car or truck, and the fact that they sometimes drive their plundered herds for days, carefully sweeping around ranches and people.
Ranchers are circulating wanted posters offering a $47,500 reward for information that leads to a conviction. Some are also spending spare time on horseback, ATVs and in pickups and airplanes trying to hunt the rustlers down, Malheur County Undersheriff Brian Wolfe said.
Malheur County sheriff’s Deputy Bob Wroten and others suspect the thefts are the work of one group of four to six men who are well-acquainted with the territory.
“The way these cattle are ending up missing, those guys grew up tough,” he said. “They lived the life all their lives. They aren’t outsiders.”
The losses have been devastating. Most of the stolen cattle were females that each year produce calves worth $600 apiece.
About 20 Oregon ranches have been hit, with a dozen taking the brunt of losses, Huffman said. In Humboldt County in Nevada, at least 500 cattle are missing, and still more have been stolen in Owyhee County in Idaho.
Rand and Jayne Collins had 150 cows swiped from their remote Malheur County ranch three years ago.
“The people who stole them had to know this many cattle would be beyond a hardship; it was a catastrophe,” said Jayne Collins, 59, of the $150,000 hit. She cried and had a lot of sleepless nights. Lots of sleepless nights.
The cattle were taken from an area so isolated that it’s reachable from most of Oregon only by a road that winds into rural Nevada, said Rand Collins, 60. The couple spent hours searching canyons in a friend’s airplane without finding a trace.
“I’d like to find them and talk to them for a few minutes,” said Jayne Collins, taking a break last week at the Old Basque Inn restaurant in Jordan Valley. “I felt like cutting their ears off.”
The rustlers’ theater of operations is roughly bounded by Oregon’s 30-mile-long Steens Mountain to the west, Winnemucca, Nev., to the south and Murphy, Idaho, to the east. After stealing a herd, the gang sometimes moves across 50 miles of Oregon desert into Idaho, then Nevada.
“Finally, they get them to a place far enough away and move them into a semi-truck and away they go,” Malheur County Sheriff Andrew Bentz said. “They may end up four states away from us.”
Investigators don’t know what’s being done with the cows but said Nebraska and Oklahoma don’t have brand inspectors to make sure cows are with their owners.
On the rare occasion when someone spots the thieves in the desert, the men usually appear to be cowhands out riding for a few hours, Deputy Wroten said. They’re never seen with bedrolls on their saddles or halters on their horses, he said, probably to avoid signaling that they plan to camp and picket their horses.
The men seem to time their thefts for stormy weather when almost nobody is on the desert, said Wroten, a former rancher who patrols a region with about 600 residents in more territory than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.
When a range detective hired by a Malheur County ranch spotted two of them during a spring snowstorm, they jumped their horses off a dangerous rimrock and vanished like smoke, Wroten said.
“It’s kind of like the old days, way back,” said Sheriff Ed Kilgore of Humboldt County. “Sometimes these guys are traveling two, three, four days at a time to get where they are going. They are not in danger of being seen because nobody is out there.”
Complicating matters, the cattle sometimes aren’t discovered missing for months. Some ranchers still haven’t gathered all their cows for winter and don’t know if any are gone, Undersheriff Wolfe said. Ranchers also sometimes have too much pride to report a theft.
“People not in the cattle industry don’t understand how big a hit this is for the rancher,” Kilgore said. “It really hurts.”
Like Wroten, Kilgore thinks that if he catches the rustlers, he won’t be slapping handcuffs on complete strangers.
“It’s people who know cows, who know the country,” Kilgore said. “The people who are the victims of the cattle thefts are going to know them.”
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