60 Minutes saddles up and catches the Drift
Historic Green River cattle drive shows up on primetime television
JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — It only took 125 years for the longest-running cattle drive in America to make it on national television.
CBS’ 60 Minutes featured a piece last night that is sure to warm the hearts of those tough cowboys and cowgirls in Sublette County. Correspondent Bill Whitaker set the scene with his opening monologue.“Most cattle drives in the United States have been run off the range by suburban sprawl, government regulations, lower beef consumption, and the return of protected predators,” Whitaker stated for the audience in the opening. “But there’s a group of stubborn men and women in Wyoming who every spring push thousands of cows over same 70-mile route their ancestors pioneered 125 years ago.”
The drive takes some 7,000 head to su
mmer pasture in the Winds. It’s a spectacular 13-day trek over arid prairie highlands hemmed in by the Wyoming Range to the west and the Wind River Range to the east.
The Green River Drift: A throwback to the American West
Whitaker himself saddled up and spent time with some of the 11 ranching families that participate in the cattle drive. He chatted with Albert Sommers, whose family has been pushing cows up to the high ground every spring since 1903; and Jeannie Lockwood, who is still on her family’s property homesteaded in the 1880s.
“Only ranchers would call this easy,” Whitaker narrated. “All for $50 profit per cow when they finally send them to market.”
The genesis of the drift began after the winter of 1889-90. A season so harsh, nearly every domestic herd was wiped out. Ranchers learned pretty quickly why the Shoshone and Crow did not winter in the Green River valley.
So now the spring drive puts cattle in the high country—leased from the Forest Service for $1.35-a-head per month—while ranchers get busy haying their property in order to have feed for their cows through the long, harsh Wyoming winter.
Come first hard frost in fall, the beeves instinctively begin drifting back home on their own, led by a few old mama bell cows who know the drill.
The 60 Minutes segment also highlighted the lonely job of the range rider—the cowboys (or in the case nowadays, cowgirls) who look after hundreds of cows while living alone, isolated for some five months, often with no internet, cell service, or running water.
Historically, the job had been well-suited to loners, drifters, and anti-social types. Men, almost exclusively. But today, 4 of the 5 range riders are women.
Brittany Heseltine is one. Now in her third season, the veterinarian told Whitaker the gig was just something that speaks to her soul and she couldn’t wait for spring to arrive every year.
Lockwood told 60 Minutes women are hard workers and stay out of the bars in town.
The Green River Drift is a treasure to locals, an anomaly to city folk, and a now placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Where everything true and good about the American West, and the men and women who still make it what it is, is history come alive.
