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Chase County Sketches
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Sauble, Patrick Henry
Posted on Sun, Jun. 20, 2004
Once a cowboy: Part 1
One ranch, one family and a 148-year-old legacy
BY ROY WENZL
The Wichita Eagle
CHASE COUNTY - On a Flint Hills ranch, where tallgrass grows and baby calves bawl and a spring runs clear and cold, an old man lives in a wide valley ringed by bluffs.
He herds cows and swears cheerfully and bounces a pickup across stony pastures with the vitality of a teenage boy.
His father and grandfather rode these pastures. For 50 years, his son did, too. The old man would love to do this forever. Once a cowboy... always.
But Patrick Henry Sauble turns 83 in August.
His son, David, left years ago, estranged. And his daughters and grandchildren have scattered to take up spouses and careers.
The ranch will stay in the family as property. But home is more than a probate document, and a ranch is more than 3,000 acres of dirt. It's 148 years of heritage. It's a story-- the Sauble story.
And the Saubles want more chapters.
They love the ranch, with its sunlight and grass and water, its seasons and stone fences, its redbuds and red Angus, and the big spring that pours cold water out of a hillside at 1,800 gallons per minute.
After David left eight years ago, the remaining Saubles reorganized, led by a feed salesman in-law named Dennis Hague. They come home once a year to mend fences, paint sheds, rebuild the ranch.
They want to keep it from falling apart just long enough to let some younger Sauble get inspired to take it over someday.
For that reason, they bring Pat's great-grandchildren to play in the creeks, to pick wildflowers, to see why the older ones work so hard to keep the Sauble ranch Sauble.
They don't know if they can make this work. But still they gather each year. And this year, work week had a twist that surprised them.
On May 29, as they mended old gates, a Ford pickup pulled into the drive, bearing New Mexico plates.
Out stepped Pat's son, David.
He wore a dress shirt, the kind you don't get dirty, and he intended to lift not a finger. The way he saw it, they broke his heart.
He'd come to say hello.
They looked at him, and he looked at them, and stuck his hands in his pockets. Neither he nor they knew what would come next.
But here he stood, on stony ground where he'd been once a cowboy.
Sunlight, grass, water.
1856, MARYLAND
Pat Sauble's great-grandmother made jelly one day, five years before the Civil War. She sent her son to buy sugar.
She gave him a small gold coin, dated 1851.
Pat Sauble owns that coin today. And he tells the family story handed down from his father, who heard it from his father, who was sent to buy sugar.
His name was David Sauble, and he took that coin and rode dutifully into Baltimore. On the way to the store, he ran into his friend, Pete Hoover.
Those boys had not a plan, not a sandwich, not a clue, Pat said.
David was 19.
David told the storekeeper to send sugar to his house.
He put the coin in his pocket.
And then he and Pete rode halfway across North America.
They rode to the Kansas territory. No one knows why.
They could not have picked a worse year or place. Only a few thousand white men lived here, but thousands more came in 1856, bent on killing. Would Kansas turn slave state or free?
Men inflated voting rolls, burned houses, cut throats. Pro-slave men shot up Lawrence. John Brown murdered five pro-slavers with broadswords. Pro-slavers killed Brown's son.
David and Pete rode to the junction of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers, the family story goes.
There was no Wichita then; only rivers and bison and half-tame white men turned loose on a lawless prairie. The boys met one such man.
Horace Wilcox ran cattle across the prairie and lived wild. In coming years, he would run from Indians on the prairie and from lynch mobs in Texas and Kansas.
He hired David and Pete. They herded his cows from Medicine Lodge to the Flint Hills. No roads, no fences, no law.
One day, the boys rode into the Flint Hills trailing cows.
South of the Cottonwood River, along what is now the border of Chase and Marion counties, they found a wide valley ringed by bluffs. A creek running clear. Grass growing shoulder-high to their horses.
They found an abandoned cabin: windowless log walls, a dirt roof to repel attackers' torches, a right-angle tunnel rather than a door. A water well inside a basement. A snug place for cowboys to sleep.
The boys used the cabin many times as they rode the prairie for Wilcox.
But one day they decided to ride for themselves.
David had left Baltimore without a plan, but he made a plan now, Pat said. In the valley he'd found sunlight, grass and water. Natural springs, including a big one a short ride over the hills.
He would settle here, and build a herd.
The roundup.
MORNING, MARCH 17, 2004, SAUBLE DRIVEWAY
On a breezy St. Patrick's Day, Patrick Henry Sauble stepped out of the stone house his grandfather had built in the Flint Hills in 1871. He limped forward with an impish grin.
He stood tall and broad-shouldered and strong. He wore a short-brimmed cowboy hat, stained, with a hole in the crown. The hat sat atop a head of white hair. Hearing aids plugged both ears.
He stuck out a big hand, shook a greeting with strength. The limp came not from age, he said, but from a run-in with a balky cow years before.
He poked a finger at a white Ford diesel pickup, already running. He spoke with a friendly, self-assured air.
"I just got this thing to replace that other truck that wouldn't start," he said.
"I didn't mind the other damn truck. But Mary (his wife) said it was a shame that an 82-year-old man had to start every day sticking a screwdriver into the solenoid of a truck to get it started."
"Maybe Mary's lookin' out for me," he said.
He grinned. "Or maybe not."
Pat swears a little. In many of the sentences quoted from him, you can assume that some salt has been removed. Mary Sauble, whom he loves dearly after 62 years, has tried to make him quit.
"Can't you clean up your language?"
"What the hell's wrong with my language?"
His big shoulders make him look trimmer than softer men who carry a paunch. Santa Claus' belly, some grandkids call it. They've watched him eat: He likes beer, vodka and tonic, pretzels out of a gallon jar, black coffee, and chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes eaten with Mary and friends in small restaurants. He'd eaten breakfast, he said. "I'm ready to move some cows."
Pat's daughter Susan walked up, dressed in boots and denim; at her side, her husband, Dennis Hague, a feed sales representative for Land O' Lakes wearing leather chaps and spurs. They live in a house built in September at the far end of the driveway. Grandparents themselves, but ready to ride. A gelding and an Appaloosa mare stood saddled in the corral.
Two cowboys, friends of Pat's, drove pickups into the yard, pulling horse trailers.
They unloaded, saddled up. Then, with Susan and Dennis, they rode north.
Pat followed with the truck. He hadn't ridden a horse in years. He rolled a horse twice years ago, got knocked hard on the head. After that, he recalls, his son, David, promptly sold his horses out from under him.
"David said, 'You're done,' " Pat said.
Pat drove north, past the riders. He picked up a 1,100-pound hay bale, loading it with automated arms attached to the truck bed. The 2004 ranch season would begin now.
He said he'd use the hay bale to lure 178 pregnant cows west from a stubble field. He would drive ahead of the herd, honking his horn, as he did every morning to call cows to breakfast. Dennis, Susan and the cowboys would herd from behind.
"We'll stick 'em in the Miller pasture," Pat said. "Then we'll go get the other herd, the yearlings and heifers."
There were 168 cattle in the second herd, 25 of them pregnant heifers. "We'll move them off the stubble ground south of the house and move 'em into High Windmill pasture.
"Then in a day or so we'll burn vacant pastures all over.
"Then the grass will grow, if the rains fall good."
"And calves will drop all over. It'll damn near rain calves."
Pat drove to a gate, got out.
He turned.
"Do you know what my dad told me one time?" he asked a companion.
"What, Pat?"
"He said if one wife wasn't enough for me, that I could have two. Or even three."
"Do you need three wives?"
"Hell, I can't handle even one."
And with that, he grinned and limped to the gate.
Thunder and lightning
1864, SAUBLE RANCH
In the seven years after he took over the cabin in the valley, David Sauble built a herd from nothing to 400 head.
He ran cows from Medicine Lodge to the Flint Hills. With his mustache and skinny backside and dark, wavy hair, he looked as handsome as the actor John Wilkes Booth.
David and Pete rode fearlessly. They owned hundreds of acres apiece. When they'd come here there wasn't even a homestead law; to get land, all you did was take it. David took 3,000 acres.
Lightning storms passed over, Indian raiders passed through, and horse thieves robbed corrals. But David and Pete lived untouched in a state where people died young from isolation and sickness and card games that mixed drink with cheating and revolvers.
Back East, generals Grant and Lee fed men into slaughter fields: the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor. But two Kansas cowboys prospered.
David's parents wrote from Maryland, pleading: "Come back." He wrote back to decline.
David got neighbors. The Sayres rolled their horse-drawn wagon into his valley, homesteaded close to his cabin. David befriended their boy, Charlie, and Charlie Sayre, as an old man obliging Chase County historians, would dictate joyous stories of David and the land.
"It is a beautiful valley about a mile wide with plenty of timber, stone and water, and was an ideal place for a homestead," Charlie said. "The blue-stem grass in the bottoms grew up to my shoulders on a pony."
When Charlie's father stacked hay, bison bulls horned it down.
The Cheyenne rode through, robbing cabins, bent on war.
A prairie fire sent settlers jumping into Cedar Creek. Isolation frayed nerves.
"All the playmates I had were Indian boys," Charlie wrote. They lived near the giant spring a short ride away.
One day, David butchered a cow and gave Charlie a sack of beef to feed the Sayres.
David's cattle smelled blood, charged the boy. They pawed the meat, ran Charlie up a tree.
One day a new pioneer chased the Indians from the spring, and built a home. It was for him the spring was named.
At night, beside that spring, which seemed to cast pleasant spells on all who saw it, John Miller gave thanks. Loudly.
"He... was a fervent prayer from the mountains of Tennessee," Charlie said. "Often of a warm summer evening we could hear him on his front step praying, although our cabin was three-quarters of a mile away."
From such people a state came to be. By 1894, some Kansans thought the state's resources and central location would let it lead the nation.
At age 56, David still rode and roped and ranged. He'd seen wild cowboys disappear along with Indians, bison, outlaws.
In their place, towns sprouted. Grain elevators. Banks.
David helped build this. He built a stone house in 1871, and a stone barn in 1876, and two miles of stone fences 4 feet tall, hand-laid by crews of 30 men earning 50 cents a day. He'd wed, fathered six, taught a son to rope and ride.
He still had that gold coin.
On Sept. 1, 1894, David stepped off a train in Medicine Lodge. Pete Hoover met him.
According to a newspaper account written after the event, they rode Pete's buckboard wagon into a thunderstorm.
Lightning struck.
The shock knocked the horses down, knocked David and Pete off the buckboard.
Pete got up, helped pull the horses to their feet. He went to rouse David.
David lay dead. The lightning bolt had struck his head and come out his boot.
Pete brought David's body home, to the ranch that a 19-year-old cowboy had built from nothing.
His tombstone read:
Tis hard to break the tender cord
When love has bound the heart
After his death, his widow, Susan, had to decide what to do. The ranch now included hundreds of cattle, all branded "DS." There were dozens of Morgan horses, raised for dealers in Tennessee.
Who would herd them now? Only the toughest of cowboys would dare.
Susan packed the children's belongings.
They'd move to Manhattan, she said.
Then, according to the family story passed down to Pat, David's wild son spoke up.
His name was John, he called himself J.C., and he liked sunlight, grass and water.
I know how to ride, he said. I know how to rope.
His mother heard finality in his words.
She must have ached to look at him. He was only 18.
How hard can it be? he asked.
Mother gave him the ranch.
And an old gold coin.
Cannons and rifle slits
NOON, MARCH 17, SAUBLE DRIVEWAY
The roundup done, Pat Sauble drove home. He pointed to the 1876 barn, to 15 vertical holes in the stone wall facing the road.
"Rifle slits," Pat said. "There's a rope and pulley in the barn that Granddad used to raise a cannon to the roof. Dangerous around here in the old days."
Pat looked furtively at his companions.
"You're fibbing," one said. "Those are ventilation slits to get air into the barn."
"Well," Pat said with a grin. "Wanted to see if you knew."
The spring casts spells
1894-1945, SAUBLE RANCH
In the years after his father died, J.C. Sauble made himself a rancher and pulled what even the Saubles say were many cruel pranks. Pat likes to tell the stories.
When a bothersome visitor came, J.C. boiled a cow pie into the man's oatmeal.
J.C. faked Indian attacks with gunfire, terrifying a relative. In a saloon, he shot a hole through a friend's new hat. He told the man he'd buy the man a new hat, because now he needed one.
When J.C.' s son was old enough to walk about on the ranch, the hired cowboys asked J.C. the boy's name.
The truth was that the boy was named J.C. Sauble, like his father. But J.C. the elder joked that "that there is Patrick Henry Sauble."
And the joke stuck.
J.C. put Patrick Henry Sauble on a horse named Brownie every morning. The boy was 6, could not reach the stirrups, could not get off to pee. J.C. said it kept the boy from getting stepped on. Pat loved it. "I got to ride!"
About the same time Pat first rode Brownie, his father bought Miller pasture, with its giant spring.
The Saubles drove wagons to picnic. They put watermelons in the spring to cool. A tree-shaded dell, a green grass floor, and water rushing clear in a bed of watercress and clean, cold limestone. Pat jumped in and jumped up with a yell.
"Damn near froze," he said.
He learned everything his dad could teach.
"Don't chase that cow, let her go," J.C. said. "She knows this is home. I said herd cows, not chase them."
Pat went to Kansas State University for a year. A man ought to get an education, J.C. said. Pat met Mary Palmer, married her in 1942. She was a redhead who liked gardens and wildflowers. The war came. Pat flew B-17 bombers stateside, training air crew gunners. A lot of airplanes crashed, killing crews. Mary sweated it out and stuck with him.
When Pat came home in 1945, J.C. surprised him. A lot.
J.C. retired.
"You move into the ranch house," he told Pat. "That's where the work is."
His father gave him half the ranch. And an old gold coin.
Pat's sister, Rebecca, got the other half of the ranch. Pat would manage it, but J.C. told Pat: "Take care of your sister."
Pat agreed. There was ranch to go around. The state was filled with prosperous ranchers and farmers, most of whom thought they'd live like cowboys forever, and pass it all on to their children.
Later that year, on July 17, Mary gave birth to a son.
They named him David, after the original Sauble cowboy.
What will happen next?
AFTERNOON, MARCH 17, SUSAN'S BACK PORCH
After Pat and the cowboys moved the herds to pasture, his daughter Susan invited the Sauble women to sit and talk on the porch she'd designed to look out over the wide Sauble ranch valley. Amanda, Susan's daughter, had come from her home just over the bluffs. Lorie Sauble-Otto, another of Pat's granddaughters, was visiting from out of state. Susan got out binoculars.
They watched turkey and deer roam the valley her great-grandfather had settled 148 years before.
The men were out building electric fence to keep cows from trampling the waterfall of Miller's Spring.
The women sat on the porch, drinking beer or iced lattes.
Pat's granddaughters traded stories about him.
"Grammie puts up with a lot," Lorie said.
"Grandpa even managed to drop swear words into grace before meals," Amanda said. "They made him say grace, so he said,
'Good bread, good meat,
'Good God, let's eat!
'Hell, Mary! Pass the damn butter!' "
The women laughed.
Then the talk turned serious.
"We don't know for sure what will happen," Lorie said. "We know the ranch is in a trust. We know we want to keep it going. But other than that..."
Amanda pulled out her wedding album, photos taken five years before. She's 28 and trim, like her mother. But in the photos, she's carrying an extra 40 pounds. She'd lost the 40 in the two years since she and her husband, Ben Hayes, moved from Newton to a ranch house five miles east of Pat's house. It was the peacefulness, she said.
"I got married right there in the barn," she said. "I walked in there one day, saw the sunlight shining through the holes in the walls, and thought, 'Wow, light shining in a cathedral.' So we got married there."
When hay dust fell from the upper floor on the women with hairdos, Amanda said, they all put napkins on their heads and went on drinking beer.
Jerry Otto, Lorie's husband, came out on the porch to say the men were back. He went to fetch a beer.
"I don't know what's going to happen," Lorie said. "But it worries me."
When she comes here, she said, she goes to Miller's Spring. She plays in the creek with her girls. And she teaches her kids "how to be."
She's a Ph.D. teacher of French at the University of Northern Colorado. But her heart's here, she said.
Susan raised binoculars. Deer, chasing one another half a mile away.
"You can't teach your kids how to just be when you live in a town," Lorie said.
As a girl, she said, she dreamed of marriage.
"It would be someone who could love this place like I do. If I couldn't find someone like that..."
She paused.
"I was lucky," she said. "Jerry turned out to love this place."
Jerry came out, beer in hand.
He listened to this story.
"That's not what happened," he said, glaring at Lorie. "What happened was, I got you drunk."
"What?"
"You're easy when you're drunk," Jerry said.
"Really!"
The women laughed; Lorie, too. Jerry sat down.
The future of the ranch was in doubt, he said. His father-in-law, David Sauble, had once lived here, raised his daughters here. But he had left. So nine years ago, Dennis Hague and others started "work week."
The family comes home Memorial Day weekend, works for a week, painting, fixing fence.
"And getting fed up with each other," Amanda added. "My dad comes out with a tiny piece of paper with 20 things for each person to do."
"People gripe," Jerry said.
"Sergeant Hague," Lorie said.
Jerry nodded.
"We're trying to keep this place going," he said. "The real worry isn't what happens when Pat goes. Denny's done a great job, moving onto the ranch, taking the load off Pat, getting us ready. What worries me is down the road, when Denny can't do it anymore."
A long silence.
"It would make my heart ache if we let this slip away," Lorie said. "I know we'll keep the land after Grandpa and Grammie go. It's in a trust. But that's not the point. If we keep the land but no one lives here..."
They fell silent again.
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