In San Luis Valley, Cowboy Culture Comes Alive on Camera

If you own 12 head of cattle and six of them die, you have six head of cattle.

Duh, you say? Well, that’s just the sort of thing non-ranchers are liable to get wrong, says Peggy Godfrey, whose jobs include sheep rancher, cattle rancher, cowboy poet/storyteller, and, most recently, consultant to Don’t Fence Me In, a three-year documentary project on ranching culture in the San Luis Valley.

The arithmetic misunderstanding stems from the fact that some outsiders believe ranchers are showered with government subsidies, Godfrey says: “The government does not pay you for mistakes you make or replace livestock that fall over dead.” Actually, it’s a hard (and often hard-luck) way to make a living. Don’t Fence Me In, which has received funding from the Colorado Council on the Arts, both pops myths and props up the unique mythology of ranching. The documentary features interviews with ranchers, some of whose families have been in the valley for many generations.

“One of the things that has come up often (in the interviews) is the can-do attitude that seems to just keep bubbling out of the ground all over this county,” say Godfrey. “There is an incredible resilience.”

The project is being run by ScSeed, a Saguache County based nonprofit organization that aims to “help the local economy without taking away from the rural feel of the community,” according to program coordinator Deana Wilfong. ScSeed (it’s pronounced “succeed” and stands for Saguache County Sustainable Environment and Economic Development) strives to include four approaches to community development in everything it does: social, economic, environmental and educational. One of its projects is ScSeed Dollars, a local currency accepted by merchants in Saguache County. Another is to build a community center in the town of Center. Don’t Fence Me In, which celebrates and promotes the ranching way of life, fits right in.

About a dozen interviews will be included in Don’t Fence Me In. Early on, Godfrey was recruited to conduct the interviews. An outsider wouldn’t be able to get the ranchers to open up, she believes. Issues like whether to shoot coyotes or risk losing livestock are highly sensitive, and journalists going after “welfare ranchers” can pretty much be counted on to misrepresent local views, she says.

Unedited footage will be tucked away for posterity. Edited versions will be made available to schools and -- organizers hope -- broadcast on PBS. A teacher is writing curriculum guides to show how the program can help students meet state standards. Yet it’s important that the videos not be dry and scholarly, Godfrey says. So she’s trying to guide her subjects not merely to recount facts and dates, but to tell tales.

“It’s the difference between doing a lecture and doing a storytelling circle,” she says. She was charmed by a story told by her own veterinarian, Marty Shellabarger, about a doll made for his grandmother by Chipeta, the wife of the Ute chief Ouray. And several old-timers talked about what would happen when their school bus bogged down in a snowstorm.

“Whoever’s house was the closest would come and get everyone who was on the bus and keep them, even if it was two or three days. And that family, even if they didn’t have any children, would feed all those children, because that’s where the bus stopped.”

In a 10-minute trailer that serves as an attention-getter for the full-length videos to come, we’re introduced to Saguache County’s postcard-perfect landscape and wildlife, ranchers’ music and horseshow art, and some of Godfrey’s poetry. Calves gambol, tall grass bends in the breeze, and rancher Virginia Sutherland explains how she learned “to not do the clever thing sometimes, but to do the smart thing. Think about what you’re doing.”

Ranchers are full of wisdom, but a profound modesty, even self-deprecation, often leads them to hold their tongues, Godfrey says.
“Nobody thinks that they really know that much, and yet they know worlds of information,” she says. “A lot of people around here are college-educated, and you don’t even know that until they bring it up in a conversation 15 years after you met them. There’s just not a lot of value placed on what your paperwork looks like, or your pedigree. It’s how you do your work, how you support your community.”

Click here to view "Don't Fence Me In" trailer.