Comstock sheep raisers look to the future, focus now on education

January 17, 2008
By Bill Sontag
Feature Writer

Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight, very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.
--- John Wayne, Playboy magazine interview, 1971

 

Often, the first thing newcomers to Del Rio hear is that Val Verde County once held the lofty title, “Wool and Mohair Capital of the World.” That was 50 years before Amistad Reservoir was crowned “The Best Bass Fishing Lake in the World.”

Next, one might hear that ranchers are a dying breed, that there’s no longer a market for warm wool and silky goat hair. But that, according to ranchers Jack L. Harrington Jr. and his wife, Katherine Eileen “Missy” Harrington, is a half truth, spoken like an obituary before there’s a corpse.

Jack, 64, has only lived half the life he intends to, and shows no interest in slowing down tending sheep and goats on the two-tract, 4,903-acre ranch north of Comstock that he and Missy continue to nurture with keen commitments to future generations of both livestock and enlightened children. “I’m going to live until I’m 120 years old, and I’ll be ranching until I can’t get up,” said Jack, Wednesday (Dec. 12).

But Harrington swears he’s not in the rigorous, risky ranch business for the cash anymore. “We’re not making any money at this. It’s just that it gets in your blood. Why does an artist keep painting pictures when he’s not getting paid for ‘em? Harrington queried, rhetorically. His wife, Missy, chimes in, “Ranching has become more of a hobby that a money-maker, nowadays.”

But these may be the years that show a turnaround in such resigned thinking, according to rancher Jerry Simpton, president, The Bank & Trust. The reason, Simpton explained, is that sheep and goats are raised less for pelage, now chiefly for meat. “Wool and mohair production is very labor intensive. The animals have to be gathered, vaccinated against intestinal parasites, and labor is just not available,” Simpton said. Cowboying skills have all but disappeared, he added, and immigrants coming over the border from Mexico now would rather work in construction, as an example, for better wages and town living.

The shift in response to demands for meat has been a logical transition. Inexpensively-produced synthetic fabrics have dampened the need for labor-intensive wool, and Americans are developing new or rekindled tastes at the table. “There have been a lot of changes,” Simpton said. “In the 80s and 90s, the margins of profit in the livestock industry were horrible – costs of trucks, costs of production, and so on. But the profits didn’t move up with those costs.

“Fat lambs, 20 to 30 years ago, were selling at 60 cents-per-pound, and profits were less than that. Then, in the last 10 years or so the margins have improved. Rather than getting 50 or 60 cents-a-pound, now we’re getting a dollar a pound at times for beef. Lambs are now at 95 cents- to $1.00-a-pound, and goats at $1.00- to $1.20-a-pound. So with those margins, you can make a profit. Out here you don’t have to feed [sheep and goats] much, and the margins now are much better than they were 15 or 20 years ago,” said Simpton.

Missy Harrington shoos a gathering flock into Harrington Ranch pens, trying to keep warm in the face of a sudden “blue norther” that dropped early December temperatures thirty degrees while the Harrington Ranch roundup was in progress. (LIVE! photo/Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge)

Rancher Bill Taylor drops in unannounced and just in time to help the Harringtons with their roundup on a Sunday afternoon when a cold front made the project less comfortable for all. Jack Harrington said Taylor’s wordless offer is not unusual, just in keeping with the help neighbors have traditionally provided to each other for more than a century here. (LIVE! photo/Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge)

A happy couple, Jack and Missy Harrington, pause for the photographer’s flash at a party in Austin, 1966. (Contributed photo/Missy Harrington.) (click image to enlarge)

Missy and Jack Harrington show the exuberance and positive outlook that have made the Comstock couple models of commitment and civic service, grounded in rural traditions. (LIVE! photo/Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge)

So, to avoid flat-out losing money, the Harringtons have shifted almost entirely to meat production with sheep and goats. In fact, their flocks are dotted now with black-headed, white-bodied Dorper sheep, the fleece of which is too short to be shorn. They are called “meat sheep for the modern producer” by the American Dorper Sheep Breeders Society. Of Persian origins, the breed does well in “harsh, extensive conditions,” as “excellent converters of a wide range of forage types,” and they “have natural tolerance to high temperatures and heavy insect populations. They are productive in areas where other breeds barely survive.”

Similar traits of hardiness and resolve invest the stories of generations of southwest Texas ranchers with legends of courage and adaptability. The chronologies and tales stretch the imagination of the past as profoundly as does science fiction of the future. Missy Harrington’s lineage begins on this continent with a Swiss great grandfather, John U. Zuberbueler, who ventured to this hemisphere in 1862, soldiering, ranching and dairying in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, skipping America because of a raging Civil War.

The late 19th century “time of cholera” chased him back to Europe where he married, then returned to the United States (first New York, then Missouri, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas). Moving into the Mexican state of Chihuahua from El Paso, John and Katrine ranched for 13 years. The partnership also yielded 10 children, five of whom survived to adulthood. One, Emil, gathered the family herds at the age of 15, driving the family cattle to Texas.

Jack Harrington removes his .22 caliber Longhorn Convertible pistol from his belt and checks it before stowing it in his truck. Harrington carries the revolver with no malice toward anyone, but mostly as a noisy warning to motivate recalcitrant livestock or to signal for help, if needed. (LIVE! photo/Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge)

Del Rio firefighter Joe Harrington, left, wades through a pen of lambs, selecting young males – mutton lambs – to be “marked” with ear clipping and castration by brother Jack. (LIVE! photo/Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge)

 

Virtually exiled from far west Texas by ranchers who apparently resented Zuberbueler’s intrusion, Emil’s parents bought land, creating two ranches – 25 miles apart – near Comstock, Shumla and on the bluffs around the Pecos River. In his 1902 memoirs, John wrote, “So I drove our 2,000 head of cattle to another region, where we kept them on 13,000 acres of our own, and 15,000 acres of rented land. Amid a peaceful, mostly German-American community, we from now on lived more quietly and much more contentedly.”

The horseback distance and complexities of adjusting herds to eke out survival on the hardscrabble country were complicated by a firestorm of revolution sweeping across Mexico. In 1917, the revolution ended, the Mexican Constitution was consummated, The United States entered what would later be lamented as a World War, women were jailed for picketing the White House on behalf of suffrage, and the Zuberbuelers introduced sheep to their ranching enterprise.

Civic-minded Emil Zuberbueler served for 10 years as a Val Verde County commissioner and as a member of the Comstock School Board. He died in 1954, his wife, Louisa, 17 years later. Zuberbueler ranch lands were divided among six surviving children. His granddaughter, Missy, daughter of Walter C. and Eline “Tootsie” (Zuberbueler) King, graduated from Comstock High School in 1964, and went on to earn degrees in biology from the College and Academy of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, and a Master of Education from Sul Ross University, Alpine.

Jack Harrington graduated from the old Del Rio High School on Griner Street (1961), became circulation manager of the Del Rio News-Herald, hiring brothers Oscar and Joe San Miguel to manage delivery routes, single-copy boxes and deliveries to Laughlin Air Force Base. Later, Harrington worked for the Texas National Guard, CPL (now CPL Retail Energy), then the Del Rio Fire Department.

The couple began dating while Missy was still in high school, married in 1967, and were married in the old sanctuary of Sacred Heart Church, Del Rio. Asked about their honeymoon, Missy laughed. “Well, we went over to the bullfights in Acuña at La Macarena arena, and then drove back to San Antonio. Jack had to be back at work on Monday, and I had to be back in school.”

Missy became a schoolteacher, reflective of her grandfather’s interest in education and a foretaste of a passionate expansion of educational concepts to come. But the ranch was there, worked by her father, Walter King, and Jack. Now, the couple own 3,263 acres called the Harrington Ranch about eight miles northwest of Comstock, and 1,670 acres called the Shumla Ranch, accessed near the old railroad way station by the same name, another ten miles up U.S. Highway 90 West.

Jack uses four-wheel, all-terrain vehicles to round up sheep and goats, but he didn’t simply follow a trend, now common practice among mechanized ranch operations. “Sometime in the 1970s, I showed up at the ranch to help Missy’s dad round up the flock – on a motorcycle. He asked me what the hell I was going to do with that!” Jack laughed. “I told him I was going to round up sheep with it. Well, that ol’ loud muffler spooked his horse, and he went to bucking and tossing, and he told me, ‘Get that contraption out of here,’” Harrington recalled.

Still, for the next 20 years, Harrington successfully rounded up his sheep with a motorcycle. “I sold my last horses about 25 years ago. Now I use a four-wheeler, a two way radio, and a pistol,” Harrington said, explaining that at times the noise of his long-barreled .22 and a judiciously placed round are helpful when sheep get into tight, inaccessible spots such as small canyons, brushy arroyos and cactus thickets.

He and Missy don’t hesitate when asked for the most significant turning point in ranching history of the area. “The eradication of the screw-worm was absolutely the best thing that ever happened to the livestock industry in general,” said Jack. Stockmen – in business before the eradication was essentially complete in 1982 – remember with disgust how the parasitic screw-worm fly (Cochliomyia homnivorax) deposited eggs and larvae, always in living tissue of warm-blooded animals, causing putrefaction of flesh and slow, agonizing death.

Scew-worms were eventually defeated with a biological control, not poisons or insecticides. Releases of sterile screw-worm flies that could not reproduce eventually brought the plague to a halt. Until then, ranchers dealt with sick sheep by collecting them when infected animals could be spotted, and treating the wounds with compounds and oils. They were often unsuccessful.

Cattlemen could see the wounds more easily, and simply walk up to a cow, and, using thumbs, express the worm to the surface to be ground under a boot. In sheep, the surface wound could be smelled before it could be seen. Harrington had a dog, “Hobo,” that could sniff out wormy sheep from long distances. “He’d smell them, run over, grab the sheep and throw it to the ground until I could get over there and pour oil on the spot,” Harrington said.

Notwithstanding that success, the Harringtons harbor little hope of commercial success with ranching. Both now work for the water department at the unincorporated community of Comstock, and Missy serves as curriculum director for Shumla, now an International Center for Archeological Research and Education. The campus of this unique institution sits on 70 acres of land donated by the Harringtons on the Shumla Ranch.

“I taught school for 31 years, and then Shumla happened,” Missy quipped. Shumla is a frenzy of activity these days with ambitious schedules, growing popularity among educators and students alike, and – fortunately – soaring acclaim by scholars, grants from foundations, and endowments from generous donors. But Harrington is no stranger to frenetic schedules. As a Comstock teacher, she typically and simultaneously taught six grade levels, six different subjects in a single semester.

Still, several times a year, the couple return to the rolling limestone hills where they run 120 Spanish and Boer goats and 500 sheep, hoping this crop will be better than the last. “You try to get 100 percent [birth and survival] lamb crop, but you can’t. We’re probably at about 80 percent this year,” Jack said, shrugging.

A little additional revenue stream for the Harringtons is a ready supply of hunters who lease the ranch during deer season, a nearly universal supplementary income sought and easily found on ranches across the region and beyond. “We get less than a dollar an acre,” said Jack, “but I’m very protective of the herd, and we’re making sure things are not overgrazed out there. We want it taken care of, now and down the road.”

Missy gazes down that road. “When we can’t ranch anymore, we’ll probably lease it out to someone else to run, but splitting it up into small parcels is not really an option, just a last resort. We really don’t want to do that,” she said. The couple’s children – son Danny, daughter Sylvia, and their spouses have shown no interest in returning, respectively, from San Marcos and Jacksonville, Fla. to take up the challenge. “It’s a fun place for them and the grandkids to come to, but not to live and work,” said Missy.

Jack admits that ranching’s allure is an intangible asset, that the lifestyle is irrevocably linked to the romance and tradition nurtured by four generations of ranching families in Val Verde County. “There’s nothing more rewarding really than to drive out there and just watch your livestock. You can learn so much from them,” Harrington explained.