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Al Scorup: Cattleman of the Canyons
AL SCORUP Cattleman of the Canyons
BY NEAL LAMBERT
In the spring of 1891, near a wide place in the Colorado River called Dandy Crossing, a 19-year-old boy headed his horse through the red sand and willows along the river edge toward the mouth of White Creek. Behind him trailed an extra horse packed with a couple of patchwork quilts, some flour, bacon, and pinto beans. Ahead of him, in the wild and beautiful breaks of White Canyon, was a chance to be a cattleman. That, more than anything else, was what Al Scorup wanted to be.
From the time when he was a little boy, when he and his brother Jim rode stick horses around their yard in Salina and "branded" imaginary calves with pieces of twisted wire, John Albert Scorup had wanted to be a "cattleman." Once he earned 400 lambs helping his father with a cooperative sheep herd, but he soon traded them for cattle. When he was 16 he used part of his summer wages to buy a new suit, but he used all the rest to buy steer calves. Herding cattle as soon as he was big enough to ride, trailing cattle as soon as he was old enough to leave home, Al Scorup was quickly recognized around Sevier County as a good cattle hand. Before he was old enough to have shaved many times, he had been given sole charge of the Salina Grazing Company herd; he had punched cows for both Mormons and "outsiders"; he had worked in trail herds as big as 1,500 head; and he had ridden a cattle train as far away as Omaha, Nebraska. By the time Claude Sanford saw him on a horse roundup at Grass Valley in March of 1891, Al Scorup had become a good cowboy, good enough at least that Sanford wanted to hire him to take care of 150 head of longhorns running wild in White Canyon.
When it came to deciding whether or not to accept the offer that Sanford made, Al had little difficulty making up his mind. "I knew everything [around home] was taken by someone in Salina," he later told his sister, and Sanford's deal "looked like a chance to get some cattle and a place to range them." So over the protests of his father and the tears of his mother, Al saddled his horse, packed his quilts, rode 300 miles to the Colorado, swam it, and now with the red stain of the cold muddy water still on his legs, he was heading up White Canyon to look for Sanford's longhorns.
When he saw the country he was up against, Al Scorup may have had some second thoughts about Claude Sanford's deal. Al was to get onethird of the calves born, that is, if he could find the cattle in the maze of cracks, washes, creeks, and cliffs that split and hedged the country. Then, if any of the bulls ever found any of the cows so there would be some calves, and if the calves that were born lived through the drought in the summer and the bitter cold in the winter, and if he himself survived in this forsaken country, then he might, just might, become a cattleman.
The nearest town (if the collection of cabins at Bluff could be called a town) was a good three days' ride away. The only human companions were a few prospectors like old grey-whiskered Charlie Fry, who kept some mares at what is now called Fry Spring. For the most part there was just the ripple of the heat waves and an awful silence during the day, a breeze, and maybe a coyote at night — and always Sanford's spooky, wild cattle.
For Al Scorup the days were long and hard; and with the appetite that goes with hard work, he soon ate through the "chuck" that he had brought with him from Salina. There was some game around, but he had no gun. Trying to keep from starving, he sold a steer to some placer miners for $20.00; but when Cass Hite took 11 of those dollars for one sack of flour, Al knew that it was find another job, starve, or give up and go home! He decided to find another job.
Punching cows alongside the swearing, chewing, drinking, gun-carrying "gentiles" who worked the large herds flooding over the Colorado- Utah border was not the kind of job Al's mother would have recommended for her son. But Al needed cash. So, knowing he could earn money with one of those large "gentile" outfits, he shoved Sanford's cattle into a side canyon where he might find them again and headed for the big herds on the border.
Al hired out to a Texas outfit that was trailing 350 steers from the Elk Mountains to Ridgeway, Colorado. "The Mormon Cowboy," the Texans called him, probably with as much respect as fun intended, not only because of his lack of the usual "habits" but because of his unusual prowess with horse and rope.
Al was to go on a lot of trail drives, but few of these cow trips influenced his life like this one. Before the drive started, Al met Frank Jacob Adams, a man who was to be his friend and a close companion in the San Juan cattle industry. For the two-month drive to Ridgeway the two "Mormons" worked as nightherders. After the drive ended, Al met Emma Bayles, the girl who was to be his wife and the mother of his six daughters. At Jacob's suggestion, Al stopped over in Bluff for a day or two before going back to White Canyon, putting up at Hanson Bayles's rooming house where Emma cooked for her brother and the roomers. "He was very attractive," Emma later told her sister-in-law. "All the eligible girls wanted him, but I said to myself, 'that nice looking Mormon cowboy was meant for me and I mean to get him.'" But there was little time for courting. Al had his grubstake now and he had to get back to Sanford's cattle.
In White Canyon, Al found more than just Claude Sanford's little herd; he also found a whole campful of new trouble. Five Texas cowboys met him; all were armed. Several more sat by a fire playing cards with Mancos Jim, Poke, Posey, and some other renegade Indians. One of the Texans told Al there was no room for him around White Canyon anymore and that he would be much better off where he came from. Al did not have much choice. Giving Charley Fry what money he could spare to look after Sanford's cattle until he got back, Al turned his horse northeast, recrossed the Colorado, and started for Salina.
Back in Sevier County, Al wrote to his employer about what had happened. Sanford replied that he would give Al half of the calves if he would go back. "I liked that," Al said. "I really wanted to go back." He knew the Texan's system of running cattle would never work out in the nmrock and arroyos of White Canyon; but until the interlopers did fail, he needed reinforcements. By forgetting to mention the Texans, he persuaded his father and a neighbor, Hugentobler, to lease their cattle to him. Using the same intentional forgetfulness, he persuaded his brother Jim, his sidekick of stick-horse days, to throw in his own small herd and come along to White Canyon. "Jim didn't believe much in the venture," Al said, "but he went with me." After leasing another 150 head from Smith Parker, the Scorup brothers finally started toward San Juan with a herd of about 300 cattle.
If they moved a dozen miles a day, Jim and Al felt lucky. Even driving that far often required the boys to be in the saddle 19 hours a day. By the time they reached the Colorado, it was December. Chunks of ice floated in the water. The cattle were gaunt and trailworn. But food and rest lay just across the river.
However, persuading 300 tired cattle to swim out into an icy river is no easy task. The cows mill around on the edge, snorting suspiciously at the chocolate water. The boys cut big willows to drive with and start the herd toward the river. The leaders splash into the cold water, then panic and turn back. In go the two cowboys to head off the turning cattle. The buoyant cows outmaneuver the heavier horses and swim toward the bank. The calves bawl; the men shout. Calves begin to chill; their struggles slow down and they drift farther and farther downstream. All around cattle churn in the water and scramble up the bank. Al and Jim splash out of the water, round up the herd, and try again. Again the leaders panic and the herd turns back. The horses are tired. The boys are wet and muddy to the waist. Al gets Cass Hite's rowboat and some miners to help. Reinforced, the boys try once more. Again the cattle try to turn back. The miners beat them with willows, their hats, and the oars. Everybody yells; the cattle bawl. Finally a long diagonal of backs and noses stretches across the river. But more calves weaken and slip downstream. The cowboys push their jaded horses into the water again and again. They rope the calves when they can and drag them along the sand at a gallop hoping the friction will restore circulation. But finally, the last cattle splash out on the east bank, and with the exception of a few stubborn stragglers still standing on the west side, the boys have their herd across the Colorado.
Sometime after they left Salina and before they started into White Canyon, Jim found out about the Texans. One can only guess at his reaction. But, however he felt, neither Jim nor Al was anxious to have a meeting with them just yet. The Texans ran in the pifion and juniper breaks on the south, so the Scorup brothers drove their cattle up onto the north side of White Canyon, into country so rough and wild that even the landhungry Texans had paid no attention to it. Driving up through this torn and broken country for the first time, Al and Jim guided themselves by two buttes that, seen together, somehow reminded them of one of the wooden shoes that their grandmother wore. In the area of these buttes (they are still called the Wooden Shoe), the two brothers finally ended their long drive. With the help of Charley Fry and an outlaw by the name of Billy Sawtell, they brought Sanford's cattle over to their side of the canyon; then the brothers settled down to the business at hand. They did not have much besides each other and some rather dim prospects, but from then on Al and Jim were "cattlemen." By this time Al Scorup was just about three months past his twentieth birthday.
It is difficult for one who has never had his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth with thirst, or been so cold that he cannot let go of the bridle reins to realize how hard life was for the early cowboys of the San Juan- Colorado canyon country. Living almost like the Indians who preceded them, the cowboys slept in sandstone caves and cached their supplies in the fine, dry sand of the cave floor. One San Juan cow puncher says of these cowboy caves,
For water, the men and animals often had to depend on the residue of storms captured in cups and depressions in the rock. In some places, falling water had gouged out room-sized bowls that filled with water. But a small trickle from the precipice above that did not carry the sand on out, or a thirsty cow that fell in and drowned might, for a time, ruin one of these "tanks." More than one desperately dry herd has had to push on because "Cow Tank" was filled with sand, or "Horse Tank" held the rotting carcasses of several drowned cattle. Too often these "tanks" could not sustain the men and animals. So, using a Fresno scraper and a team of horses, the Scorup brothers often dammed up the mouth of a small wash or depression to augment the natural reservoirs.
But lack of water was only one problem that confronted the early canyon cattleman. Huge herds of wild horses ate up the feed and ruined the range. One cowboy remembers that Al and Jim would "spend whole days shooting horses — 700 at a time." Besides the wild horses that ate the feed, lions and wolves killed the calves. For instance, "Ol' Big Foot," a large wolf, killed 150 calves in one fall, apparently just because of a lust for blood.
Although many of the early San Juan cowboys carried guns to shoot these predators, they did not often carry guns to shoot other men. But this fact does not mean that the cowboy's life was not filled with violence and death. Al Scorup misjudged a wild steer once and ended up with his leg ripped open and his kneecap almost torn off. Tying himself to the saddle so he would not fall off when he fainted with pain, Al turned his horse toward Bluff, three days away. Jacob Adams, Al's friend from that first drive into Colorado and later a foreman for Scorup, tried to cross White Creek too soon after a thunderstorm. He told the hesitating boys who were with him, "Ah, hell, you c'n cross this," then spurred his own horse into the rush of brown water. Jacob's men found his horse a couple of hundred yards down the canyon. They found Jacob's body the next day four miles downstream lodged behind a rock. His neck and one arm were broken.
If the country was hostile and violent, it was also beautiful and aweinspiring. More than one cowboy carried a camera to photograph the cliffs, canyons, and fantastic formations of his world. Not the least of these are the great natural bridges that Jim Scorup rediscovered and helped to name, and which are now a part of Bridges National Monument. But the beauty of these cliffs and canyons might well have been lost to the frustrated cowboys who tried to traverse them. Often a rider would have to detour for miles before he could find a break in the sheer walls of a wash. Thus a cow just a few hundred yards away on the other side of White Canyon wash might just as well be in the next state. The ride was just about as long to one place as to the other.
By living in caves and shanties; eating sourdough, beans, dried fruit, and venison when they had time; by riding as long as daylight would let them see and often longer; looking for grassy pockets and drifting their herd along to each one; the boys kept their cattle alive. The first year the number dwindled, but the next year the cattle wintered well. By the summer of 1893, Al and Jim had good reason for hope. At the Wooden Shoe, they were able to brand 300 head of calves. By this time, too, the Texans had folded and pulled out, abandoning the summer and winter ranges and leaving the Scorup brothers pretty much to themselves in White Canyon.
But if Al and Jim felt any optimism, it was short-lived. In 1893 a group of Bluff businessmen who had bought out some of the failing Texas outfits pushed 1,300 "Bluff Pool" cattle and 300 horses onto the White Canyon range. Once more the Scorup brothers were involved in an undeclared range war. Riding almost without rest, drifting the Pool cattle away from the grassy pockets and practically hand-feeding their own stock, the brothers hung on through the fall and through a hard winter. By spring, the Scorups' small herd was even smaller; but the Bluff Pool had lost almost half of its stock. The bigger outfit gathered what stock it had left, about 600 head of cattle, and pulled out with new respect for the canyon country and the two boys who ran their cattle there, so much respect in fact that the Bluff Pool owners wanted Al Scorup as their foreman. The brothers were broke, so Al accepted the offer and went to work for $37.50 a month. Leaving Jim with their own cattle, Al took the Bluff Pool herd to Colorado, but whenever he could, Al rode back to the Wooden Shoe to help Jim with the roundup and branding. At best, these were hard, lonesome years for both men.
During these years, Al also found some time to slip into Bluff to get some "book learning" at the one-room school, and to pay a call at the Bayles residence. At the school he soon acquired the fundamentals essential to his business transactions; at the Bayles's he soon acquired more than just a liking for the dark haired girl who cooked there. After a respectable engagement of "a year or two," Al decided that it was "time to settle down." He and Emma drove to Salt Lake and were married in January of 1895. A bad winter made the return to San Juan next to impossible, so Al Scorup and his bride "honeymooned" at the Scorup home in Salina for the rest of the winter.
Returning to White Canyon the next spring, Al found a disgruntled, discouraged partner ready to sell out and go back to Sevier County. Jim has been described as "a hard twisted youngster, freer to fight, freer to laugh, and lacking Al's pigheadedness when it came to butting his skull against a stone wall." And the evidence certainly indicated that the Scorups were butting their skulls against a stone wall. Four years of rimrocks, hard work, and loneliness had yielded exactly nothing. The brothers had in fact suffered a net loss. All Jim could count for their efforts was a shrunken herd of 120 cattle, and even some of these were leased from Smith Parker. Jim wanted to quit.
As he was to do many times, Al sat down with his brother, and arguing with what must have been an almost religious fervor, he told Jim that there was nothing for them in Sevier, that if they were ever to be more than just second-rate cattlemen, they "must stick with White Canyon and the Wooden Shoe." Jim decided to stay.
Trading with Parker for his White Canyon cattle, borrowing to buy cattle from Jacob Adams, Al tried desperately to get their failing enterprise going again. But the hard winter and low prices of 1896-97 made conditions even worse. With cattle going for $12.00 a head, everything that could be rounded up had to be sold just to pay debts and buy supplies. The 40 cows and a few calves that Al and Jim kept must have looked like a pretty small return for six years of hard work. To keep from going broke, the boys needed more money. Once again Al rode towards Bluff, looking for a job.
This time he signed a contract with the Bluff Pool to gather wild cows. For years cattle had been slipping into a 60-mile maze of dry junipers west of Bluff. The entanglement had plenty of grass and water, but it was so thick in many places that a horse and rider could not get through. Unmolested now for years, generations of wild longhorns had grown up in this jungle-like juniper forest without ever seeing a human being. The Bluff Pool owners figured these wild animals belonged to them. Al Scorup figured that for $5.00 a head he could get the cattle out. So, taking some of the braver Bluff boys, Al went to work. The stories of what happened in that forest, sometimes comical in the telling but almost disastrous in the doing, have gone around many bunkhouses and campfires. Snubbing a recalcitrant animal to a stout juniper until he decided to be led, diving out of the way of a wildeyed steer that broke loose, yoking two animals together, twisting tails, dehorning, working, sweating, freezing, Al and his little crew worked all winter long dragging "wild-as-buckskin" longhorns out of the junipers. By spring they had rounded up more than 2,000 head. Al deposited almost $10,000 in the bank at Durango, and rode back to the Wooden Shoe.
Now with enough money to "run on" without selling, Al and Jim were able to shop around themselves for good buys. Later that same year (1898), the Bluff Pool collapsed and the Scorups bought it out. The next year they bought cattle from the Indian Creek Company and from Monroe Redd; the next year from Bob Hott. And so it went each year. Al and Jim were building — carefully buying, carefully selling, increasing their herd with every opportunity.
But Al was interested in the quality as well as the quantity of their cattle. He knew that on the same feed better cows put on more weight and that pounds meant dollars. Thus as early as 1901-02, he and Jim were back in Ephraim buying pure-blooded Hereford bulls.
The 300-mile trail drive back to White Canyon was no easier with 30 bulls than it had been with 300 cattle a decade or so earlier. To get their bulky animals across the river, the brothers once again hired some extra men and a boat. With one Scorup in the stern holding the halter rope and the other riding behind the bull laying on with a willow, the big brutes were "led" across the Colorado, one at a time. But the bulls were not always reasonable about crossing. A splash of water or a gust of wind at the wrong moment would set off a grand melee of horse, bull, and boat in the middle of the water. Once when things were more than just a little hectic, with the bull trying to get into the boat, with Jim on the horse trying to keep it out, and with the rivermen trying to keep the boat right side up, Al leaped out of the boat, lit straddle of the bull and rode it to shore. "I wasn't trusting that boat in those huge waves," Al said later. "I couldn't swim and I knew that bull could."
By 1912 the "Scorup brothers" outfit had become a sizeable cattle concern; their "Lazy TY" brand could be seen on thousands of cattle that ranged over tens of thousands of acres from the Elk Ridge of the Blue Mountains to the junction of the San Juan and the Colorado.
By this time also, the brothers were accumulating more domestic responsibilities. Jim had four children, one boy and three girls; Al had six children, all girls. Al's first home, a rock cabin that he and Emma rented in Bluff for $1.50 a month, had been replaced first by a two-room wooden house and finally by a large, ten-room home built from quarried stone. 43 Providing the best that he could for his family, the now prospering cattleman even bought an automobile, one of the first in Bluff, though there were hardly any roads to drive it on. 44 But if Al provided well for his family he was not often at home to help them enjoy the new car or the fine house. One of his daughters recalls that when he did come home,
Jim got home even less than Al. On a bull-buying trip to Salina he had met Elmina Humphrys, a Salina school teacher, and in 1908 they were married. Thinking that life in San Juan would be too hard for his bride, Jim had insisted that Elmina stay in Salina. So, for almost 10 years, whenever Jim came home he had to plan on a trip of 600 miles, a lot of it on horseback.
In 1918 Al and Jim started to talk about selling out in San Juan County. Prices were good and their brother Pete had a good ranch for sale at Lost Creek, just outside Salina. By buying the ranch they could get away from the rimrocks, settle down to a civilized life, and raise a few purebred Herefords. Al had already bought a home in Provo so his girls, now college age, could go to school. Jim was more than anxious to be with his family. Moving their operation to Sevier County seemed just the thing for the Scorup brothers to do. So Al and Jim sold the Wooden Shoe-White Canyon interests to Jacob Adams and his brother, the rest of their holdings to other San Juan cattlemen and bought Pete's Lost Creek Ranch.
But before he even got the San Juan dust out of his saddle blanket, Al Scorup was bargaining for another big canyon country ranch. When he heard that David Goudelock was willing to sell the Indian Creek Cattle Company, Al could not resist the temptation. After walking up and down the streets of Moab with Bill and Andrew Somerville until they consented to go in with him, and by signing Jim's name along with his own, Al finally put together enough money for a down payment of $50,000. The Scorup brothers were back in the canyon cattle business.
When Jim found out what Al had done he was "not only upset but was fiery mad." However, pleading and reasoning as he had done before, Al persuaded Jim that it was "the only thing to do." Still partners in the cattle business, the brothers decided that while Jim looked after their interests at Salina, Al would go to Indian Creek. The arrangement seemed ideal to Jim. Now he could spend some time with his wife and family. But Jim had just settled down to his new job at Lost Creek when Elmina contracted pneumonia and died.
Jim was not quite so "hard twisted" after that. The heavy buying at high prices in the fall, the falling market since the Armistice, the huge debt to Goudelock — all the problems of the business seemed to set heavier on him than similar problems had ever done before. In February he "caught the flu"; it was soon pneumonia; and in less than a week, he was in his bed dying.
The news that Jim was seriously ill came to Al while he was struggling with three feet of snow and starving cattle on the winter range at Indian Creek. Leaving the cattle as they were, Al saddled his horse and set out through the stirrup-deep snow for the nearest possible transportation, the railroad station at Thompson — almost 120 miles away. Al just missed the morning train. He waited all day; then just as he was getting on the evening train, a telegram came. Jim was dead.
"I think I really became an old man during the winter of' 19 and '20," Al told his sister. "It is the worst year I have ever lived." Jim was gone. The cattle market was gone. The feed on the range was buried under 36 inches of snow, and there was not a spear of hay to be bought. Cattle were dying everywhere. By spring almost 2,000 head of Indian Creek cattle were dead. Three hundred had starved to death right in the feed yard. Al paid a trapper $1.50 apiece to skin as many carcasses as possible. Then he sold the hides for $.28 a pound ; that was all he could do. On every side of him cattle outfits were folding up, but Al Scorup managed to hang on. By now his methods were familiar to those who knew him — buy carefully, deal shrewdly, work harder, ride longer, pull your belt tighter, do not spend anything you do not have to, and above all stay with the cattle. Such methods made life pretty difficult, but, at least for Al, they worked.
When prices began to creep back up, the Indian Creek cattle pool was still in business. In 1921 steers sold for $20.00 a head; in 1923 for $25.00 a head. In 1926, Al, the Somervilles, and Jacob Adams combined to form the Scorup-Somerville Cattle Company; the bulk of the stock was Al's. In 1927, the Scorup-Somerville Cattle Company held a U.S. Forest Service grazing permit for 6,780 head of cattle, the largest ever issued in the United States. In 1928 Al sold 4,400 head of cattle for $194,000 and paid Goudelock the final $ 100,000. Though the hard years of the depression still lay ahead, the S. S. Cattle Company was never in financial trouble again. Each year 7 to 10,000 head of cattle wandered over Scorup-Somerville range. And that range itself covered a giant triangle from the Blue Mountains to the junction of the San Juan and the Colorado, an area of almost 2 million acres.
When Al was almost sixty years old, he was still spending long hours in the saddle. He could still rope and cut cattle, but most of his work now was supervising. Another generation of nephews and sons-in-law were carrying out many of the orders. Even members of a third generation of Scorups could sometimes be seen trotting along at Al's heels. Merrill Nelson, whose own father was killed in a fall from a horse at Lost Creek, often went with his grandfather out on the range. But even a grandson had work to do. For years, Merrill's main chore at the cowboy camp was taking care of his granddad's bedroll. The two mattresses, the pile of blankets, the pillow, and the double-sized tarpaulin were plenty for a grown man to handle, and almost too much for a half-grown boy. On many mornings, as he struggled to get the small mountain properly rolled, tied, and into the wagon, Merrill longed for the day when he would never see that bedroll again. Perhaps Al was remembering those mornings and the struggles of his grandson when he made one of his last requests. Al wanted Merrill to have his old bedroll.
From the grandchildren to Al Scorup himself, everybody in the S. S. cattle outfit had to work; it was a tough business and hard country; to survive you had to be tough and work hard. Those who could not take it did not last long with Al; those who could take it and stayed were appreciated and respected. These were men of Al's own stripe, men who knew and had a high regard for the country and the cattle in it, men like the Adams brothers and the Somervilles; men like Henry Lyman who punched S. S. cattle for over 20 years; men like Harve Williams who went to work for "Mr. Scorup" in 1927, who stuck through the hard years, who drew only enough wages one year for a pair of levis and some cigarette paper to protect his chapped lips. Another man, crippled Fred Eiconberger, hardly left the ranch at all in the 15 years that he worked for "Mr. Scorup." The fact that he was crippled did not keep Fred from putting in a good day's work, but it did cause him some embarrassment. Al Scorup sent more than one otherwise excellent cowhand packing up the road without so much as a ride to the highway for making fun of Fred's twisted leg.
Al would have no "nonsense" from his cowboys. At roundups there were none of those impromptu rodeos with an excited steer and an impetuous young rider that "sweat dollars right off a cow." Nor would Al allow the cowboys to use whips or dogs. An overzealous nip by a dog might cripple a cow. Or she might decide to turn and fight. In either case precious pounds might be lost. But if Al was firm, he was also fair. In the summer of 1907 or 1908, Al and some companions were making a trip from Bluff to the Elk Mountain. A short time before they got to Twin Springs, Al's headquarters on the Elk, they met Old Posey Ute coming down the trail on a pony. He had killed three deer near Twin Springs. One of them was tied on the same horse he was riding and two were lashed on a pony he was leading behind. Everyone stopped and the men exchanged a few greetings. Twin Springs cabin and it was all the baking powder he had until he returned to Bluff in about a week.
Sitting on their horses, Al and Posey just looked at each other for several minutes. Finally, in a very deliberate manner, Al got off his horse, walked over to Posey and took the can from his pocket. Then Posey admitted that he had taken it from Al's cabin. But he said that he did not have any baking powder at his camp either. After a moment or two Al said, "Posey, get down from your horse and I'll give you part of the baking powder." They found an empty can, and the cowboy and the Indian sat on the ground and divided the baking powder.
Al was just as firm and fair in his financial dealings as he was in his treatment of other men. At least one person certainly thought so. For 30 years Ed Lavender bought cattle from Al Scorup; sometimes as many as 2,000 head were involved, yet never once was there a signed contract or written agreement.
"He was as regular as clockwork about everything," his daughter recalls. "He had every day planned ahead; the months too — the dates when he'd deliver, and things he was going to do." Thus Al Scorup's day always began hours before sun up, even when he was 60 years old. His son-in-law remembers that "he'd get up at three o'clock in the morning, and he'd take a bath and then go back to bed for a little while. He done all his thinkin'then."
But while Al did plenty of "thinkin'," he was not known as a "talker"; he was certainly sociable; but in the true western tradition, Al Scorup was a man of few words. "Kind of draggy" is the way one good friend described his speech. His dress was distinctive too, at least in the later years. He always wore a white shirt, perhaps in reaction to other years when he did not have one. On or off the range he could usually be distinguished from others by his large frame, slightly bowed legs, and white shirt buttoned against the sun at the cuffs and collar. Al did not go much for bright colors or prints as many cowboys do. "Calico shirts" he called them.
The big man with the blue eyes and white shirt was a familiar sight to everyone around the Indian Creek headquarters for many years. Riding his favorite horse, "OF Booger," Al Scorup continued to direct the affairs of the Scorup-Somerville Cattle Company long after he had passed the normal age for retirement. Emma, his wife, had died in 1935. He had married again. But even the close attention of Laura, his second wife, could not prevent the stiffness in his bad knee, or the aches of other old breaks and bruises from reminding him that he was no longer a young man, that for a cowboy he had lived a long time. One night during those last years, Al stuck his head in the bunkhouse door, and motioned Henry Lyman, the only cowboy awake, to follow him over to his cabin. He wanted to talk, he told Henry, and so the two old cowboys sat and swapped wild cow stories and talked of the days of the long drives to Thompson before cattle trucks, and of the changes in the country since the uranium boom. Each time there was a pause in the conversation Al's head would begin to nod; then with a jerk he would start to talk again. Finally Al's heavy chin settled on his chest and he lost all consciousness. Henry slipped out of his chair and back over to his own quarters, but in a few minutes Al was back again leading Henry out of the bunkhouse for the second time. "I'm not through talkin' yet," he told his friend. "If I fall asleep again, you just pick up the paper and read awhile. I'll wake up in just a minute. I don't want you to leave until I'm through talkin'." And there were a lot of "old times" to be talked about.
Al Scorup kept riding until he was 80 years old. Then age finally did what bucking horses and wild cattle had been unable to do. A stroke crippled him. Not long after the stroke, he sat in his wheelchair at a stockholders' meeting and saw the reins of management of the Scorup-Somerville Cattle Company pass to Harve Williams, now his son-in-law. A few months later, on October 5, 1959, Al Scorup died.
His obituaries list many accomplishments and honors but none more fitting than his election to the Cowboy Hall of Fame to be remembered alongside Charles Goodnight, Richard King, and other great cattlemen of America. Here in Utah he is still remembered as an outstanding cattleman, and Scorup-Somerville cattle still graze over much of that rugged country that he won for himself. But the piece of our heritage that Al Scorup represents is fast fading. Charlie Fry, the miners, the Texans, the Bluff Pool men are all gone. Many of those who rode with him, who knew him best, will soon be gone. Already the spot where he and Jim fought their herd across the Colorado is disappearing under the water of Lake Powell, and a large section of the winter range where he struggled with starving, freezing cattle when the snow was so deep will soon be lost behind the boundaries of Canyon Lands National Park. Now as missiles spook the cattle, as ore trucks roar along where only a horse used to go, as progress eats away at what he built, one wonders how long the memory of Al Scorup, of what he did, will remain vivid. One wonders how many of the tourists who may honk at "Flying V Bar" or "Lazy TY" cattle will ever know the story of hardship, of disappointment, of sacrifice, and of success that go with those cattle. One wonders how many will know of that 19-year-old boy who crossed the Colorado 72 years ago with a spare horse, a couple of patchwork quilts, and a dream.
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