The Last Roundup

Cattleman Pat Graves hopped in his 1950 Buick one day last week and raced the nine miles from a Denver bank to his 280-acre ranch outside town. He hustled into the kitchen of his one-story ranch house, and sat down to lunch "Well Mom," said Graves to his pretty red-haired wife, "here we are with mor'n half a million in the bank, and look what we're eatin'." In the bowl were ham hocks and lima beans. Graves had just been paid $505,039.33, one of the biggest checks ever made out to an individual cattleman, for his herd of more than 2,000 catte sold at Denver's livestock market. It was Graves's last roundup and the biggest deal in his big-dealing career.

The son of a poor coal miner, Graves was born (1896) in Warrensburg Mo., left school to work in the mines at ten, switched to sheepherding, put in a stint in the Wyoming oilfields. But Graves was never satisfied to work for someone else. He saved enough money to buy a truck, parlayed it into a fleet of seven and sold out for $60,000. With the cash he bought a sheep ranch of his own--and was wiped out when a blizzard killed his herd in 1920.

Graves talked a bank into lending him $100, made a down payment on a cigar store and used it profitably as a front for an illegal liquor business. With the new stake, he got back into sheepherding. When other herders told him it couldn't be done, he moved a herd of 25,000 sheep into Kansas to fatten them up on leased wheatfields. By such tricks he managed to cut his costs enough to weather the depression. Later, he bought 1,800 acres dirt cheap in Colorado, cleaned up when prices rose by selling all but the 280 acres he needed for raising cattle.

When Graves decided to get out of the cattle business and take things easier, he did it in his usual flamboyant way. With his wife, seven herders and a dog named Sparky (the "equal of five men on horseback"), Graves rounded up his cattle and drove them along the road into Denver, the first such cattle drive the city had seen since "the old days." Even with half a million in the bank, Graves was not quite satisfied. Said he: "Think what I could'a done with an education."

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