LIVING HISTORY
62
Bob Enns’s columns in The News-Tribune sometimes drifted to thoughts of
Cow Creek Ranch and the joy he found there.
journey that reconnected me with people I hadn’t seen in 50
years and helped me recover a part of my childhood I had
almost forgotten about.
SETTING UP CAMP
Some of my best ranch memories were of camping out, the
one thing upon which our large and rowdy family agreed.
We’d camp at the ranch at least once a year, at first in tents
and then a rental pop-up trailer and finally a 1967 Volkswagen
camper van where my parents slept and a tent for the
rest of us.
One of our favorite spots was the creek along Son Arnold
Gulley, a site also preferred by cowboy George “Junior” Mills
and his extended family and which my dad called Millsville
because they had discovered its outstanding qualities as a
campsite first. Later, we had a permanent camp on the north
side of the ranch where Dad and my oldest brother, Chuck,
built a small cabin; my brother, Michael, built a chickee; and
we retired the old camper van. We sometimes spent Thanksgiving
at the ranch, with mom bringing out silver goblets and
some of her fine china for the occasion.
Dad loved setting up camp and building a campfire. He’d
whittle a palm frond into a hibachi stick for spearing sausage
and cooking it over the fire. Mom was a former Camp Fire
Girl who always imparted us with the expression, “Always
leave the camp better than you found it.’’
It was amazing how the ranch influenced our lives. We attended
the Okeechobee rodeo almost every year, we listened
to country music, memorizing all of Roger Miller’s most
popular tunes and many of Johnny Cash’s, and we regularly
watched Bonanza on Sunday nights.
My favorite pastime at the ranch was riding Matthews, the
horse my dad rode when working cattle. In the barn, Matthews,
a gelding with white coloring known as a gray, was in
the first stall on the left, his stall assignment at the front inhis
thoughts to drift to the ranch. “My favorite sport, in case I
haven’t told you,’’ he wrote in one column from the 1960s, “is
rounding up cattle at Cow Creek Ranch. Cow Creek has to be
one of the prettiest corners of the universe.’’
While my dad made his living by the written word, he was
intrigued by the artistry of the cowboys’ use of language —
how they described something and relied on the oral tradition
to pass on stories instead of writing them down. Their
language is precise, economical and their stories become better
after each telling. I am fortunate to be able to rely on some
of these stories for the reporting of the series.
FAMILY ATMOSPHERE
And though a half century has passed since my days at
Cow Creek, Debra Sloan and Kathy Sloan Blanton, Jo Ann
and Tommy’s daughters, still refer to my parents as Aunt
Katie and Uncle Bobby, though we share no blood relatives.
Both Jo Ann and Tommy were only children and Debra and
Kathy had no true aunts and uncles.
“My mother would always say of your mother Katie that
they were birthday twins because they were born on the same
day, which was July 22, 1930,’’ Debra says. “Uncle Bobby
would go out to the ranch and he loved to be a cowboy.’’
Tommy and Jo Ann were so close to their ranch hands and
their children that the children called them simply Tommy
and Jo Ann. But we were taught to address them as Mr.
and Mrs. Sloan, a convention of which Jo Ann, raised by a
grandmother who clung to Victorian values, wholeheartedly
approved. Jo Ann always thought I looked most like my dad,
so she always called me “Little Bobby.’’
The Sloan family to us were like royalty or rock stars.
They drove the latest Cadillacs and Jeep Wagoneers. They
lived in a stately home at Orange Avenue and 11th Street,
they owned the beautiful Cow Creek Ranch and, best of all,
they were stars of the annual Cattleman’s Day Parade.
While Tommy commuted to the ranch almost daily in the
early years, Jo Ann and Kathy and Debra, known as Debbie
when she was younger, mostly visited on weekends. They
stayed at what had originally been their great-grandparents’
house right across from the horse barn. Because they were
several years older and Debra went to boarding school at
13 and Kathy married young, I didn’t have much interaction
with the girls, except to remember that they were quite
accomplished on horseback and participated in the chores
required of running the ranch.
In my early days visiting the ranch, I slowly started to
put the pieces together of how Cow Creek Ranch came to
be. The old horse carriage in the barn gave the clue that it
had been around along time. I learned what was the broadest
outline of a story: That Jo Ann’s grandfather, Frank
Raulerson, had founded the ranch and that he and Jo Ann’s
grandmother raised Jo Ann after her father died when she
was a young girl. Jo Ann then inherited the ranch when her
grandfather died.
But it was only after a lifetime in journalism and the deaths
of Jo Ann and my mom just a month apart a little more than a
year ago that I started filling in the details. In the years before
their deaths, my mom had been urging me to write a story
on Jo Ann’s life and it was only after their deaths that I began
working in earnest on the story.
I began with calls to Kathy and Debra. I told them the
story I wanted to write, and they agreed that their mother’s
remarkable life was worth sharing. And so began a yearlong >>