By 1978 the ranchers of Arbon Valley had a habit of branding their calves together each spring, working one ranch and then the next until every herd was done. On June 30, 1978, the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello gave a full page to one of those days, at the ranch of Sod and Nelda Williams. The writer and photographer was Tom Shanahan, and his pictures show the neighbors roping and holding calves.
The Williams ranch
Sod Williams was Donald Thayne Williams (1922–2001), who with his wife Nelda, a daughter of the Ward family, had ranched at Arbon since the years after the Second World War. By 1978 he and their son Barry were running Simmental cattle, a breed the family was among the first to bring into southern Idaho. Between 1956 and 1970 the Utah papers followed Sod as a quarter-horse breeder, show-ring rider and teacher of reining; that side of his life is told in Sod Williams of Arbon and his quarter horses and The Williams family of Arbon in the arena.
How the branding was done
The article walks through the day. Portable pens went up first, and the cattle were brought into them. From there the work split between riders, who caught the calves with their ropes, and a ground crew, who kept each calf still so Sod could brand it and another rancher could give it a shot. Between them, the Arbon ranchers expected to brand nearly 1,200 head that spring.
Three of the neighbors are named in the captions. Sherm Swim, pictured with his rope swinging over the calves, was almost certainly Sherman Hale Swim of the Swim family, then in his mid-fifties and himself a rancher in the valley. Louie Estep and Gail Wood are shown holding a calf down for the iron; the paper calls them ranching neighbors and says nothing more about them. The site's Ward family page names Nelda's sister Eileen as Mrs. Louie Estep of Arbon, so Louie Estep was probably Sod's brother-in-law. The page also reproduced two of the brands, without saying whose they were.
Sod told Shanahan that branding in the open, with ropes and hands instead of a cattle chute, was becoming "a lost art." Chutes had become common elsewhere; in Arbon the neighbors kept roping and kept trading work. He expected the business side of ranching to win out over men of his kind, and his hope was that the old-timers' stories would keep that way of life remembered.
At the rodeo that week
A few days later Sod was roping in Pocatello. At the Fourth of July Rodeo at the Bannock County Fairgrounds, sponsored that year by the Pocatello LDS West Stake, the Journal's results for Monday night, July 3, named Sod Williams of Arbon Valley in both the Old Timers calf roping and the Old Timers steer stopping. In the Tuesday results printed on July 5 he was listed first in both, roping his calf in 16.7 seconds and stopping his steer in 7.5. In June 1980 the Journal reported that Sherm Swim had been the Old Timers roping champion at the same celebration in 1979; a roper qualified for the old timers' events at fifty.
What is not known
The article does not give the date of the branding at the Williams ranch, the names of the other neighbors in the crew, or which ranches the brands on the page belonged to. Sod's wife and daughter-in-law are mentioned as cooking for the crew, but the daughter-in-law is not named.
On this site: Sherm Swim's death in 2011 is noted among the Stories, and a 2010 post on branding describes the valley still roping, throwing and branding calves with neighbors pitching in, more than thirty years after Sod's warning.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, June 30, 1978, page 6. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Ranchers in Arbon Valley were still branding their calves by rope and by hand in 1978, sharing the labor from ranch to ranch, the Journal reported in a photo feature by Tom Shanahan.
Sod and Nelda Williams owned the ranch at the center of the feature, and Sod ran a Simmental herd there with their son Barry. The Arbon ranchers pooled their crews every spring and took the herds one ranch at a time, and by the paper's count they marked close to 1,200 head in 1978. To Williams, branding had two sides: the crew enjoyed the day, and they were relieved once it was over.
Williams saw the old open-herd style fading. Elsewhere, he said, many ranchers had turned to chutes and other equipment meant to speed the job, while he and his Arbon neighbors stuck with ropes. He expected men of his sort to die out as ranching shed its romance and became a business that pushed its people to modernize. A good cowman, as he described it, lived the work so fully that it crowded out nearly everything else. He spoke with pride of the crew's hard work and of the way they pitched in on one another's places, saying they were "proud to help our neighbors out." What he wanted was for the older ranchers' stories to keep the open-range way of life, and the neighborliness that went with it, from being forgotten.
Work at the Williams place got underway in the morning, when Williams and roughly a dozen neighbors set up portable corrals and drove the herd inside. A fire was built to heat the irons. Barry Williams and a few other ranchers on horseback then went after the calves, which were between two and six weeks old, catching each with a rope and pulling it across to a crew on the ground. That crew kept the calf pinned long enough for Sod Williams to put the brand on and for another rancher to vaccinate it. Heat and dust came with the job. The crew broke at midday for sloppy joes that Williams's wife and daughter-in-law had made, and there was beer and soda on ice to drink.
Photographs showed Williams ready to brand a calf, Sherm Swim roping, and Louie Estep and Gail Wood holding a calf for the iron, along with two of the brands.