By Sue Hancock Jones
Wes O’Neal began breaking broncs when he was 13 years old, and now he is three months shy of being 89 and a few years short of being a working cowboy for eight decades.
Wes has a sharp mind and every memory has a date. He knows immediately that he became the Wagon Boss in 1963 at the nation’s largest contiguous ranch, bought a house in Holliday, Texas, in 1960 with his wife Pat, and left the W.T. Waggoner Estate in May 2016 after 58 uninterrupted years on the same ranch.
A cowboy can collect a lot of memories in nearly eight decades of sitting horseback and watching the sunrise.
“I was born in Clarendon (Texas) on Nov. 30, 1933, right smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression,” Wes recalls. “There was no jobs and no money.” His father worked on the Mel B. Davis Ranch in the Panhandle but quit ranching when he could make more money on a road construction crew.
“The last year Daddy cowboyed, he grossed $720, and there was four of us siblings at that time,” Wes said. Eventually the family had four girls and four boys. Three of the boys would cowboy on some of the largest and most well-known ranches in America—or, as Wes tells it, in North America.
A 2016 photo hanging on the wall of the Cook House at the Four Sixes Ranch marks the beginning of Wes’s time as a day worker at the historic Texas ranch. The photo shows Wes and his brother Boots standing next to a cowboy tepee during a fall roundup.
photo by Peter Robbins
“That was the first time in about 50 years we was back on the same ranch,” Wes said. The brothers are 14 months apart in age and had worked together at both the JA and Waggoner ranches. Boots worked at the Waggoner for 24 years before joining the 6666 payroll for 32 years. Their younger brother “Little Joe” also worked on the Waggoner for 50 years.
Wes and his siblings were raised in what he calls a shack with no electricity or indoor plumbing. “You couldn’t hardly call that old thing a house,” he said. “It was just kinda a cardboard shack.”
When his father got sick and the old house burned to the ground without the family saving anything, Wes and Boots put up hay one summer pulling the machines with horse teams and then began breaking broncs for area ranchers.
“I tell everybody that I left school in the tenth grade because it was gettin’ in the way of my education,” Wes said, “but truly there wasn’t no money, Dad wasn’t workin’ and we had younger siblings at home. The RO Ranch was the first big bunch of horses we broke.”
Wes and Boots broke 20 broncs for the RO Ranch in the Texas Panhandle for $20 per head, pocketing $200 each (about $2,400 today). Then Wes went to work for two smaller ranches before joining Boots at the JA, which was established by cofounder Charles Goodnight in 1875 as the first ranch in the Texas Panhandle.
In 1957 the two brothers broke 48 broncs at the JA in less than six weeks for $15 per head. Wes eventually became Wagon Boss for the JA before working for the W.T. Waggoner Estate until it sold. Today he still lives in Holiday and day works for the Four Sixes Ranch near Guthrie, Texas.
Wes O’Neal in 1983.
“Wes has left a lasting impression on all of us and left his mark at the Waggoner Estate and everywhere else he has been,” said A.B. (Buck) Wharton III, former owner of the W.T. Waggoner Estate. The Waggoner ranch grew to more than 520,000 acres spread over six Texas counties and was the nation’s largest ranch under one fence before being sold.
Wes worked at the Waggoner Estate for nearly six decades, serving 12 years as Wagon Boss during his 17 years with the cattle operation. He spent 41 years with the Waggoner horse operation and 25 of those years as horse foreman directing the breeding of broodmares and stallions.
Before moving to Holliday, he and Pat lived at the Whiteface Camp horse headquarters located near the town of Electra. Pat was high school registrar for 29 years at the Electra Independent School District before her death in 2013.
Wharton said that Wes’s idea of retirement was that he no longer worked on weekends, but Wes admits to trying to retire once in 2000. The ranch asked him to stay a few more years to help train his replacement, but he didn’t leave until the ranch sold 16 years later.
“His insight into breeding horses laid the groundwork for the W.T. Waggoner Estate being selected as having the best ranch horses in the country when it received the coveted American Quarter Horse Association Best Remuda Award in 1994,” Wharton said. “He traveled to Nashville to receive the award on behalf of the Waggoner Ranch.
“Looking forward we can see that his legacy will be a continuation of the line of great ranch horses at the Waggoner Estate.”
Despite his horse breeding legacy, Wes sees himself more as a cowboy than a horse breeder. He’d rather be roping, riding and dragging calves to the fire than breeding mares. Even when he was breeding horses, he oversaw an 800-cow resident herd for the Waggoner. Wes is a cowboy who prefers cows, but not just any cows. He’s a Hereford man.
Wes carries a cell phone, has an email address and is adept at texting. Cowboying in the 21st century probably honed those skills. “Back in the early days of the JA or Waggoner, there was no communication,” Wes said. Today every cowboy carries a cell phone and can talk to each other even out in a big pasture 40 miles from nowhere.
photo by Peter Robbins
“It started changin’ in the 70s when gooseneck trailers began showin’ up,” Wes said. “Instead of just getting’ on a long trot or lopin’ to the back side, now we can load up and haul around to where we want to go. It saves time and don’t take as many horses.”
Wes credits horse trainer and clinician Ray Hunt with showing the ranching world a more humane approach to start and break a horse. Wes and every other cowboy followed a different path when he was breaking broncs as a teenager.
Despite changes in today’s ranching, Wes doesn’t believe cowboys are any different. “There was good cowboys in my day,” he said. “All these ranches have good, young cowboys comin’ up. The difference is that all these ranches have improved their breeding horses—raisin’ better horses.
“Nearly all of them have an arena with ropin’ cattle, cuttin’ cattle. You can go down in the evening or at night and train on your young horses. We didn’t have that when Boots and I were startin’ out.”
Wes received the Working Ranch Cowboy Award in 2013 from the Texas Cowboy Reunion in Stamford, Texas, but he’s quick to call the 2022 RHA Working Cowboy Award the highest honor in his lifetime. He’ll give a speech and accept the award on October 15 in front of nearly 500 leaders and representatives from six of the most significant organizations in the ranching and cattle industry.
Wes may not have had a great deal of speaking experience, but some say he is a cowboy philosopher. “While there are a lot of cowboys and a lot of philosophers, there aren’t many people that are both,” according to Col. Don Green, an auctioneer from Roanoke, Ala. “Wes O’Neal is a less famous Will Rogers.”
True to his “less famous than Will Rogers” image, Wes is philosophical about cowboying. “If you’re gonna cowboy,” he said, “you accept the fact that you ain’t gonna ever be rich and you’re gonna get injured from time to time, but the trade-off is worth it to me. You’re not punchin’ no eight-to-five time clock, and you get to see some beautiful sunrises sittin’ on your horse. As Buster Welch says, ‘That’s the best seat in the house.’”
The Ranching Heritage Association developed the RHA Working Cowboy Award five years ago to recognize outstanding men and women who make their living in the saddle taking care of livestock. It was important to the board to recognize those folks who brave all kinds of weather and conditions to ensure that the work gets done. The board also emphasized the need to recognize the candidate’s integrity, impact on the ranch and community and overall standards.
Our first three recipients—Boots O’Neal, Ed Ashurst and Joel Nelson—have set the standard for the award. This year we had another outstanding group of nominees. In the end and through a tough selection process, the selection committee chose Wes O’Neal to be the 2022 recipient. Nominating letters sited Wes as the image of a real cowboy and a role model for younger cowboys because of his modesty, honesty and dedication to his craft.
If you have someone you would like to nominate for this annual award, please contact the NRHC for a nomination form prior to April 2023. —Jim Bret Campbell, NRHC and RHA Executive Director
This article appears in the Summer 2022 issue of the Ranch Record. Would you like to read more stories about ranching life? When you become a member of the Ranching Heritage Association, you’ll receive the award-winning Ranch Record magazine and more while supporting the legacy and preservation of our ranching heritage. Become a member today.
