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By Bob Welch

Note: this article features images of deceased animals.

The Smokehouse Creek fire sparked on the afternoon of February 26, about a mile north of Stinnett, Texas, when a power line went down at the intersection of County Road 11 and County Road O in the midst of 60-mile-per-hour winds.

Some 70 miles east, on his family’s Wagon Creek Ranch west of Canadian, Texas, Craig Young worked, worried and watched from a high point. Within 24 hours the blaze consumed about half a million acres, coming straight toward Young.

Young knows this country. He grew up in Hemphill County. He knew between his ranch and Stinnett there was nothing to stop the fire: just the rough and rolling grass country of the Canadian River breaks. There were no swaths of farm ground that would slow the blaze. Firefighters could not establish fire breaks or back burns in the broken, brushy and remote terrain.

As it approached, he and his wife, Cindy, packed what they could in the truck in case they needed to evacuate.

“What do you take when that happens?” Young asks. “You take what’s important. You take pictures of your family, your parents, your kids, your grandkids and that’s what you take. That’s what you throw in there. I have a Bob Marrs saddle or two I’d thrown in the back of my pickup.”

But they didn’t leave immediately. As the fire approached, Young watched from a high point on the ranch. In 2017, the last time fires ravaged the area, his ranch was spared. Maybe the fire crews could get it out, maybe the weather and winds would turn in their favor.

“They actually got it out three miles west of my ranch,” he said. “I was up there all night watching it, and the winds were terrible. The humidity was low, and the guys on the ground didn’t have a chance to stop it the way it was going. But the winds died down, and the humidity came up and they got it mopped up. It was unbelievable.

“So it was dark by then, and I could just see it as a big red glow,” he says. “I could see it, and I could see some of the flames over the top of some hills. It was still three to four miles away from me, and that red glow just started going out that night.”

The Smokehouse Creek Fire burned more than 1.2 million acres of the Texas Panhandle, most of it ranching country. | Peter Robbins Photo

Prospects looked great

Craig Young grew up in Hemphill County on a ranch his family settled on over 100 years ago. He holds fond memories of playing in the headwaters of the Washita River with his 20-some cousins as a boy. “We had our own football team,” he says. “And so we were raised out there and that’s what I love. My wife is the same way on her side.” He followed Cindy to Stillwater, Okla., for a year of school at Oklahoma State University, but they didn’t stay. Instead, they were married at 19 (42 years ago) and came back to her family’s ranch.

“That’s what I’ve always wanted to do,” he says. “And I just love it.”

He and Cindy raised two sons and a daughter on the ranch—and they’ve grown up and moved on into their own lives. Craig encouraged them to pursue their dreams, but he taught them how to work.

“I might’ve overworked them when they were still home,” he says with a grin. “They were still in high school and I had about a mile of a new fence I wanted to build, so over Christmas break, we built the fence. My boys, they were sitting in a corner. I would go by on a four-wheeler stretching out some wire, and every time I went by, I’d say, ‘Merry Christmas!’ They would laugh, and I did it several times. About the fourth time, my oldest son, as I went by and said, ‘Merry Christmas!’ he said, ‘Dad, it’s not funny anymore.’”

At their height, the Youngs ran on about 10,000 acres and turned out around 3,000 summer yearlings. Over the years, they’ve downsized to about 6,000 acres and just under 1,000 stockers. Lately, he’s focused on the rangeland management aspect of his operation.

“Over the last 10 years I’ve really got serious about brush control, chemical-wise, and with a track hoe,” Young says. “So I’m seeing lots of changes in my country. The springs are coming back, and lots of grass. We had about 30 inches of rain last year, that’s a lot around here. I had pulled some cattle off and I had been rotating some pastures and cutting numbers, trying to get my grass established better. I had some big bluestem that was over six feet tall in patches, and that’s the first time I’ve ever had that.”

Prospects looked great for 2024. He had 800 yearlings in the Canadian Feedyard, a strong cattle market and lots of old feed to get them started.

An ominous feeling

Craig Young went to bed on the night of February 28 knowing the fire had gone out just three miles west of his ranch. But he couldn’t sleep. At 4 a.m. he got up and drove to that same high spot. The winds were calm and he ran into a volunteer fire chief who had spent the night on his ranch. As the day dawned the winds stayed calm, but there was an ominous feeling in the air.

“We had some things packed in the truck,” Young says. “They were predicting big winds for later in the day with a 50- to 60-mile-an-hour northerner coming in so I told my wife, ‘Don’t unpack.’

“We didn’t have any air support. If we would’ve had air support, they could have come in that morning until 10 or 11 o’clock. But by then the winds got terribly bad. The winds were so strange that day. They were out of the west. Then they were out of the south. Then, of course, it turned from the north later on. It got started again, and the guys on the ground, they didn’t have a chance. Man, it got to rolling. I kept thinking maybe it’d go around, but it didn’t.”

At 4:30, he rushed from his vantage point and told Cindy, “We have to go. I hate it, but we have to.” Despite being completely packed up, strange things happen in those moments of panic.

“I was fixing to jump in, and my wife said, ‘Grab my Stihl battery-operated blower.’ I said, ‘What?’ I just thought, ‘Well, this isn’t a time to argue,’” Young remembers. “So I threw that blower on the top of my Bob Marrs saddles and off we went. We hit the county road and I looked back over my shoulder and I saw huge flames come over the hill about a hundred yards from our house. They were just licking up in the air. I thought, ‘Oh mercy.’”

Young called his neighbors to tell them what he was seeing and advise that they leave, too. The neighbors called the fire department and followed the Youngs out. They picked up Cindy’s mother and went to the safest place they could think of at that moment: The Abundant Life Assembly of God Church parking lot.

Fear and trust

The fire burned right up to Craig and Cindy Young’s home, somehow, though, the firefighters saved it.

Sitting in the church parking lot that he attended his entire life, a flurry of emotions overtook him and his wife. First, relief to have escaped the flames. Of course, not knowing the fate of their home, their ranch and their horses was heart-wrenching. Then, impatience, confusion and frustration.

“We got trapped in Canadian for six, seven hours,” he said. “It was just black smoke. You couldn’t even see the sun. It was like the end times or something. It was incredible.”

The winds were such that the firefighters anticipated the flames would threaten the town of Canadian from the north, so they concentrated their forces there. Unbeknownst to the firefighters, however, the fire spread to the south of Canadian as well. The highways on both sides of town were closed and most of the fire trucks were north, leaving the southern homes exposed. More than 70 homes were lost.

“The winds were just incredibly … You just didn’t know what they were going to do,” Young says. “There was no place to go.

“I have to admit, there was some fear there. So we put our trust in the Lord. My wife and I both were raised in good Christian homes. But at that time, there’s fear.”

And uncertainty. For six or seven hours there were rumors of whose homes were lost and whose were saved. Having grown up in Canadian, Craig and Cindy knew most everyone for whom there were reports being made.

“At that time, we didn’t know about our home either,” he says. “So it was probably four hours there, just praying a lot and just hoping everybody was okay and that nobody was going to get hurt or killed.”

Two people did die in the fire, however. Cindy Owen, a delivery driver from Amarillo was caught in the smoke and flames on the highway. Joyce Blankenship died when flames engulfed her home south of Stinnett.

About seven o’clock that evening a volunteer firefighter called Craig to tell him his house was saved.

“As we left our ranch the flames were so big, I thought, ‘There’s no way the fire trucks get to our house.’” Craig says. “But somehow, they did. Three of them got to our house, and the fire burned up to our driveway. I have a bunkhouse. It got within five feet of the bunkhouse, five feet of my horse fence, and they circled the wagons there. You could just tell exactly where my firefighters went, and they saved my home. I’m so grateful for that. Ninety percent of the ranch burned up, but that’s okay. They saved our home, and I didn’t have cattle at the time. And so we came out really good. I have nothing to complain about.”

His horses, as an aside, were in a large dirt lot and came through the smoke and fire unfazed.

The cost of loss

Young’s neighbor, on the other hand, did not fare so well. Shane Pennington has managed Jack Field’s ranch of 200 registered Simmental cows for about 20 years. When the fires hit, the herd was in the middle of calving season. There were brand new babies and cows yet to calve.

Craig Young helped a neighbor dispose of dead livestock. An estimated 12,000 cows and calves were lost in the fire.

“A lot of these cows he raised from a baby,” Young says. “He’s been out there a long time, so he knew them. It was devastating for him. He has an older son that’s in high school and when I went over they were having to shoot some cows that were down.”

Immediately, Young returned home and came back with his tractor and some round bales of hay that had been donated to the relief effort. The first day, Pennington and his two sons rode the Canadian River trying to find cows that were still alive. The ones they did find wouldn’t leave their dead babies. The Penningtons pushed up what they could—two, three at a time—and Young would drop off hay for them. After two or three days of that, Pennington and Young began the gruesome task of burying the dead. They figured they lost about 80 cows and 80 calves.

[Read more: Flood of Generoisty]

“I dragged the cows with my tractor, and put the baby calves in the bucket,” Young says, fighting off tears. “They didn’t have any hair on them. We did that for two or three days. Some of the cows were pregnant, and they were kind of coming apart…”

Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service released a statement on May 7 outlining the damage. More than 1.2 million acres burned and more than 12,000 cattle died. Monetarily, some $68.7 million was lost in ranch infrastructure, $26 million in long-term grazing damage, and $27 million in cattle losses which includes both cows and the estimated season’s calf crop. Another $1 million is attributed to disposal costs.

“There’s a lot of good people in America.”

In the 2017 fires, Wes Avent, who owns Animal Health and Nutrition in Canadian became the hub for relief efforts. When the Smokehouse Creek Fire hit, he knew exactly what to do and his feed store again became a clearinghouse for donated feed and hay. Once Avent knew who was and wasn’t affected by the fire, he began placing calls for help managing the donations and distributions. Craig Young was one of his first calls.

“He had called me, and I was still with Shane,” says Young. “He said, ‘You just take care of him. Don’t worry about this.’ So after about a week, I called him back and said, ‘You still need me?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah. I need you.’ So I just roaded my tractor on into town.”

Scattering hay over 1.2 million acres is no small undertaking. Young spent all day every day for a week unloading and loading semis. There were full loads of mountain Timothy grass hay from Kentucky, meant for race horses, that showed up. A young couple drove eight hours to bring two big round bales in the back of a 16-foot full-top stock trailer—and said they wished they could have done more.

“I saw things like that and then semis coming in with big old American flags draped to the side of their hay,” he says. “It’s just a really encouraging site to see and how people wanted to help. There’s a lot of good people in America. Hay came in from four or five different states.”

Yet with all the relief, the damage will require years of work and millions of dollars to repair. After the initial cattle losses, the fencing costs seem daunting.

“I lost 20-25 miles of fence,” says Young. “I’ve done 10 miles so far, and I probably have another 10 to 15 to do, it’s costing anywhere from $20,000 to $25,000 a mile in this rough country. So you can get up to $500,000 very easily. The government is cost-sharing 75% of that. It’s incredible. Without that, it would’ve bankrupt a lot of these ranches. I think they would’ve had to actually sold some acreage to get back in the game without this cost-sharing program.”

The Farm Service Agency and National Resource Conservation Service have been at the forefront of the governmental disaster assistance programs and Andy Holloway, the County Extension Agent, has earned a reputation among the area agriculturalists as a superhero of sorts.

The folks in the entire area, in fact, have risen to the occasion not only to rebuild but to help each other out.

“That’s just the type of people around here and the type of spirit that people have, and just helping one another,” Young says. “There’s just a lot of good people, a lot of Christian folks. We can’t live in a better place, I don’t think, than this top of the Panhandle. It’s tough people, too. They didn’t think about it very long. The next morning, they went to work.

“It’s going to take a while. It may be two years before all the homes are built back, and it may be two years for all these fences to get rebuilt and our grass to get re-established. Our cow herds, it may be three, four years before the cow herds are built back up, but we can have God’s peace today. That’s what I’ve seen. There’s just been a peace and a calm. There hasn’t been a panic. We’re going to get there. We’re already getting there.” ★

 

Smokehouse Creek Fire | February 26, 2024 to March 16, 2024

Two deaths • More than 500 structures lost • 1.2 million acres burned 12,000 cattle lost • $123 million in agricultural damages • The most costly wildfire on record

The following are loss estimates by category compiled by AgriLife Extension economists:

‣ $68.7 million: Ranch infrastructure, fences, barns, corrals, well pump motors and windmills, stocks of hay or feed.

‣$26 million: Lost long-term grazing in fire-damaged pastures and range and short-term emergency feeding.

‣ $27 million: Cattle losses due to wildfires. Livestock loss estimates include both cows and estimated losses to the season’s calf crop. Another $1 million in miscellaneous includes disposal costs for deceased animals and forced marketing losses.

 

This article appears in the Spring 2024 issue of the Ranch Record.  Would you like to read more stories about NRHC and 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.