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Beef on the Line

The Brannaman family keeps the vaquero tradition alive over three days of long ropes and fancy loops.
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Brannaman

Photography by Matt Cohen and written by Logan Ward

Vaquero-style ranch roping is not a speed game. No chute. No spring-loaded gate. Efficiency matters, but judges look for mastery. Horsemanship in the service of working cattle. At the Brannaman Pro-Am Vaquero Roping in California’s Santa Ynez Valley—the year’s richest ranch-roping competition—teams of three riders get four minutes to hold herd and rope a calf. In those four minutes, as the dust boils and loops fly, centuries of tradition unfold.

Reata Brannaman is the future of the vaquero tradition. A crowd favorite at the annual event she and her father, Buck, co-founded, she enters the pen atop her bay roan quarter horse, Ray, and zeroes in on her team’s designated steer. As calves peel off one by one, she swings a long loop over her shoulder. The caller’s voice crackles over loudspeakers: “Reata’s locked and loaded. Looks like she’s going to throw a Houlihan.” Her calf bolts, and Reata fires. The loop arcs, wavering like a smoke ring. It falls around the steer’s head, and Reata gets her slack and stacks dallies on her saddle horn.

“Reata’s got beef on the line!”

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“This kind of horsemanship is more than a sport,” Reata Brannaman says. “It’s a lifestyle. It’s about stewardship of land and cattle and horses. It’s just what I do.”
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The Brannaman Pro-Am Vaquero Roping attracts mostly working cowboys to the Santa Ynez Valley. The three-day competition is a tip-of-the-hat to North America’s original stockmen, vaqueros. They came out of 18th century California’s vast, unfenced ranches, where they worked cattle using braided rawhide ropes called reatas.
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You can tell a vaquero roper by his slick, mulehide-covered saddle horn. He uses it like a clutch—or the drag on a fishing reel. Instead of a hard tie-down, he slips his dally to avoid jerking both cow and horse.
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Vaquero roping is all about finesse. “We specialize in slick-horn roping,” Reata says. “The goal is low-stress stock handling. If you’re doctoring in the pasture, you don’t want to make a sick cow even sicker. Some masters of the slick rope might never come tight on a cow.”
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Judges dock points for rough handling. “If you’re dragging a calf and it starts to get short of air, which naturally will happen, you run your rope to put slack in the rope. That’s a cowboy’s job,” Reata says.
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“Vaqueros had an abundance of three things—good weather, grass and time,” says Bill Reynolds, Buck Brannaman’s longtime friend and co-founder of the Brannaman Pro-Am. They capitalized on that abundance by training their horses to be the best they could be—smart, athletic, responsive working partners.
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Buck borrowed the pro-am concept from tournament golf. Two skilled amateur riders partner with a seasoned pro. “We want amateurs to feel welcome, not intimidated,” he says. “They can relax a little knowing they have a wolfy roper on the team.”
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“Reata is sensitive and in touch with her emotions. At same time she’s tenacious,” her father, Buck Brannaman, says. “When it comes to horses, that’s a winning balance.”
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Raised near Sheridan, Wyoming, in the shadow of the Big Horn Mountains, Reata, 22, rides with the confidence and grace of a veteran. She cut her teeth touring the country with her father, legendary horseman and trainer, as he held horsemanship clinics. Eventually she followed him in her own trailer, hauling colts and living out of the gooseneck.
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“Ray’s been mine since he was a baby,” Reata says. “He’s 1,400 pounds—bigger than your average quarter horse. He’s always calm but quick and on the dime. He’s got such a big heart. I can rope on him all day. He’d pull a house down if I asked him to.”
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Following a heel shot, Reata gets her slack before tying off. “I’ve got a lot of life to live yet, and wherever I go,” Reata says, “I’ll be astride good horses doing my best to make a difference.”

Photographs by Matt Cohen. Written by Logan Ward. Logan is a journalist and author living in Virginia. He writes for Outside, Garden & Gun and other magazines. His memoir, See You in a Hundred Years, chronicles his family’s immersion into 1900-era farm life in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The Chinese-language edition is titled We’re Not Crazy: Let’s Go Live in 1900!