My wife and I bought a house on a ten-acre lot right on the edge of Clayton, New Mexico. We had to do that ten years ago because the home we had lived in at Bosque farms had to be sold and it wasn’t on enough land to allow us to keep our horses.

I know perfectly well that Clayton is a long ways from any large city in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Colorado. It’s just that the price for our new home was low enough we could actually afford it. It has turned out nice to live way out in this small town area, which sits right against the Texas Panhandle. That has left Clayton a lot like it had been way back in the eighteen hundreds when outlaws like Blackjack Ketch-um ran wild.

It’s just that as newcomers in this area my wife and I have had to learn some lessons in order to keep our mares fed and well cared for. Naturally our ten-acre lot is surrounded on three sides by other landowner’s property. On the east side sit Clayton itself. On our north side is a large pasture owned by a retired county sheriff. On the other two sides is a large piece of property owned by one older couple.

As close to town as we all are those other pieces of land are used for livestock more than our ten acres. It’s just that there have been some times when stock from those other pastures have found a way onto ours and used up a lot of the grass we are depending on to feed our horses with.

When we first moved here a couple heads of cattle had wandered their way onto our land. I saw them while out walking a dog and could easily use him to run them back off our land. That time it was real easy to complain to the south and west landowners about that and they had the fences fixed. At the time I thought that was a good neighborly action.

It wasn’t until last year that I actually found out what was happening in that land. Back then proud cut gilding got through that fence and started racing after one of my mares. At that time I learned that studs that are only partially castrated still think they are stud horses and they act just as belligerently.

While learning that lesson I unfortunately learned that the horse owners were leasing the land to graze their horses on. They didn’t own it and just seamed like they didn’t care one way or the other how or why their horse had come over the fence onto my land. I could hardly get anyone to come over to my pasture and fetch his or her stock.

Wondering why this kind of incident could be legally happening the puzzle only thickened. That was intensified when I went to the county courthouse and found out by law one was responsible for keeping other livestock off your land. No one was responsible in keeping their livestock on their land alone. Who knows how that would work out of town in any area with large ranches? Who can tell who actually is responsible for the fence that separates two small grazing pastures?

That last point is really mysterious when I walk around our pasture to keep track of the barbed wire fencing. Some of the fence has the barbed wire on our side and some parts have it on the outside. If there really is a low making one responsible in keeping other peoples livestock off your land a few points are made. Our neighbors built the sections of fencing that have barbed wire on our side to keep our stock off their fields. If the barbed wire is on the other side of the fence it was built that way to keep other stock off our land.

This fencing law turned out to be real dazzling to me because while trucking I have observed several different kinds of fencing and the state of New Mexico has a law forcing ranchers to build fences and keep their stock off of every road in the state. When one travels into Oklahoma you must be careful. That state +doesn’t require ranchers to build any fencing one could hit some cow while driving through at night while vision is dimmer. None of the Native American Indian reservations in the state of New Mexico are required to build any fences alongside any road on the reservation. I never did pick up on whether there is a highway fencing law in Texas, Colorado or Arizona on any of the times I was trucking through them. It’s just that there always seamed to be some kind of fence alongside the Interstate.

The one piece of horse owner experience that made this conflict with those neighbors was what had been learned while growing up in Bosque Farms. It seamed like back then no one was allowed to let any of his or her livestock roam around into any small pasture belonging to someone else. It’s just that on my grandfather’s small diary farm none of the cattle were ever allowed to escape. I can just remember one time when some woman let a couple of her horses get out onto the highway and my brother in law ran into one of them with his pickup. I’ll never forget how upset that lady was because that horse died. She had even tried to make my brother in law responsible enough to pay her a lot for it. At least the Valencia county judge was smart enough to throw out her claim.

At least after living here a while I have been able to see how much people can really care for their stock. A few months before the people leasing my southern neighbors land took me on the one on my north side had some horses race across his land. There are some neighbors on our west side that have property farther out of town. When their horses escaped and got on the retired sheriff’s pasture they promptly came and took them home. They cared about their horses it was kind of nice to them when my northern neighbor helped them out.

On the north side of that retired sheriff’s pasture is another piece of land where the owners are always grazing a herd of goats. In that case a couple weeks after the horses got into my neighbor’s pasture a herd of goats did. They didn’t stay over there very long before several of them hit our pasture. In this case I learned how some special fencing had been built on my northern fence to keep some goats out. It’s just that this neighbor didn’t seam to care a tiny bit when his herd got onto property belonging to anyone else. He was just as hard to get into gathering his herd up, as the proud cut gilding owners had been to catch their horse up.

Now I can perfectly understand how friendly neighbors can help each other keep their livestock under some control. It’s just that looking back into the eighteen hundreds when this area was mostly populated with ranchers and cowboys I can’t understand how New Mexico could have a law making some cattle rustling perfectly legal. Let’s just assume that any outlaw rancher wouldn’t have to worry about having enough stock to herd to Kansas and make some money. Every time some of his neighbor’s stock wandered onto his land they could be herded into a small pin and branded with the outlaw’s branding iron.

It was a normal function to actually double brand some cattle back in the Wild West. With the price of ground beef being so high right now wouldn’t it be perfectly legal for me to butcher whatever stock roams onto my pasture? In this harsh economy it would really crack me up to legally cattle rustle around Clayton just like they did in Blackjack Ketch-um time.