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Bay and driven up the wooden planks that extend out over the water. The
scene was reversed after Spring roundup, when island cowboys herded
fattened cattle down the wooden wharf onto the waiting boat. Crossing
the Santa Barbara Channel was always done at night, as unloading before
daybreak kept the livestock calm and cool while preventing the loss of a
day’s work on the island.
World War II brought new challenges, as in 1942, the United States
government seized
Vaquero
under the War Powers Act. She was sent to the
South Pacific and never returned to Santa Rosa Island, her ultimate fate
unknown. The dilemma of getting his cattle to the mainland left N.R. Vail
with few options, so he spent the next sixteen years using barges, tug boats
and retired U.S. Navy landing craft to transport the cattle to Port Hueneme
or directly to the beach in Ventura. As the cattle swam in on the waves,
waiting cowboys would drive them across Highway 101 to the nearby
Taylor Ranch, were they were gathered into pens until sent to market.
The U.S. government finally paid V & V $25,000 for
Vaquero
, but
not until 1956 – fourteen years after she was requisitioned. With the
money, V & V commissioned
Vaquero II
, although at 65 feet with a 53-
ton capacity, she was about half the size of her predecessor. But
Vaquero
II
made history as the last dedicated wooden cattle boat to operate on the
Pacific coast.
The U.S. federal government forced another change on Santa Rosa
Island in 1951, although it was one that was top secret until 1956.
Shortly after the Korean War commenced in July of 1950, the U.S. Air
Force leased ten acres on the south side of the island at Johnsons Lee
and built the Santa Rosa Island Air Force Station, one of two offshore
radar stations constructed off the Southern California coast. Staffed until
1963 by military personnel from the 669
th
Aircraft Control and Warning
Squadron, the station was officially abandoned in 1965, and the buildings
were removed in 1987 by the National Park Service.
Although V & V worked closely with the military during the Cold
War, they were at odds with the government starting in 1980, when the
U.S. Congress passed a new law establishing Channel Islands National
Park. The new legislation essentially forced V & V to sell Santa Rosa
Island to the federal government, which they finally did for nearly $30
million, on the condition they be able to continue the ranching operation
until 2011. What followed were years of “bitter dispute” over endangered
species and grazing rights. In 1992, the National Park Service removed
the last feral pigs from the island, and in 1998, thirteen years prior to its
promised deadline, V & V was forced to remove the last of its cattle herds.
At the time of Al Vail’s death in 2000, his daughter Nita Vail was quoted
as saying about her father’s reaction to the government’s actions, “He felt
what happened was a violation of the code of ethics he taught all of us.”
Vail and Vickers family members gathered on Santa Rosa Island for
the last time in 2011, just before the ultimate hand-off to the National
Park Service. They called the bittersweet reunion “The Final Gather,”
pointedly referring to people, as “Cowboy Island” no longer held any
cattle to round up. But the day marked the enduring relationship of two
families that remained partners for a remarkable 122 years, starting back
in Tombstone, Arizona in 1889.
Now only tourists visit Santa Rosa Island, where they camp and hike
to the stand of Torrey pines, one of only two places on Earth that one can
see these rare trees. They wander among the silent ranch buildings, where
dust grows thick on abandoned saddles and sad breezes blow between
the planks of an old wooden barn. They pass sheep rendering vats that
stand covered with a velvet-like patina of rust, and hear the whistling of a
ghostly blacksmith as he pounds iron horseshoes on a sturdy anvil.
Or wait… was it just the wind?
Landmarks
winter
|
spr ing
109
Photo: Nita Vail