558 N. Main St., Prineville, OR 97754 | (541) 447-6205
Rollin Baker, the 2010 Old Timer for the Paulina Rodeo has a never-dying passion for horses, cows and dogs.
Faye Taylor
Born a little more than one generation after the turn of the century, Rollin Baker has witnessed a lot of change in the world, but he has not changed much himself over the generations.
He lives in a modern home with electricity, indoor plumbing, and a microwave, but he is still an iconic representation of days gone by. Baker is a cowboy, still helping out his daughter and son-in-law, Gary and Cheryl Ervin, on their ranch in Paulina.
This year, Paulina Rodeo is honoring him by naming him the 2010 Old Timer.
Baker, now a resident of Prineville, was born into the cowboy life in the eastern Oregon country called Narrows, near Burns, in May of 1927. That is where he began a life-long journey of ranching and a never-dying passion for horses, cows, and dogs.
When asked what his favorite part of ranching is, he replied, “Handlin’ the cattle, managin’ the cattle. But you’ve got to do a lot of farming, because they have to eat in the winter time, so therefore you’ve got to have something there for them to eat. Can’t just tie ‘em to a post or put ‘em in cold storage.”
Raised in the high desert of Eastern Oregon, Baker had to grow up fast when he, the youngest of eight, lost his mother when he was only 13. After spending his formative years living on ranches with his father, he opted for that lifestyle when he left high school in his junior year.
When he was 14, Bob Hughet and John Kirk had Baker and another young cowboy drive 80 rough stock horses 150 miles from Narrows, Ore. to the rodeo in Bend.
“Them old buckin’ horses them guys had were good horses. They’d been to lots of rodeos and a lot of them old horses. The older horses, they handled good. Some of the newer horses you had to keep pushin’ them in where they followed up and stayed there. But the older horses a guy could kind of go in the lead and they’d follow. My job was to go behind and keep them pushed up.”
For Baker this was no big deal-everyday work.
“It was somethin’ like what I’d been doin’ ever since I was big enough,” Baker said.
“All we did was follow some of the old wagon roads across. We were five or six days trailin’ the horses. But we had a layover at Wagon Tire [Ranch] because the horses had to be brand inspected. At that time you couldn’t go out of one county into another without a brand inspection. It took all day. Now you can go anywhere you want inside the state,” Baker explained.
In his early years as a ranch manager, he managed some historic ranches in Eastern Oregon. The Island Ranch and the White Horse Ranch are some of the original John Devine holdings. "He also buckerooed on the Roaring Springs Ranch and the Alvord Ranch at one time.
“We lived in Paulina a number of years up there,” Baker said.
Harold Coffelt, the Paulina Rodeo Club Treasurer, said, “He was a gentleman who was active in the community, and he had a huge impact on the community for years.”
In 1955 John Hudspeth began buying ranches in the Paulina area. He obtained the Humphrey Ranch, currently owned by the Sesslers, and the Swamp Creek Ranch, now owned by the Schnabeles. Four years later Hudspeth added the Sartain Ranch, the Sherman Ranch, and the Laughlin Ranch, now the G.I.
Baker and his wife, LaDonna, were hired to manage all these ranches, and they moved onto the Laughlin Ranch to be close to the action.
The largest ranch he managed was the Lakeshore Ranch in California where they ran 9,000 head of cattle.
“That was a pretty big job, because some of it was 600 miles apart,” Baker said. “One bunch of cattle we run for the Mexican government. We run 3,600 head of steers for them. They [Mexican Government] bailed out a lot of these small people [cattle owners] around that didn’t have any money, and they were trying to get them organized. They had no jobs for them.”
The ranch he felt was the most challenging was the D-W (D Bar W) Land and Cattle Company.
“There was lots of things going on all the time. There was trouble with the BLM, Forest Service, or the National Guard, or the Fish and Game. We ran a lot of cattle where the National Guard has that big training area east of Boise. It got so bad that I spent two to three days a week in meetings with some of these people. There was always a conflict of interest of some kind.”
An example of the trouble with which Baker had to deal was a wolf issue.
“We had an allotment there this side of Stanley [Idaho] and they [undisclosed government agency] turned some wolves loose on the northeast corner. They claimed they didn’t, but they had a video of it and it got out. A lot of people had a copy of it. They finally had to admit that that [D-W Ranch] was where they turned some of them loose,” Baker said.
The D-W Land and Cattle Company was sold in 2000, and the Bakers moved back to Prineville where they still have family and friends.
Paulina Rodeo will be honoring Baker on Saturday and Sunday, during the break in the middle of the rodeo.
The Paulina Rodeo is an amateur rodeo and will take place this year Labor Day weekend, Sept. 4th and 5th beginning at 12:30 each day. Cost is $8.00 for Adults and $4.00 for 12 and under.
Preliminary and Final Rounds for the Oregon State Cattle Cowdog Championship Contest and the Bridle Horse and Snaffle Bit Contest are scheduled to be held Thursday and Friday, Sept. 1 - 3, 2010 at the Rodeo Grounds.
