Conservation History Association of Texas
Texas Legacy Project
Oral History Interview
Nature Conservancy in Texas

Interviewee: Ryland Howard
Date: June 6, 2022
Site: San Antonio, Texas
Reels: 3733-3735
Executive Producer: Lydia Saldana
Producer: Jeff Weigel
Field Producer / Chief Interviewer: Lee Smith
Videographer: Curtis Craven
Writer / Editor: Ron Kabele
Transcriber: David Todd / Trint
Item: Howard_Ryland_NCItem13_SanAntonioTX_20220608_Reel3733-3735_Audio.mp3

[Numbers refer to the interview recording’s time code.]

Lee Smith [00:00:15] And you’re a former board member or present board member of the TNC?

Ryland Howard [00:00:20] Former – back in early history.

Lee Smith [00:00:25] Okay. And speaking of history, where did you grow up?

Ryland Howard [00:00:29] Grew up in Christoval, Texas, on the Head of the River Ranch.

Lee Smith [00:00:34] You grew up on that ranch?

Ryland Howard [00:00:35] Yes.

Lee Smith [00:00:39] What was, cast your mind back to the, you know, when was the first time that you really made a connection with nature as a child?

Ryland Howard [00:00:51] When I walked out the door. Yeah. I would be. Yeah. I mean, it was just there. I mean, you’d walk out the door, you’re at the ranch, you know, and look out for snakes, go down to the river and the river’s right in front of the house. So there was nature everywhere. I slept out on the porch. So, you know, heard everything was going on down in the river in the night. A lot of things got eaten.

Lee Smith [00:01:19] So was there a family member that was kind of instrumental and inspired you with regard to nature?

Ryland Howard [00:01:27] Yeah, my mother was really sort of an instinctive naturalist. And she had a kind of an interesting background because she grew up through age five on the ranch. And then after that, she was living in Europe, in New York City. And her father died and she would come back with her New York mother to the un-air-conditioned, un-electrified ranch, and be there in the summertime. And she was in high school in New York City in a very nice high school there. And she she did a collection of butterflies from the ranch for a science project. And then the next time she was an entomologist and she did bugs, insects, which she took to New York City.

Ryland Howard [00:02:21] So when I was growing up, she was always just totally sensitive to the environment. A big, you know, early pipeline, gas pipeline, was coming through the ranch. She made those people run the pipeline around the oak trees and the oak mottes. So this is a pipeline on the surface that kind of snakes through.

Ryland Howard [00:02:46] And I saw some wars, battles, to protect the river there. And we had Dr. Clark Hubbs, one of the future leading icthyologists and a board member. He started doing his research on the gambusia. Not, ours were not rare. I mean, in other words, they weren’t an endangered specific species. They were mosquito fish.

Ryland Howard [00:03:11] But all of that was going on around me when I was, you know, eight, nine, seven. You name it, it was there.

Lee Smith [00:03:21] And in school or in college, where did you go to school?

Ryland Howard [00:03:28] I had a checkered career, but it wasn’t for lack of achievement. I went to school in Christoval for five years. Very small school. We had one teacher for every two classes. We had 5 to 7 or 8 kids in a class. And so they taught two classes together in the same room.

Ryland Howard [00:03:48] And then I went three years in San Angelo. We had a house in San Angelo. And that’s sort of the way people, a lot of ranching families, would do that is the wife would take the kids to town and they would go to finish school in town. So I did that for three years.

Ryland Howard [00:04:08] And then my last four years of high school, I went to a boarding school in New Hampshire.

Ryland Howard [00:04:13] Well, it’s a huge campus, mostly undeveloped, basically woods with a very big drainage creek or stream, whatever you want to call it. But it’s big, especially in the spring. It’s powerful. And so it sort of circles around the campus and then comes through the middle of the campus. So you’re just in nature.

Ryland Howard [00:04:36] We played hockey out on the ponds. There were all natural rinks then. They’re not anymore. And, you know, we were outside. I rowed and played football and everything was outside. You know, winter was great – playing hockey outside. It was wonderful.

Lee Smith [00:04:54] Wait a second. A Texas boy playing ice hockey?

Ryland Howard [00:04:56] Well.

Lee Smith [00:04:57] Were you the goalie?

Ryland Howard [00:04:59] No, I was anything. I finally quit when the guys that I was playing with because it was intramural started skating between my legs because they were so small. And I said, “Okay, I’m not doing this anymore.” But I ended up coaching my son here in, you know, little, little kid bumper hockey. So, yes, you know, I love skating. I love doing that.

Lee Smith [00:05:23] Now, you probably didn’t need it with the background you had, but was there a teacher or anybody in your education that that was an inspiration with nature?

Ryland Howard [00:05:33] I was totally not paying attention, you know, with the experience. We had one guy who was sort of an outdoorsman. They did not have an outdoor program then, an outdoor education outreach. And so here we were in the heart of New Hampshire. And so we didn’t have that.

Ryland Howard [00:05:52] I had one master at the school who was an English teacher, and he took us all out to his cabin in the woods and so on. And that was all very nice, but I didn’t get anything out of it.

Ryland Howard [00:06:02] I didn’t get an understanding like camping, doing all that stuff, except from Boy Scouts. I loved Boy Scouts back in San Angelo. I did that there. And we had a lot of places to go because we had, you know, we had 2 or 3 good Boy Scout camps out in the woods or out on the plains.

Lee Smith [00:06:21] So where did you go to college?

Ryland Howard [00:06:23] I went to Harvard. So four years there, you know, urban life. We took one big hike up Mount Monadnock in, you know, out in western Massachusetts.

Ryland Howard [00:06:38] And that was really it. You know, we were urban, I was basically an urban kid, played squash and house hockey, rowed and that type of thing.

Ryland Howard [00:06:48] It really wasn’t until I got back to law school here in at the University of Texas, that I really started scouting around what is here in this state because I didn’t know much about it.

Ryland Howard [00:07:02] Mother and Dad were kind of … it’s a strange background, but we went to Rhode Island in the summertime, even during the drought. I think they got some money at some point and they had enough money to go up and rent a house or something.

Ryland Howard [00:07:19] So and that was beautiful. I mean, it was an incredible place. We were right on the shore. It’s kind of a modest community, but not crowded. Everybody had big sort of room to move around. So another place where you’re accustomed to being open, there’s a big salt pond and then the barrier dunes and the beach and Block Island in the distance. It was an amazing area.

Ryland Howard [00:07:47] So, you know, basically I was on the ranch in the summers and all my vacations. I was free labor on vacations. And so, you know, I spent a lot of time in the woods. I just wasn’t looking, you know, I was looking for ducks or, you know whatever. I mean we didn’t have deer in those days in that part of the country, which is pretty amazing. But nobody remembers deer. But, you know, one of the old settlers said I’d never saw a deer growing up here and I was born in the 1890s.

Ryland Howard [00:08:18] So when I got back here to the University of Texas, I started, you know, read some books and started getting really kind of focused on the need for conservation, especially in Austin, because now, you know, it looks like a great natural, you know, but comparatively. But to me, it was crowded. You know, you had to kind of work to get out. And and I saw sites that I said, you know, these sites are going to be overrun in 10 to 20 years and we’ve got to figure something out about how do we deal with this?

Ryland Howard [00:08:55] And so and then somebody gave me “Goodbye to a River”, by John Graves. In my first year in law school, a guy said, “Well, you like canoeing. Here, you know, you ought to read this book.” And it was like a Bible. I just. “Whoa. Really?”

Ryland Howard [00:09:13] And then I read, oh, gosh, when I’m going blank – Justice… What’s our wonderful, wonderful Supreme Court … Douglas. Justice Douglas wrote “A Farewell to Texas.” I don’t know if you’ve read it, but this guy has. And it really, I mean, he wrote the Bible on what needs to be conserved in the state of Texas. And this is Justice Douglas. He was a friend of Johnson.

Ryland Howard [00:09:43] So he was down here and he obviously took a circuit and he went to the Big Bend. He went to the, he said there’s got to be a Hill Country national park. And that was among the things. He did the Big Thicket. He did Big Bend. He just picked up on all these things in the natural sites. And he really articulated it, you know, and he had something about the lower canyons of the Rio Grande. And I mean he covered a lot. He was an adventurer himself.

Ryland Howard [00:10:12] So I had these sort of biblical books. And they gave me, you know, a lot of insight to get where I ultimately got to.

Ryland Howard [00:10:22] And then I can’t remember. It was my first year there, I think it was. The Waller Creek Massacre. And that really set me off. The Waller Creek Massacre. I didn’t approve UT football anyway. I like Harvard, sort of incompetent football. And I anyway, what happened is this huge stadium that they already had had to be expanded to be a huger stadium. And the only way they could do it …

Ryland Howard [00:10:54] Am I hurting feelings?

Jeff Weigel [00:10:54] Look at him, not me.

Ryland Howard [00:10:56] Sorry.

Ryland Howard [00:10:58] The only one they could do it was to… Waller Creek was this beautiful, you know, creek running through the campus. And it was a nice drive along the way. And all the cypress trees. I mean, it was perfect, you know, football here, you know, take care of nature here. And basically they went in and just cut all the trees down.

Ryland Howard [00:11:17] And all the hippies showed up. They were just horrified. You know, it was the beginning of the hippie movement. So all these hippies are there. And I put on a coat and tie, and a suit. I put a suit on, and went down there and really debated whether I was going to sit down with “Goodbye to a River” or something and say, “You can arrest me, but I’m not moving”, you know, in front of a bulldozer or something. Well, I wasn’t that big a hero and I didn’t do that.

Ryland Howard [00:11:42] But it certainly, you know, I said, things have to be done. There’s force. We have to oppose this force of ignoring nature and not taking care of it. So I already had that.

Ryland Howard [00:11:57] And then one of the things I learned from my dad was that ranches and farms got taxed at full, you know, full market value, i.e., a speculative value to build a subdivision, you name it, whatever, and nothing to do with productivity. And so, you know, the productive value of ranch land was way, way below that.

Ryland Howard [00:12:21] And I said there’s got to be a way to separate the speculative value from the productive value. There’s got to be a way to separate that and say, we’re not going to do that. You know, we’re not going to, which is basically conservation easement.

Ryland Howard [00:12:38] And I looked at places like Hamilton’s Pool as I drove by and I said, “You know, this going to get hammered”, you know, but if you put an easement on it, you could take care of it.

Ryland Howard [00:12:46] Well, I didn’t know what I was talking about. I mean, it was sort of an unrecognized concept.

Ryland Howard [00:12:51] And I wrote a paper. Found out they had them in Wisconsin and on the Blue Ridge Parkway. They’re called scenic easements. They were protecting the viewshed from the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Ryland Howard [00:13:06] And so, you know, anyway, I wrote a paper on it. And some years later it became the law, that you could actually make a donation, a donation, do a conservation easement and, you know, achieve the goal that I was talking about. So.

Ryland Howard [00:13:26] Go ahead.

Lee Smith [00:13:27] Was that paper used in the formulation of the law?

Ryland Howard [00:13:31] No. No. I didn’t even know what was going on about that. And I think it’s Stephen Small. He’s still practicing law. He’s in Boston. And Stephen Small is sort of the guru of conservation easement law throughout the United States. And, you know, he wrote the book on it, etc., etc.

Ryland Howard [00:13:52] And but he was, he wrote the regulations in 1976 that brought the conservation easement into law and made it, how it made it work.

Ryland Howard [00:14:04] And really amazing that he had the insight to be able to do that, you know, to anticipate things like mineral development on conservation easement lands and the need to accommodate certain things that people were going to not be able to control. Whatever it was. So, anyway.

Ryland Howard [00:14:25] How did you wind up with the Nature Conservancy?

Ryland Howard [00:14:29] Ah. The Nature Conservancy. I was in my second year in law school. We were friends. Chris Harte, I’d sort of grown up with. His father, Ed Harte, who was chairman of the National Audubon Society and various other things, and to do with conservation. He’s from Corpus Christi. He’s originally from San Angelo.

Ryland Howard [00:14:57] And you know, I’d run into him and said something about, you know, I’d like to get a job as an intern doing something with conservation. And so he found me an intern, legal internship, with what was called the Conservation Foundation in Washington, DC.

Ryland Howard [00:15:16] So I was there, I don’t know, for two months and doing legal work there. I worked there with an in-house lawyer. And it was a think tank. It was a conservation think tank. It was sort of a blue stocking kind of operation. Very nice people. 2 or 3 other young people that were my age who were not legal, but, you know, they were working. We were all friends. We all kind of linked arms in what we worked on.

Ryland Howard [00:15:43] And of course, 1970, big things were happening in in Congress, you know, and that’s led to the Clean Water Act, Clean Air, EPA, etc. I mean, big things were happening. We weren’t really part of that. We were back in our ivory tower.

Ryland Howard [00:16:01] And somebody leaked my name down into Texas and they said, “There’s a kid here we want to get working for conservation.” And I guess, I think, they got hold of Ned Fritz. And, you know, Ned was, you know, my he’s my ideal of the total “Tear down the temple. It doesn’t matter. Save it. Save what’s there.” And truly an amazing force in Texas.

Ryland Howard [00:16:32] And anyway, so he contacted me and he said … No, he got me a job with the Texas legislature with a Fort Worth legislator. And I worked for him in his office during my spring graduation semester. And so I did that.

Ryland Howard [00:16:53] And then I went to San Antonio, and then I got, some people found me down there. And we were working on trying to protect the recharge zone.

Ryland Howard [00:17:03] Then a friend of mine, Kirk Patterson, whose wife has been on the Edwards board for years, anyway, Kirk and I drafted legislation, enabling legislation, to protect everything in the recharge zone. Make it a green, you know, a green area and not develop it, you can develop the other side. You can develop this side. But we’ll have a green belt. I mean, it’s pretty obvious that’s an easy solution, especially in 1972. We were both practicing here then.

Ryland Howard [00:17:37] And so it was quite a while. That was back then. So we, you know, we were all working on different things around here, Sierra Club, that type of thing. North Expressway.

Ryland Howard [00:17:50] And then, I guess 1980 or something, Ned Fritz was on the board of the Nature Conservancy, and back then it was all-volunteer. There was no staff. And it was just really, really committed people who really had, they didn’t have what do you call it? They didn’t have connections. They didn’t. They weren’t connected to the establishment, whatever. They were highly committed birdwatchers, call them tree huggers. Call me a tree hugger. I was.

Ryland Howard [00:18:25] And so, Ned knew about me. And he said, “Hey, you know, how would you like to be on the TNC board?” And I knew all about the Nature Conservancy, not all about it. I didn’t know what they were doing.

Ryland Howard [00:18:41] But when I was up in Washington in 1970, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about the Nature Conservancy. Pat Noonan, I think was his name, the original sort of spearhead guy that got the Conservancy going, sort of nationally. And he had a reputation for working with, working with big business and not butting heads with them. But let’s all get together. Let’s make this work. You know, it’ll be beneficial to you, it’ll be beneficial to the environment, etc.

Ryland Howard [00:19:20] And I read that article and never forgot it and sort of kept up over time. So when Ned said, “Would you like to do that?” I was like, you know, “Take me, I’m yours.”

Ryland Howard [00:19:30] So I did that and went on the board with Chris Harte, who was Ed Harte’s son. Both of us did. And and Scott Spann came on as, as the director, as the first employee of the Texas Nature Conservancy.

Ryland Howard [00:19:51] And so we all started at it. We were down here. It was headquartered here. Not sure why, but it was. And that’s sort of the beginning of getting to TNC.

Lee Smith [00:20:06] So what kind of things did Scott Spann accomplish?

Ryland Howard [00:20:11] You know, when I think about it, probably just to make us function. He had to answer back to the Southeastern headquarters. I think it was in North Carolina. And we didn’t, as a board, have anything. Well, I didn’t, because I was just a board member. So we had a chairman. I think it wasn’t a chairman. It was a president. That’s what we called the head of the board. And then Scott was the executive director.

Ryland Howard [00:20:40] And so he was interacting, you know, taking orders because they wanted us to do certain things. And what we were doing and accomplishing, a lot of it came through the individual board members.

Ryland Howard [00:20:56] They would go out. Ned was really, he was really big. He loved East Texas. He like woods and he would find a piece of property, 15 acres, you know, in the woods back in there, and he would commit us to buy it. And, you know, after a while, we had to sort of figure, well, wait a minute. We got to operate as the board. But Ned was an incredible sort of charismatic character.

Ryland Howard [00:21:26] And so we ended up with a number. One of them I think we called it the Green Cathedral or Emerald Cathedral. But we had a number of these little holdings scattered about.

Ryland Howard [00:21:36] And I think philosophically, some of us were not totally comfortable with what are we going to do with these small holdings? We need bigger pieces of the ecology. We need to take care of more if we can figure out how to do that.

Ryland Howard [00:21:53] And so we started, you know, kind of moving ourselves around.

Ryland Howard [00:21:57] Scott Spann moved us to Austin. And, you know, he was dealing with, you know, the basics that we needed for an organization, the budget and all that sort of thing. So there was a lot of interaction with him. I spent time with him.

Ryland Howard [00:22:14] And then one day he said, “Well, Ryland, I’m going to resign from the Conservancy.” And I thought, my God, some corporate guy has gone and grabbed him because he’s pretty good.

Ryland Howard [00:22:27] Well, he was a CPA to start with. He was a CPA and they told him, get involved in the community. And, you know, it was like a national CPA firm. So he did. And he liked conservation. And then he sort of fell into the Nature Conservancy.

Ryland Howard [00:22:45] But I figured, okay, he’s probably had enough of that and wants to make more money and he’s going to go be a CPA or a comptroller, you know, some CFO.

Ryland Howard [00:22:56] And as it turns out, he was into martial arts. And he was going to quit and be a martial arts instructor. And that’s I don’t know anything more after that, what he did. You know, it was just, “Oh, really?”

Ryland Howard [00:23:12] And so we’re, “Okay, we’ve got to find somebody.” We had a man on our board, I believe. And I know he was on the board named Bill Kitchen. And Bill Kitchen was a parks, he was a professor of parks management at Texas Tech, and Andy had studied under him. And then Andy went to the Department of the Interior. And I don’t know the complete succession, but Bill knew about Andy, and Andy had then come back to Texas, to his home area, which was where Dow Chemical is. And I can’t remember.

Lee Smith [00:23:53] Lake Jackson.

Ryland Howard [00:23:54] Yeah. Is that it? Okay.

Ryland Howard [00:23:57] And so he was down there working on conservation matters for a local organization, I believe it was. I don’t think he was still working with Interior. And I may be wrong, but. So, Andy, we hired him. I didn’t know him very well. I mean, I wasn’t part of the hiring group or anything. I was just, you know, a board member. And so I’m, you know, I’m sure Bill brought him forward, highly qualified individual. It turns out, yes, he really was highly qualified and talented.

Ryland Howard [00:24:32] And so he came on to be our executive director and was, you know, he immediately started finding projects and talking to people. He was a great schmoozer. He was good at talking to wealthy people, landowners with some vision. Maybe they wanted they had something they didn’t want or whatever it happened to be.

Ryland Howard [00:24:58] And one of the things we had, at the Conservancy, originated was the concept of trade lands, which is if you want to get rid of a piece of property and it really doesn’t have significant natural value, it doesn’t have Nature Conservancy value, but if you want to get rid of it, we’ll be happy to take it off your hands. You want to donate it or make a bargain sale, whatever it is. And then it’s trade lands. And then we can take that, and if we see something we really want, we can make a deal, you know, some kind of deal or whatever happened to be.

Ryland Howard [00:25:35] And so Andy was, he was gung ho on that and working on it. And I think that’s what led us to Honey Creek, because Honey Creek was our first large acquisition and we were a bunch of, I don’t know what you’d call us. We were like a bunch of privates and corporals going, “Well, 1800 acres in the Hill Country, you know, in the heart right there. I think it’s in Kendall County, Comal County.” But I mean, high impact already at that point in history, you know, ’80s.

Ryland Howard [00:26:09] And so we had a trade land down on the coast and then we, I think, let me think that through. That’s where I’m not totally clear about the evolution of the transaction because I wasn’t the one, you know, moving the pieces, chess pieces, around on the deal. Andy really was and he was working with Southeast. And the Southeast was really pushing for us to have a real project. “Come on, boys. You got to grow up. You’ve got to get something in.” (boys and girls).

Ryland Howard [00:26:48] And so, you know, we’re sitting there and I think the Southeastern guy came down. And we had this closed meeting and he said, “You’ve got to do this. You cannot. Don’t mess around. Do it.”

Ryland Howard [00:27:02] And we were worried about the money. How were we going to raise the money? Because ultimately we’d be obligated, not individually, but the organization. And we’re all looking at each other and said, “I’ve never I mean, how do you raise money.”.

Ryland Howard [00:27:17] Now, luckily, I had already been on a camp board with the YMCA, so I’d already been through a number of kind of management issues, but this was different.

Ryland Howard [00:27:28] And so I think we had a, you know, real serious night one night. And finally. You know, sort of like, Ah, you know, the poor Southeastern director’s sitting there and he said, “These guys.” And finally it was touchdown. He walked out and we’d agreed.

Ryland Howard [00:27:49] And it looked like a lot of money and we weren’t confident that we didn’t overpay for it. And as I said, one of my friends who had property up in the area and so on, and he called me and he said, “You’re going to pay too much for it,” because he was on some kind of network.

Ryland Howard [00:28:04] And, but, you know, it was nothing, comparatively, to get this piece of property. I mean, you know, it was all water. With an incredible spring. Spring right across the fence. And so, you know, there it was.

Ryland Howard [00:28:22] I mean, this amazing deal. You come down off the steppes, if you want to call it that, in other words, off of the dry upland and you go down and you’re in Tarzan’s lost world with, you know, with the cypress trees and the, I can’t think of the word. I was looking at it today. But anyway, what grows under, in wet places in parts of the Hill Country. And it was, you know, an amazing deal.

Ryland Howard [00:28:53] And then ultimately, we made a trade with the State of Texas. We did a trade land deal with the State of Texas, and we ended up with a property on the coast. And they got the natural area, in other words, right next to the Guadalupe River State Park.

Ryland Howard [00:29:15] And I’d done a lot of canoeing. I spent the ’70s. I lived on the Guadalupe, the Medina Rivers and so on. It rained all the time. The biggest rain year, I think, in recorded history was 1954. I said, “This is great, man. It’s whitewater every day.”

Ryland Howard [00:29:33] And so, you know, I’d been up and down the Guadalupe numerous times, but I didn’t know, you know, where this guy came out. I had to go figure out where does he come out on the Guadalupe.

Ryland Howard [00:29:44] So anyway, that’s sort of the Honey Creek story. And you know, it’s been a home run ever since. And it sounds like, keep our fingers crossed and everybody take a deep breath, hopefully we can preserve the spring and its, that drainage.

Lee Smith [00:30:06] So what of the nature of the protections?

Ryland Howard [00:30:10] For Honey Creek?

Lee Smith [00:30:13] Honey Creek.

Ryland Howard [00:30:13] You know, I don’t remember. We should have had a conservation easement on it. And.

Jeff Weigel [00:30:17] Yeah, we, the original deal, we transferred in full fee to Parks and Wildlife. I don’t think we kept an easement.

Ryland Howard [00:30:27] I don’t think we did. And nowadays we’d keep an easement if we were going to do a deal. Because you never know when politics fall down, or somebody, somebody’s buddy said, “Well you know we’re going to call this surplus land and all of a sudden it’s gone.”.

Ryland Howard [00:30:43] I mean, I don’t think that sort of thing would happen because we saw what happened out in Big Bend when they were trying to make what was a beneficial deal for the state park, but it didn’t smell right to the general public, so it never happened.

Ryland Howard [00:30:59] So you know those… The wise thing to do if the Conservancy, and now they do, if they transfer a piece of property, they’ve got an easement on it to protect it, even if it’s a government entity.

Ryland Howard [00:31:14] We just did that on the headwaters in Incarnate Word, The Sisters of Incarnate Word. Through a bunch of us working along. I’m on the board of that organization. And 53 acres, actually, it’s only 49. We kept certain amount out, but is under a conservation easement. So later nuns can’t change their mind to some developer and have something happen. And that’s the way, you know, a lot of things should work because I’ve seen it happen on other lands.

Ryland Howard [00:31:52] Trinity just did it. Trinity just brutalized one of the nicest natural areas in San Antonio and they just destroyed it. I’d walked there for 40 years. And I kept saying they need a conservation easement, but I never went and said, “Hey guys, if you do it now, the later board can’t screw it up.” Well, that’s what happened. So take heed.

Lee Smith [00:32:22] So what’s your favorite part of Honey Creek?

Ryland Howard [00:32:26] Well, you want me to admit something, because I was thinking about this. I haven’t been there in years. And, it’s, see, this is ironic, but we still have our ranch. So when I’m out, I’ve got to go to the ranch, because we. That’s our place. We got to take care of it. It’s 9500 acres, and sometimes it rains.

Ryland Howard [00:32:49] I mean, there are threats on a yearly basis to the integrity of most any property. And there are today. And so you’re in and out. You’re talking to the local people. You know, you’re maintaining contact with the community.

Ryland Howard [00:33:06] And my wife and her brother are ranchers and they’re down on the border. They have a conservation easement with TALT, Texas Ag Land Trust. And so we’re either one place or the other.

Ryland Howard [00:33:20] So, you know, it’s like Cibolo Creek. What’s the proper term? Nature center. You know, I’d love to be able to go over there and just walk around for an hour, but I’m always on the way to the ranch.

Ryland Howard [00:33:34] So I hate to say that. If it’s on the way to the ranch, like Enchanted Rock, every now and then, I can do that.

Ryland Howard [00:33:40] So it’s not a reflection on I mean, I know it’s there. The key thing to me is to know it’s there. I don’t care whether I can walk on it or I’m strong enough to walk to the top of the hill. As long as it’s there.

Ryland Howard [00:33:57] So that’s a, that’s my, no reflection on Honey Creek because it’s a treasure.

Lee Smith [00:34:03] So tell me about the Head of the River Ranch.

Ryland Howard [00:34:06] Head of the River Ranch. Well, been in the family since 1902. There were three brothers that came here from England and seeking their fortune. If they stayed in England, they would have been younger sons. Their father was the second Earl of Litchfield. Big house, you know, whole rig, you know, servants, farm, etc. Big estate.

Ryland Howard [00:34:34] And one brother came over here and the next one came. They’re all younger sons. There were 13 children. My grandfather was the 11th. So two older brothers came over to Coleman County, and then my grandfather came over.

Ryland Howard [00:34:48] And they all got in the ranching business. And I think they did, they did well. And somehow my grandfather, I mean, he bought a ranch up there in Coleman County, so he had a ranch I didn’t even know about it, until I looked at the deed records. And he must have sold that to buy the Head of the River Ranch.

Ryland Howard [00:35:07] The two other brothers went back to England and he married. He hadn’t gotten married, didn’t marry for a while. He was a horse racer. He was a horseman. And he made, he and his brother got the contract with the British government for the State of Texas to supply horses to South Africa for the Boer War. So they were war profiteers and they shipped over 25,000 horses, plus mules, etc., out of New Orleans and Galveston.

Ryland Howard [00:35:40] And there were people all over Texas. They had agents all over the state of Texas buying horses. And so they both made a lot of money. And my grandfather, I think, put it in one place and the other. And so he he got the Head of the River ranch. He just you know, he saw this place, must have, and said, “This is it. This is what I’m looking for.” Because it’s the head springs of the South Concho River.

Ryland Howard [00:36:07] So right there in front of what was then a three-room cabin, not a log cabin, but, you know, solid wood that had been there for 20 years already. It was right there looking down at the springs, looking at the river and big live oak trees. And one of them was in a picture in 1886 and it’s still there. We’re praying that it doesn’t fall down because half of it’s under the house.

Ryland Howard [00:36:34] So. He went out there and he was a bachelor for golly, many years. You know, had never married. And he raised polo ponies, police horses, back when they had mounted police, and ranch horses.

Ryland Howard [00:36:53] And he also raised, blah, blah, blah. What am I thinking of? I can’t think of the breed. But anyway, he brought a certain breed of plow horses. What’s the proper word? You know, the Budweiser horses.

Lee Smith [00:37:11] Clydesdales?

Ryland Howard [00:37:11] Not Clydesdales.

Lee Smith [00:37:11] Pichersons, Belgians.

Ryland Howard [00:37:11] Yeah, but these are, you know, the horses to pull where, you know, the.

Lee Smith [00:37:17] Draft horses.

Ryland Howard [00:37:18] There you go. So he was always experimenting. You know, “I want to do this, did that.” And so on. So he had cattle.

Ryland Howard [00:37:25] So he bought that place and really it hadn’t changed. Sadly enough, we haven’t added much to it. 9500 acres in one piece, you know, one piece goes this way. But mostly it’s fairly rectangular, east-west.

Ryland Howard [00:37:44] And he’s got two sets of springs on it. So he’s got the Anson, what’s now, topographically, called the Anson Springs, which are right there in front of the house. And then if you go a little northwest from the house, you know, it’s about it a 30-minute walk, 25-, 30-minute walk through the woods because it’s all live oaks, it’s a riparian forest all down here.

Ryland Howard [00:38:09] And if you walk over there, you’re at Cold Creek, C-O-L-D, and that’s a separate spring that just comes out of the, it’s got its own little house. I mean, it’s not a house, but you know what antlines are? Don’t know what antlines are?

Lee Smith [00:38:28] You mean.

Ryland Howard [00:38:28] The little things. Yeah. Insects.

Lee Smith [00:38:31] Oh, yeah.

Ryland Howard [00:38:32] So, you know, they have this little deal that goes down well, there’s a natural little deal that goes down. And because you’re in 20-foot deep topsoil, you know, floodplain topsoil. And so the spring comes up in this bowl that’s on all sides surrounded by burr oak trees, huge burr oak trees, pecan trees. And then it runs into the main stream, and goes downstream.

Ryland Howard [00:39:04] Well, it discharges in an adequate year, a third of what goes off the property. So two thirds comes off Anson Springs. And they meet just below the property line. They don’t meet in our place.

Ryland Howard [00:39:19] But that’s, you know, that’s a whole other world over there. It’s just beautiful. It’s been taken over by beavers and now we’ve got beavers everywhere. I don’t know what we’re going to do with them because they’re girdling trees, good trees. They just take them down.

Ryland Howard [00:39:33] But they also eat along the banks. You know, they’re they’re eating stuff. We don’t I mean, they’re all that’s the thing about land. I mean, you’ve got hogs. We’ve got we’ve got beaver, hogs. And what’s the other thing? I’ll tell you in a little bit anyway, we’ll think of that.

Ryland Howard [00:39:53] There’s one other. Oh, it’s invasive grasses.

Ryland Howard [00:39:59] So that’s that’s what he had there.

Ryland Howard [00:40:01] And he raised the horses and he would ship them. He did, he supplied the Philadelphia Mounted Police horses. You know, they wanted so many every year and he’d ship them off. So it was like being a car dealership before, you know.

Ryland Howard [00:40:14] And he stayed with it. But he became a citizen. I mean, he was an English citizen. He became a citizen at age 25. He knew. He said, “I’m not going back over there. I love it. I like my family and so on. But this is where I belong. This is what I want to do is be an American.”

Ryland Howard [00:40:32] And he ended up in, at age 45, he volunteered in World War One. It must have been. I haven’t had time to research this, the Quartermaster Corps, i.e., managing horses. And he caught something and it took him down, basically. And he died when he was 56.

Ryland Howard [00:40:54] And so the ranch basically, you know, my grandmother was up in New York State. She was in New York City. What would she going to do with this place? Luckily, my mother was around, but, you know, whatever.

Ryland Howard [00:41:05] So for 20 years, from 1926 to 1947, it was leased to a guy that raised polo horses, but a lot of other stuff. He was a rancher and so on. You can imagine, you know, all these people. I’m sure you know what horses do to land? A lot of horses? They’re just like sheep. They graze right down to the ground.

Ryland Howard [00:41:29] So, you know, trying to keep, you know, be a conservation-minded landowner. So, you know, I don’t know about all of that. We lost a lot of his diaries. Some of them we have, but a lot of them got in ’36 flood. What was my grandmother thinking? She had stuff down at ground level. Flood came six feet deep and that was end of whatever was there.

Ryland Howard [00:41:53] So my dad, who was actually my stepfather (my real father died in World War Two in Normandy), and my mother remarried a tremendous, wonderful person. And he was a mining engineer from San Angelo. And he was running mines in Utah. And they told him, “You’re going to be a corporate officer.” He said, “I think I want to be my own boss.” And he came back and taught himself how to ranch and took over the ranch and ran it until he died.

Ryland Howard [00:42:29] And so that’s where I grew up. Mother and dad, they came out, and we went through the drought. We went through the ’50s drought, beginning to end.

Ryland Howard [00:42:36] And, and it does something. It burns a hole in your head.

Ryland Howard [00:42:42] But, mother and dad would do anything to protect that place. And they fought off what was then the Parks and Wildlife Department when they were poisoning streams all over Texas. They killed the “rough fish”. And they said to us, they said, “We are going to poison the fish in your stream.”

Ryland Howard [00:43:03] And they said, “No, you’re not. You’re not coming on our property. Yeah, well, you know, we’ll arrest you. We’ll do whatever we can to stop you.” And they never did.

Ryland Howard [00:43:12] And Clark Hubbs was part of that. Clark Hubbs wrote letters to all the universities, all his buddies, and, you know, had them write. And it finally went away and quit doing it. But they did it all over the state. Yeah. I saw a fish kill.

Lee Smith [00:43:27] When was that?

Ryland Howard [00:43:27] Fifties. Mid, early, I think early ’50s. So there were some big battles. I mean, we’ve had battles all the way along.

Ryland Howard [00:43:37] We had a pig farm right next door. The pig farm was, you know, less than a quarter mile from Cold Creek, head spring. And Texas Water Quality Board said, “Well, why do you want us to do anything? We gave them a permit.”

Ryland Howard [00:43:52] Said, “Well, what do you, what do they have to do to protect it?” They said, “Well, I mean, nothing.”

Ryland Howard [00:43:59] And a lot of money, mother and dad’s money, went to pay lawyers. And what they got was they got them to line the pits with clay so they didn’t just go straight down. This is a permeable limestone area.

Ryland Howard [00:44:15] Had the same thing with a proposed dairy, 6000-cow dairy, which is the equivalent of 15,000 people with no sewer system, 90 feet over broken limestone, straight down to the water table, about four miles, five miles upstream from us.

Ryland Howard [00:44:35] So one after the other, you know, battles to preserve the springs and the environments there, the under flow.

Ryland Howard [00:44:46] Because in the ’50s when the water table disappeared, not quite, but, really, I mean, the head springs dried up in front of the house.

Ryland Howard [00:44:55] Anyway, you’re hearing too much. But, you know, it just keeps you on your guard.

Ryland Howard [00:45:01] And the Nature Conservancy was doing the job all over the state, really by itself for a long time, except Ned Fritz started another land trust. So that was good. He was kind of a spin-off and his land trust ended up being other than the Nature Conservancy, the only statewide land trust in the state. I think it still is, except for TALT, Texas Ag Land Trust.

Lee Smith [00:45:28] So do you have a conservation easement now?

Ryland Howard [00:45:30] We do. We do. We wasted too much time getting there. And I look back on it and I cannot understand what was I doing, because I knew exactly what I needed to do. I knew how to do it. I’d written papers. You know, I was a promoter and I didn’t have one.

Ryland Howard [00:45:45] And, you know, my understanding was we didn’t have what the Nature Conservancy needed, you know, for for a conservation easement in those days, because they were very, very picky. And I knew that because I was on the board, we didn’t have the right endangered species, etc. Nobody told us that.

Ryland Howard [00:46:05] But I happened to go to a Land Trust, Texas Land Trust Council. And I ran into … who was their guy? There was a guy in the Hill Country. Anyway, he was good. He was a retired lawyer, I think. And I just was talking to him and I said, “I wish you guys would do, well, you know, would do an easement with us.” And he said, “Well, we might be interested.”

Ryland Howard [00:46:34] So here I was, you know, not knowing that my own organization, what it was doing. I wasn’t on the board. But anyway, that led us to do that.

Ryland Howard [00:46:46] And it was really a tough deal because we did a postmortem easement and there was only one person in the state of Texas, only one person we could find. And we didn’t go to Steve Small. But it was a new, it was a new provision of the code. And I knew what all the requirements were because I’d studied it. But nobody had done it except this one guy in Austin.

Ryland Howard [00:47:11] And, he basically, he was an older guy and he’d done one and he quit. But he had an understudy, a brilliant guy, was at a top law firm, and he spun out to another firm and he did. So we did the second postmortem easement.

Ryland Howard [00:47:27] But I called Colorado. There’s a wonderful guy who was founder of the, or adviser / founder of the Colorado Cattleman’s Ag Land Trust and a great lawyer. He came down and advised us here when we were starting the Bexar Land Trust. And I called him. He said, “I don’t know anybody who’s done one.”

Lee Smith [00:47:50] What is postmortem?

Ryland Howard [00:47:51] That my mother died, and we hadn’t done one yet. So that meant she couldn’t do it. Well, before the law was changed, you’re toast. You’re going to get full estate tax because, you know, one of the reasons you’re doing the conservation easement was to keep from losing the ranch to the federal government, not directly, for to pay taxes.

Ryland Howard [00:48:15] And so they created this provision that allowed the heirs to all say, “We’re, we’re fine. We’d like to like to do it.” And so we got it done.

Ryland Howard [00:48:28] Well, that’s, but, you know, and it’s been a good relationship. I mean, I was worried that the Conservancy might be too picky about ag operations running a ranch, that type of thing, because, you know, there are things you might want to do and they come out and say, “Well, this doesn’t look pristine”, etc., etc.. And said, “Well, if it doesn’t rain, it’s not going to look pristine. And but we do our best.” And I think that’s what we’re doing now.

Lee Smith [00:48:57] So the Nature Conservancy isn’t really involved in the Headwaters?

Ryland Howard [00:49:02] They’re not in the management, but they’re involved because they come with a conservation easement. They’ve got to come annually and survey the land – different checkpoints and whatever and make sure I haven’t cut down all the live oak trees or something stupid like that, or just changed the environment, the ecology of the place.

Jeff Weigel [00:49:24] Is the postmortem easement still available, Ryland?

Ryland Howard [00:49:28] Absolutely. Yes.

Jeff Weigel [00:49:30] Yeah. What a great concept, you know, that so you can kind of reach back and fix that oversight, you might say. Get that easement done.

Ryland Howard [00:49:39] But you’ve got the other one. The Nature Conservancy has the other one. I can’t think of the guy’s name in Victoria. He was the head of our Texas Ag Land Trust. The only reason I can’t think of his name was because he.

Jeff Weigel [00:49:54] McCann?

Ryland Howard [00:49:55] No, no. It’s another guy. He lives in Houston.

Jeff Weigel [00:49:58] OK.

Ryland Howard [00:49:58] But it’s a family, a family operation right outside of Victoria. And he did it when his father died.

Jeff Weigel [00:50:07] And TNC holds that one, too.

Ryland Howard [00:50:09] I believe that’s correct. Because it was before we had TALT.

Jeff Weigel [00:50:13] Yeah.

Ryland Howard [00:50:13] And then I did it. We already had. I’d already gotten far enough along that when TALT came along and I really wanted the Conservancy, I wanted an organization, I wanted an 800-pound gorilla so that if we had a threat, we had backup.

Ryland Howard [00:50:30] And we’ve got a threat coming up now. We’ve got an interstate that may go within a mile of our whole place. You know, the forest, the woods, everything. Yeah. You know, people are cheering – all the development people, you know, Chamber of Commerce. “Hooray. We’ve done it.”

Ryland Howard [00:50:50] I don’t know where it’s going to go. It could go right through the middle of the ranch. I mean, you know, they just put it down and they go.

Lee Smith [00:50:58] What interstate is that?

Ryland Howard [00:50:59] It’s not around. It’s not around yet.

[00:51:01] Would it be I-12?

Ryland Howard [00:51:05] Ports to Plains. I can’t remember the number, but basically it comes from way up in Canada and goes all the way to Mexico. And they’ve been pushing for this for 20 or 30 years. And it’s just like having a shotgun just right off your right ear. And finally, they did it. When this infrastructure bill passed, ironically, the Democrats infrastructure bill gave them this. Say, “Hey, we can do this. We got a big pot of money. Look.”

Ryland Howard [00:51:36] So all the promoters, you know, these are promoters – Lubbock, you know, San Angelo, Lubbock. But it goes all the way, all the way to Canada. That’s what it’s supposed to do.

Ryland Howard [00:51:47] And hopefully, I won’t see it in my lifetime. But, you know, my kids, they have a huge commitment. My son has a total commitment to that ranch.

Lee Smith [00:51:58] So what work have you done with the NRCS out there?

Ryland Howard [00:52:02] We’ve been working with them for a long time on lots of different programs – EQIP. We’ve done, we did a lot of clearing, actually – cedar and mesquite, juniper. And I’ve got some funny looking things. Kind of cruising through some groves because I didn’t want them to go a straight line.

Ryland Howard [00:52:27] But we did that with a, it was called the North Concho, I think, Watershed Project. And they were going to prove that if we clear the brush, we’ll get more water in the streams. And I’m not sure that’s true, but it went all the way around San Angelo, so we’re in that halo.

Ryland Howard [00:52:50] So we did a lot of work there. Essentially, it’s like EQIP. We just did some EQIP work just this year and we’ve done it over the years, you know, when we applied and it qualified and we were able to do that. I mean, you got to have the money too. You got to have it – in other words, 50/50.

Ryland Howard [00:53:08] And then we did a riparian buffer. I did not. The hog pasture, as we call it, which is at Cold Creek. What we’re doing now is we’re moving the cows so we don’t have any right now, which is terrible, but because of the drought. But we’re moving the cows on a daily basis or every other day. So they’re grazing paddocks and they’re moved.

Ryland Howard [00:53:33] And it’s really amazing. This is my son’s idea. I mean, it was beyond me, but the idea is to graze, and get them off before they eat it down. And so they graze everything about evenly. So they eat the mediocre grass as well as what they call it ice cream grasses.

Ryland Howard [00:53:53] And the… excusd me, what am I trying to say in English? Anyway, that’s regenerative grazing. It’s kind of a new concept. And he got onto this and it’s been working, except it quit raining. And so that’s always the, that’s always, you know, what we live with in the ag business.

Lee Smith [00:54:21] Key ingredient.

Ryland Howard [00:54:22] Now we did the riparian buffer and that’s a key thing. I wanted to do it long before that program was available. It was nice to have the program because basically it paid 90%, 90% of the fences to cut off the access to the watercourse, and also put up money to drill wells away from the watercourse so that you have water sources for the cattle that weren’t, they didn’t come down on the riverbank.

Ryland Howard [00:54:49] And it totally changed everything until the hogs hit us. I mean, I had incredible riparian growth. I mean, I had the river banks were coming in over the rocks. I’ve got bare rock covered with switchgrass and Eastern gamma grass and, you know, some Indian grass. That’s really hard to get. I’m excited. But growing those things and bushy bluestem down. So I had I mean, the banks were just solid and just looked beautiful.

Ryland Howard [00:55:26] Now, a lot of that’s just mud from the hogs, and axis deer. The other things is axis deer. They eat grass. Our regular deer don’t; they browse. And there are too many of them. And now we got axis deer. Anyway, it’s an eternal challenge.

Lee Smith [00:55:43] Do you have a favorite spot on the ranch?

Ryland Howard [00:55:46] You know, the whole thing is a favorite spot. But you know, because everywhere you go, there’s this or there’s that or the, you know, this tree, whatever it happens to be. I mean the easy ones are the river. I spent, you know, all my life on there. I had a kayak, had two kayaks from Dedham, Mass that were canvas. Mother got them. And you had to paint them every year because, you know, they’d leak. Super tippy so great for boat balance.

Ryland Howard [00:56:19] And then they started making kayaks in San Angelo back in the ’50s. And paddle it standing up like a Venetian gondolier and you could see to the bottom of the river. You know, it’s great.

Ryland Howard [00:56:35] So the river, any part of the river, is a favorite place. And just being out and about, there’ll be a grove of trees here.

Ryland Howard [00:56:45] Every time I go out, if I go to someplace I haven’t been recently, I see something totally, I say, “I’ve never been here before. I’ve never seen this tree before. And it’s 100 years old.” I mean, that’s the way that country is.

Ryland Howard [00:57:00] We have a big, a big water hole called Panther Bluff. In fact, somebody saw a panther on Panther Bluff this year, but it’s upstream. See, our our, where our house is, the river, the drainage is coming from all the way back to a town called Eldorado, up on the divide. And then it’s, you know, everything’s coming down. It all meets just above the house.

Ryland Howard [00:57:28] And so when it really gets going, the house is an island. And when it really, really gets going, the house is not on an island, it’s in the river.

Ryland Howard [00:57:38] And it comes down from all that country. And it can rain ten inches up there in two hours. And it’ll, you know, give it however long it takes, it’s going to be there by the house.

Lee Smith [00:57:49] Is there a favorite time of year?

Ryland Howard [00:57:51] November.

Lee Smith [00:57:53] Why is that?

Ryland Howard [00:57:54] Because it’s not hot. And it’s not freezing cold. Because I don’t have air conditioning out there yet. And it’s an old, you know, it’s an old wooden house, pretty good size, but it’s, you know, you’ve been. Yeah.

Ryland Howard [00:58:07] But anyway, but that’s before the hard freezes, so there’s lots and lots of color. All the leaves, you know, are down. The burr oak leaves and there’re, you know, all these different trees. And we’ve got a lot of Texas soapberry, which are very colorful along the river.

Ryland Howard [00:58:30] And another tree that really, really turns a neat color that I never knew existed until about 25 years ago. And I said, “What is this?” And it’s an oak and it’s now I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s something limestone oak, Durand limestone oak. And it’s a tree that grows out of a ball. And if there’s a fire, it’ll disappear. And then the ball just explodes after the fire. And it’s got bristly, gray kind of ash-colored bark and, you know, little oak leaves and those little oak leaves deciduous. They turn a real pretty orange in the fall.

Ryland Howard [00:59:16] So, you know, that time of year is great. Also, you know, if it’s cold enough, the ducks are there. Turkey are always there. It’s turkey season so there’s good hunting. So yeah, there’s a lot there.

Ryland Howard [00:59:28] My son does, he does deer culling. He doesn’t look for any, kind of, because, you know, we just say people are paying us for the horns. We’ll leave those to the hunters.

Ryland Howard [00:59:41] So did that ranch become part of Big Bend?

Ryland Howard [00:59:43] What it was is that the US government can’t just accept, say, “Hey, good idea, we’ll take it.” It’s got to be an act of Congress. So there had to be an act of Congress.

Ryland Howard [00:59:55] So we had that place for a number of years while it went through the process. So they needed a tax deduction, so they gave it to us. So they got the tax deduction that year. And then we had it for those years with the understanding it would ultimately go be part of Big Bend National Park, which it is.

Ryland Howard [01:00:15] And I think it was half a mountain range and I don’t know what’s happened since. So the piece sort of went over to I can’t remember exactly how we did it. Jeff would know the answer. We’re talking about the Rosillos Ranch.

Ryland Howard [01:00:34] Panther Ranch, Rosillos. No, no one has told that story. If you’d like to.

Ryland Howard [01:00:38] I’ll tell it. It’s colorful. I was just telling him.

Jeff Weigel [01:00:42] Yeah. Ed Harte.

Ryland Howard [01:00:43] I just want to know if you wanted any. The rest of it, I think you all are covered then. I mean, Mount Livermore, all of that. Yeah.

Ryland Howard [01:00:53] And, you know, hiring David Braun. Or do you want any of that kind of stuff? We almost hired the wrong guy.

Jeff Weigel [01:01:02] I asked Braun to do an interview and he declined.

Ryland Howard [01:01:05] Really?

Jeff Weigel [01:01:07] Yeah, really. But he wants to… We, you know, we’ve had to raise some money for this project.

Ryland Howard [01:01:12] Yeah.

Jeff Weigel [01:01:13] And I hit up all the old state directors, and he wants to make a donation, but he declined to be interviewed.

Ryland Howard [01:01:18] Really? Okay.

Jeff Weigel [01:01:20] His right.

Ryland Howard [01:01:20] You know, so because he was the right guy for the right time.

Jeff Weigel [01:01:25] He was.

Ryland Howard [01:01:26] And. And I don’t mean he wasn’t the right guy, period, but, you know, and we nearly hired the wrong guy. I mean, we had these candidates and we just, we weren’t quite there. And we had this guy and we were going to hire him. And we we were desperate, you know. Said, “Well, it’s the only one that’s half passable.” And we sent him over to … who was the guy with the pipeline, Houston Natural Gas.

Jeff Weigel [01:01:52] Rich Kinder?

Ryland Howard [01:01:53] And maybe it was Rich and we sent him over there. Okay.

Lee Smith [01:01:59] Rolling.

Ryland Howard [01:01:59] So one of the great things about Andy was he called up with this kind of funny tone of voice and he’d say, “Ryland?”, you know, it sounded like he was in a phone booth or being monitored. And it was a Friday afternoon. And he called me up and he said, “Ryland, you are not going to believe this.”

Ryland Howard [01:02:21] He said, “Houston Harte just walked in here and gave us the corporate stock to a corporation that owns 67,000 acres next to Big Bend National Park. He just gave it to us along with like, you know, a big pile of cash that was in the corporation.”

Ryland Howard [01:02:43] And I said, “You’ve got to be kidding.” He said, “That will be the largest preserve that the Nature Conservancy owns in the whole United States.” He’d already checked that out.

Ryland Howard [01:02:58] And I just said, “God, I’m just knocked over.”

Ryland Howard [01:03:01] And that’s what happened. And it was.

Ryland Howard [01:03:05] The way this worked is the intention was clear that this property was meant to become part of Big Bend National Park, and the Hartes needed a tax deduction that year. So the best way to do that is to give it to the Nature Conservancy who knows how to handle those things.

Ryland Howard [01:03:28] And then it, in order for it to become part of the park, it had to go through Congress. There had to be an act of Congress. And those don’t happen overnight or even within a year or two years. I don’t know what the lapse was. But it … I do know? When was my daughter born? ’93. Five years was the lapse time.

Ryland Howard [01:03:54] So we owned this huge ranch and all watered by one spring on the side of a mountain with it was like little hoses going out all over this place to water it for the cattle because it was a cattle ranch.

Ryland Howard [01:04:11] And I think the Hartes called it the Panther Ranch. We called it the Rosillos ranch. And we got half a mountain range. And I don’t know what’s happened in between whether that rest of that mountain range became part of the park, but that got done.

Ryland Howard [01:04:27] And so it was a win-win deal. And the act of Congress was passed. And I think David Braun was the chairman, executive director at that time. I was the chairman. And we dedicated it in, got to remember when my middle daughter was born, three weeks ahead of time. It was … anyway, it was in, wait a minute, ’87, ’89. It was ’89. And there it was – 67,000 acres.

[01:05:06] And Pam and I went out there one time for a meeting, which didn’t happen. And we drove around, you know, and drove. We didn’t know what we were doing, but it was great.

Lee Smith [01:05:17] Any other thing about Andy?

Jeff Weigel [01:05:18] Good story. Yes.

Ryland Howard [01:05:20] Andy was working. One of the things he used to tell stories about was and I can’t remember what Mr. Wynn’s name was.

Jeff Weigel [01:05:32] Toddie Lee Wynne.

Ryland Howard [01:05:32] Toddie Lee Wynne. And Andy was working with him for quite a while, I believe. Mr. Wynne wanted to, I think he wanted to sell the property he owned. It was very, it was sort of inaccessible by nature. It was the Matagorda Island and it was the southern end of Matagorda Island. And he owned it. He had a big airstrip on it, and he had a really cool sort of headquarters that was simple, but it was all there, equipped for hunting and fishing.

Ryland Howard [01:06:07] And Andy worked with him for quite a while. And this was the classic sort of Nature Conservancy project where the Nature Conservancy actually would take title. So they had to pay for it because Congress had to allot the funds to be able to buy it. So they couldn’t just go buy it directly from Mr. Wynne.

Ryland Howard [01:06:31] So, we came to own, and it was big, it was a big piece of property. And when I say inaccessible, I mean, you know, there was an airstrip and there was you could get there by boat. But in the winter we went out there in the winter with David Braun and it was cold. Wonderful experience.

Ryland Howard [01:06:50] And then, you know, we were taken out by the federal government.

Ryland Howard [01:06:54] But it was another win-win deal where, you know, the public achieved conservation of a very, very important area. We actually had 2 or 3 whooping cranes, cranes feeding there from the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. So they were, they were kind of spreading out. So, you know, and they said this is a good place to feed. So, you know, it was very, very important.