I’ve read that in the winter of 1846, during his march from Santa Fe, N.M., to California, Col. George Cooke of the U. S. Army found bands of immense wild bulls along the San Pedro River about 40 miles east of Nogales, Ariz.

According to Cooke’s diary, the bulls attacked without provocation, injured men, damaged wagons and killed horses and mules. These wild bulls were descendants of domesticated cattle left behind by Spanish settlers who quit the Pimeria Alta generations earlier because of incessant warfare with the Apaches.

These wild bulls were still in Sonora into the early 1900s. They were very dangerous, destroyed fences and killed cultivated bulls. This story, of the largest wild bull ever domesticated in the Mexican State of Sonora, was told to me by one of those old-timers by the name of Charles Fowler who was a well-known local entrepreneur.

Easy decision

When he was 14, Charlie had to make a decision; he could take his report card home from school and show it to his father, the local postmaster, or he could hit the road. He ended up in Caborca, Sonora, in the early 1920s at a ranch owned by an American friend of the family.

You see, Charlie wanted to be a Mexican “vaquero.” We call them cowboys. One night after a daylong tequila-fueled fiesta, bets were placed for and against an audacious plan to domesticate a wild bull that was wrecking fences and stealing breed cows from ranches in the area.

Charlie admired the vaqueros; their skills with cattle and knowledge of the Sonoran Desert had developed after centuries of survival in this hard desert environment. The rancher’s decision to reclaim this wild bull was serious business and involved months of planning and preparation.

Professionals with specific skills in horsemanship were hired. Special leather and cotton ropes were ordered to be made in Magdalena. Corral makers came from the Proto-Elias Ranch near Cocospera and Joe Escalante, a superb horseman and the strongest vaquero in the Pimeria Alta was hired, contracted from the Altar Valley to act as mayordomo.

Getting ready

Charlie, being only 14, was assigned to dig holes six feet into the ground to firmly hold the mesquite corner posts for the enormous corral. Escalante and the other vaqueros were already in the sierras scouting the wild bull’s habits and movements.

The rope maker was creating extra strong and long “riatas,” the leather ropes with thick cotton binding material needed for the project. Others were feeding a couple dozen heifers with sweet oats and grain and training them to roam out and gravitate back into the corral.

Charlie remembered that one long mesquite trunk was embedded deep into the ground right in the center of the big corral. He told me that he had no clue how they were going to bring in the wild bill and confine that 1,900-pound monster. But he trusted the old vaqueros guiding the work, “they were savvy,” he said, “determined and confident.”

He noticed that two 800-pound mules were brought into another pen that had been joined and gated into the larger “corralon.” The mules were also fed sweet oats, taken out to work, and brought back into the corral for more food and clean water at the end of each day.

While outside the ranch, the vaqueros knew that the bull would hide in a large mesquite grove that had ample water and was inaccessible to a rider on horseback.

Heifers as bait

One day the heifers were herded to one end of the mesquite grove and driven in toward the bull. The cowboys kept their distance. As they had hoped, they noticed that the bull started following the female cows while they slowly worked their way back to the ranch. When the bull noticed a vaquero, Charlie told me the bull would try to look small by crouching in the middle of the herd.. The bull was smart, and he liked his company. Slowly, the wild bull and the small herd of heifers went into the big corral.

Then, quietly, the vaqueros closed the gates behind the herd and slowly started to move heifers out of the corral, one by one, through smaller gates. Eventually, the large bull was trapped by his own lust.

The animal was standing in the pen alone, but still very dangerous.

Days went by. Then, early one morning, the side doors of the corral opened, and three “sun-browned, steely-eyed cowboys” rode into the corral with long riatas in hand. Charlie and the others who gathered to watch the men work laid low to quietly witness what Charlie called “a vaquero tour de force.”

The vaqueros probed the bull from opposite directions. They did this, he said, to embolden their horses and feel out the habits of the bull. They continued to tire the bull by triangulating their taunts.

The bull rammed the mesquite fences with a force strong enough to make those hiding behind it scatter. The bull was not to be injured, they yelled, yet the animal could fling a man and horse 10 feet into the air while goring them if it got the chance.

Vaqueros signal

The vaqueros communicated with grunts, whistles and head signals. For a long while the horsemen continued their dance and probed around the corral to set up the bull for their rope work. Charlie claimed “the whole thing was like a fantastic dusty ballet.” Escalante threw the first rope. It found tension just as another rope caught horns. The third rope then came into play from the opposite direction. It was a well-scripted attempt to secure the wild bull’s head with three thick ropes.

Escalante weaved his horse and rope toward the vertical post planted in the middle of the corral. He quickly swung two loops around it that allowed him to leverage his pull.

The other vaqueros’ ropes were also looped around their oversized Mexican saddle horns. When they released tension, to prevent the leather rope from snap ping, Charlie remembered smoke rising from the burning rope as it turned quickly on the wooden saddle horns.

The cowboys kept working. They would shout “dale!” meaning “give it some slack” and “jala!” meaning “pull back.”

Slowly, but violently, the bull was worked head first into the center post that was vibrating from the battering. Then the moment came when the bull stopped moving, his horns bound to the pole with leather ropes, his skull pressing against the mesquite. The bull was panting, exhausted.

Charlie Fowler and some of the others jumped out of their hiding places and shouted approving curses. The dozens of spectators from Sonora and Arizona were whopping it up on the fence.

“They had just witnessed the incredible,” Charlie said. “Now, how do you tame the beast?”

Very carefully

When the bull’s muscles finally relaxed, the two oversized mules were brought into the corral. The mules had been securely bound in large cotton ropes that were around their bodies, and they were slowly moved into position, one on each side of the exhausted bull.

Charlie’s voice lowered as he recounted: “Slowly and patiently, each mule was tied to the bull until they formed a strange-looking clown combination.”

I asked Charlie how in the world they tied the mules to the bull?

Charlie answered, “Very carefully.”

Escalante rested while the mules were tied. Then he walked into the corral with a large machete in his hand and raised it high above his head. A terrified hush fell over the crowd. With three swift and sure strokes, he cut the ropes that bound the monster’s head to the post.

At that instant, the large gates of the corral were flung open. The bull pulled back, snorted and blasted out of the arena with a mule tied to each of its sides. Charlie laughed, “All I could see was a cloud of dust and a dashing bull with mule legs dangling and flapping in the wind.

“The vaqueros guiding the work,” Charlie said, “had kept most of the plan to themselves. Nobody knew what was going to happen, but I had an idea and, to me, their plan now became obvious.”

On the horizon

Four days later, Charlie was sitting on the fence of the corral. He was wondering if all that he had recently experienced was real. He thought about his family, school, his report card, and what his father would think about the events of the last few days.

Then, up on the horizon, he saw the two mules coming toward the ranch. They were walking at a peaceful pace, returning to good food and water. Between them, and slightly to the rear, they were towing a resigned bull. The biggest wild bull in Sonora had given in.

The mules and the bull walked into the big corral. Young Charlie Fowler quietly jumped off the fence. He stood tall, sun-browned, steely-eyed and closed the gate.

The old-timers

Charlie Fowler regularly met with Mexican cattle brokers and other old-timers at the old El Dorado Bar in Nogales. I enjoyed hanging at the sidebar; eavesdropping as they told their tall tales about their lives, their loves and their fortunes. Ralph Wingfield, Dick Woodell, the Morales brothers, Dickey Fleischer, Tom Doyle, Ernesto Elias, Manuel O’Daley and others. They were all defined by audacity.

(Editor’s Note: Fontes de Trujillo of Nogales is a collector of local history of the Santa Cruz River valley and the greater Pimeria Alta, in Arizona and Sonora. He holds a license to research at the Acrchivo de las Indias, Sevilla, Spain.)