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Born in February 1927 in San Angelo, Joan Stocks Nobles and her older brother Banky grew up on their grandfather’s ranch near Kent, where Jeff Davis, Culberson and Reeves counties meet. Joan has ridden, trained and judged horses at stock shows around the state. As a single mother, she supported three children by managing hotels in Dallas, San Angelo and Fort Davis, including the Hotel Limpia in the early 1990s. Her novels, Run with the Horses and Soar with the Eagles, capture a family legend, which her grandfather, Joe “Daddy” Stocks, told her when she had red measles as a child. Now 80 and living in Midland, she still hopes to finish the trilogy. The following are Joan’s own words, taken from interviews about her early life on a Davis Mountains ranch.

 

You want to know more about my grandfather? I worshipped him – Banky and I both did. Daddy Stocks was six feet two, redheaded, Scotch-Irish, with a temper like a meat-axe. But he was the funniest man I ever listened to in my life, and he loved to laugh. He could tell the most wonderful stories, and nearly all of them were true.

He had run away from home, he told me when he was 16, Banky says 15. He broke horses for a fella by the name of Gage, and they took cattle drives every year to Kansas.

He said back then he could ride from the Pecos River way down – way on down below Sheffield and that country – to the Kansas line and never see a tree except when they came to water, and not many even then. And it was literally a gorgeous sea of grass. He talked about it and his eyes would twinkle, like, what a joy. He loved the land so.

I think that was another great influence that he had on us. He said if you can’t leave this world and it be better – what you are in control of – he said you haven’t succeeded in life. And you stop and think about that. Because I have seen people buy property and just let it go to ruin. And other people buy property and make it better.

His reputation as a rancher was unbelievable, really. And anybody that could pay off the first ranch in ten years… He paid off the Kent Ranch during the Depression. Everybody was losing everything. He made a deal with this hard-hearted old man that Daddy Stocks had to have the down payment – which was more than you’d normally ask for – in three years. He didn’t think Daddy Stocks could do it. But the day it was due, Daddy Stocks walked in his office in El Paso and put the cash money on his desk and said, “Here it is.”

Nowadays, there’s no way you could pay off a ranch ranching, which is the saddest thing in the world to me. But at that day and time, you could make money. It took an awful lot of hard work, but Daddy Stocks was so diversified.

He raised sheep and goats and literally sent them all over the world. If cattle prices would go down, he could rely on his sheep, either lambs for marking or wool, or his goats for their mohair. He was the first sheep man to go to the mountains, and at first he wasn’t liked very well. But after the ranch men saw what he was able to do, within five years there wasn’t a ranch around that didn’t have sheep and goats.

And then we had the horses and mules that he raised for the cavalry. We had 120 head of registered thoroughbred mares. And he got the remount stallions from Fort Riley, Kansas. Aw, they were wonderful animals.

But back to my grandfather. He was a very, very hard man. That fiery temper, I don’t know where it came from. From the Black Irish, my mother used to say. The hard-work ethic from the Scots. Then being on his own for so many years, everything was done the hard way. I mean, there was no easy way.

That was the sad thing about my grandfather. He was a driven person, and he had a way of driving people away from him because he was so hard. It wasn’t that he was critical. It was that he was critiquing everything we did, how we could do it better. I drank it in like a glass of water. But it ran my daddy away from home, and it ran my brother away. He was a very difficult person to work under.

And yet, he was so admired, by so many people. He built this table on a back porch of that house. It was so big, it could seat 33 people. And the reason it was an odd number is he would put Banky and I on either side of him at the head of the table. But most days, for all three meals, that thing was full – people from all over the world that bought his livestock or came to visit with him about his life.

He was so good on one hand and so tough on the other. And so tough on us. We were expected to do so much so young. Banky and I would work so hard to please him and we never could. He’d tell Banky and I, if you can’t work harder and do things better, then you’re no use to me.

He hurt my feelings, yes, but I always wanted to try and do something better to please him. The sad part about it was I never did for the simple reason I was a girl. I wasn’t the other boy that he had wanted so badly. And why he raised me the way he did…

It was really a weird way to raise a girl. I got along 46 miles from the nearest town, on a ranch that had no less than 16 cowboys that worked for us. So I got along better with men than I did women. I could do more, better than a lot of men could. I could ride a horse better than most men. And I’m not bragging, it’s just that I rode every day. And that ranch was big.

We were usually up at 3:00 or 3:30 in the morning. Four was late. Daddy Stocks got me up first. It was so funny – he’d reach under the cover and grab my big toe, and I would just positively go right straight up. That’s a horrible way to wake somebody up.

My main job was to rustle the horses. There was usually 30 to 40 head of saddle horses that we used to work. And regardless of the weather – and whether we were going to use them or not – those horses were brought in every day and fed oats.

The thought of a little nine-year-old girl on four sections – 700 and something acres – and hills, at that time of morning, rounding up 30 or 40 saddle horses! But just put her on that horse and turn her loose – that was Daddy Stocks’ attitude and I loved it so much. I loved the life I lived so much.

I did anything a boy would of done. Just like a regular cowboy, regular everyday ranch work. I helped brand. I helped castrate. I could do it all. Wherever I was needed. Even when I was young, I was legging calves. I was strong as an ox. I was helping break horses when I was nine years old, and if it weren’t for my brother, a lot of people wouldn’t believe me.

When we’d be out for Christmas, we brought the mares in and then weaned the colts, branded ’em and castrated the geldings. And I was involved in all this. Then we brought in the young horses that had not been broke. My grandfather didn’t believe in breaking a horse ’till he was four or five years old. And you can’t imagine – being raised in the rocks and no rope on ’em except when they were branded – how tough they were. Because their feet were just exactly like stone. And their bones were all developed and they were strong. And thoroughbreds – they were hot-blooded.

Can you imagine a little girl doing all that? But it was a job running that big ranch. As we got older, Banky and I were sent off by ourselves. We were armed with a rope, bailing wire and a .30-30. Mine, Daddy Stocks won in a raffle at the Kent Cafe, a Winchester, and he sawed it off, just as illegal as can be now. He’d tell us go look in this pasture or do such and such in this pasture. If you can imagine, they might know what direction we were going in, but they had no earthly idea where.

To this day, I don’t know how my mother nor my grandmother stood watching what Daddy Stocks did with us. I guess the reason they did is they saw the pleasure that I had, and I guess the talent that I had. It’s so unusual to see a girl that could ride like I could.

I’ve just had such – I’ve always said – a horsey sense. Banky didn’t feel about a horse like I did. Banky would say himself they’re a means of transportation and that’s it. I was the one that loved the livestock. Anything that involved a horse I was all for it.

I had an understanding with them. We’d go to Pecos for the week for school, and then we’d ride the bus back. Then to get to the house, I could whistle to my horses and they’d come to me, if they could hear me. And I’d put a belt around their neck and ride that mile and a half to the house from the highway.

Horses are really, really smart. The things you can teach them. They can sense when you love ’em or when you’re afraid of ’em. And they can be extremely dangerous. If you work with them long enough, you’re going to get hurt. That’s just all there is to it.

Now Banky, he almost got killed. A horse fell with him right under the rockslide of Gomez Peak. There was a Norther comin’ in, and we started to play hide-and-go-seek. I lost him and saw the tail of his horse go over a little hill. I rode up to the top and looked down and he was laying there with his horse. He was real famous for getting off his horse and claiming he was hurt. So I rode up and I said, “Well you’re not going to fool me this time. You just lay there.”

I started to turn my horse and run away. And to this day, I don’t know why I looked back, but I saw the blood trickling down the side of his head.

We were sixteen miles from home. It was getting cold, cold, cold, and sleeting. We had to put him on a horse and take him right straight up that mountain. It was right about twelve hours before we got to the hospital in Pecos.

One of the rocks had punctured his skull. The doctor was able to draw the blood clots off his brain and relieve the pressure before it killed him. He was unconscious for nine weeks, but he was playing football with a steel cap in his head that fall.

Stuff like that, that never slowed us down. That was the joy to me of writing my books, is that I re-lived my childhood and my young adulthood and what had prepared me for life. I can look back on it – as rough as it was and as much heartbreak as we had in our family – I can look back on it only with a smile on my face and with love. And think, really, how privileged I was.

You know, I’ll tell you how rough it was. We had registered angora goats and they were just like gold. But they were the orneriest things in the world. Those old temperamental nannies, if you didn’t get their kids right quick they wouldn’t claim ’em. So just as fast as they’d come, the men would put the nanny in these little pens, and I’d put the kid with it. Half the time the kids was still just as bloody as they could be.

Well, Mother’s bridge club came out to see the ranch. And the first thing Mother said was, “Well, where’s Joan?” And my grandmother said, “Well she’s down there at the corral kidding out the goats.” And course, I don’t know what these women thought “kidding out the goats” was going to be, but they said, “Oh could we go see?” And Mother didn’t think anything about it, so they troop off down there and they’re looking through this fence, asking, “Well, where’s Joan?”

And there I was, I had blood from my nose to my toes. I was just a mess. One woman started screaming and then another one. And one looked around at Mother and said, “How can you let your little girl do something like that?” And boy, Mother turned on them and said, “The one thing about it, she appreciates what God creates.”

And the funny thing is, Mother never went to bridge club again. Because those women thought it was horrible that she let me be involved in something like that.
And this is what’s sad. We were always taught life was just such a beautiful thing. We were created in God’s image and that he gave us all these wonderful things. And the world, it’s just created and recreated. And you accepted the beauty in it, the beauty of life. And you accepted death. Because golly so many times we’d have such tragic things happen.

That’s another thing that amazes me about people. Later when people’d come to see me outside Fort Davis – a single woman, living seven and a half miles from town, by herself – people asked, “Aren’t you afraid?” or “How do you stand it, it’s so quiet?”

And I’d say, “Have you ever sat on your front porch and watched fireflies come bouncing up into the light of the windows of your house at night? Have you ever seen that?” No, they’d say. But, what an experience something like that is, you know? My goodness, to be so thankful.

Or growing up I had friends on other ranches, girls. I used to get so hacked at them talking about how bored they were. And I’d want to say, you follow me for 24 hours a day, you wouldn’t be bored. All I ever wanted to do was to stay at the ranch, and all they could think about was getting away from it. They couldn’t stand the loneliness.

I guess I’m just a ranch girl. Always will be.

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