Letter from Rural Nevada: Cowboy Bob's Buckeroo Past
Rural Nevada is chockfull of abandoned old mines and ghost towns that suggest the Silver State’s colorful past. But those places that remain peopled remain full of eccentric and hardworking characters, people like my new friend Bob. So, let’s take a ride in Bob’s old pickup truck.
Last of three parts.
Bob Grubaugh grew up the cowboy way.
He was raised in the tiny Oregon burg of Arock which, believe it or not, is even smaller than McDermitt. The school only goes to the eighth grade. After that, kids are bussed to the Jordan Valley, thirty miles distant.
His parents, Don and Lois, ran a small ranch outside town and Don made extra money driving school bus. There were five kids, three boys and two girls, and Bob was the second youngest. All lived the traditional country life.
“Bob had a pet pig,” said Charlotte, as she sat at the kitchen table of her ranch house, tucked up onto the eastern foothills of the craggy Canyon range. Her daughter Michelle, a capable fifty-something woman who handles most of the ranching chores, sat by her side. “He loved that little pig. It grew into a nice big sow and he’d rub her belly and she’d lay right down. He had a horse he called Blue. They caught her and Bob broke her all by himself. She was a really nice horse after he broke her. Anybody could ride her. He had her for years.”
Growing up, Bob idolized his oldest brother Chuck so when chuck graduated from high school and relocated to California, Bob was suddenly no longer content with ranch life. He wanted to follow his brother.
Chuck encouraged the move and so off Bob went. He didn’t even graduate high school. “Our father thought he was old enough to make his own decisions,” Charlotte recalled. “He’d made it to eleventh grade. He was a shy kid, in a way. He just didn’t like school.”
Bob got a mechanic’s job at a wrecking yard in San Mateo and began seeing the boss man’s daughter, a young woman named Pam. He got married at age 19 and the couple had five children before the relationship fell apart a decade later.
As Charlotte recalls it, Pam’s father had money and there was no question who would take custody of the children. Bob quickly fell out of touch with his kids, a situation that persists even to today.
The move jettisoned Bob onto a path he would follow for decades — that of a loner whose main contribution in life with to work with his hands, drink beer, both at the bar and at home, and womanize whenever he got the chance.
At age 30, Bob became a full time itinerant cowboy, moving between buckeroo jobs across Idaho, Utah and Nevada — including a gig near Area 51, which, both women joke, is how Bob became so damned weird and irascible.
He’d long ago fell out of touch with Charlotte, who had her own life working in a grocery store in Brigham City. His sister could only guess where he was, and what he doing.
“There weren’t many holiday check-in calls, mainly because Bob never had a phone,” Charlotte said. “He wasn’t really a hermit, but did he did his thing. He liked his beer. He’d go home after work and drink a few six packs.”
As far as the family can recollect, there were a few more kids along the way — one son here, and still another now-grown boy who came into the picture not long ago.
“Bob got around,” said his niece, Michelle. “Bob had a bunch of little Bobs.”
“Well, you know, you go to the bar,” her mother said. “You drink and you meet someone, and that’s what happens.”
Meanwhile, while Bob was off gallivanting, his idea of home shifted. Charlotte met a man named Cleto, from McDermitt and the couple relocated to the ranch just north of town. They also moved their parents to McDermitt, so Bob began checking in from the cowboy circuit whenever he wanted to reconnect with Mom and Dad.
He and Cleto became drinking partners. “They both liked to go to the bar and drink,” Charlotte said. “The Highway Bar and the Orovada Bar and sometimes the Desert Inn. They just made a circle sometimes at night. Whichever one was open the latest.”
For years, Bob worked on a couple of ranches outside Tonopah, where he picked up the moniker Cowboy Bob. He got a puppy, a blue healer that he named Whisper, and the two became inseparable. The two women believe Whisper became the single meaningful relationship in Bob’s life.
Finally, around 2004, Bob’s ranch luck ran out. He could handle most manual work, but he could not fathom working for a female boss. “Bob does not like a woman telling him what to do, not me, not her, not anybody,” Michelle said, motioning to herself and her mother. "He was the only employee and once in a while he’d have a guy come in and help him. It was dry and desolate and he drove 200 miles a day checking water. He had no power there and he lived in a round rock house.”
After 18 years, he left the ranch, one day just showing up at the new mobile home that Michelle and her parents had installed on the ranch. After a few months, Bob found a house in town and quickly landed a gig at the nearby Lucky Seven ranch, where he watered the cattle, cleaned the barn and sheds, built fences. Again, it was a lonely, solitary job, which suited Bob just fine.
Then just about when Bob turned 80, they let him go at the ranch. Suddenly, he didn’t have much to do, but ride around in his pickup and scarf down Little Debbie donuts. He’d quit drinking decades ago following some near death incident out on the ranch and had found a version of country religion.
But Bob’s isolation is closing in. His male companions are all gone now: his father died of a heart attack years ago and Cleto passed away in 2020. Old Whisper went even before that, when the dog was 16. That’s who’s buried out in Bob’s back yard, under the pile of stones Bob keeps manicured and weed free. Bob still talks to his old friend. Maybe that’s who he was conversing with that day I first saw him out by the fence.
Despite Bob’s stubbornness and troublemaking, Michelle now believes she understands her eccentric uncle, and has actually become proud of how he has made his simple way in a complicated world. But a life of isolation, she believes, has made it hard for him to find a place in regular polite society, a man who struggles in knowing how to keep up with his own bills.
“Bob is a very smart man. He’s just peculiar. He was a cowboy and that’s all he had to worry about. He never paid insurance. He never paid any bills. He never paid electric. He never paid water. The ranch owner did all that. And then came all that isolation. He wasn’t around people to be friendly. He doesn’t know what it means to say thank you. He knows what it means to be kind but he doesn’t know what it means when people hurt. Bob’s never had great loss. But he still feels sorrow.”
The tragedy is that the old buckeroo seems to have outlived his usefulness.
“Bob’s legacy is that he’s been a fantastic cowboy. He’s helped a lot of young cowboys coming up. He’s very caring,” Michelle said. “He was an exceptional horse breaker. He knew cattle and he knew how to take care of cattle. He just loved animals. He wasn’t around people. He was around them horses and them dogs. And that’s what he loved more than anything in this world. He carries a picture of his dog because relates more to animals than his own kids.”
As he ages, Michelle says, her uncle clings to his peculiarities, his warped sense of humor. He’s a man who doesn’t see the problem of walking into the woman’s bathroom at the Walmart, who can’t seem to hold onto his money, who trusts everyone he meets.
“He believes that everybody is kind and God fearing. He doesn’t understand that there are bad people in this world,” Michelle said. “He’s been very isolated. He has spent his life way out in the middle of nowhere, forty, fifty, sixty miles from town. That’s why he’s so unsocialized. That’s why he doesn’t understand the way the world works, from cell phones to his own TV set, because he was always isolated. It’s like taking someone whose been isolated for 50 years and throwing them into another world. And McDermitt’s a small place. Can you imagine Bob in a big city? They’d put him in a nut house and it’s not that he’s nuts, he just doesn’t understand.”
The police around McDermitt are well aware of Bob and his antics, as his sister and niece try to keep tabs on the old cowboy. When people in town call about his latest faux pas, Michelle steps in to clean up the mess.
“When there’s a problem, the police call us. We’ve had two cops in Oregon this year come down and there’s been issues and the first thing is, “Is Bob ready for a nursing home?” Now it’s better. We’ve got control of the finances; he gets his money, but not so much because he takes out his wallet and he hands people cash.”
So in a bit of small-town irony, old Bob Grubaugh no longer trusts the two women who are his last defense against losing the independent life he’s always known, the freedom to start his pickup each morning and cruise McDermitt’s backstreets, to play his pranks and get on people’s nerves and rake his yard and talk to his long-dead dog, and just continue being Bob for Bob’s sake.
One day, not too long after I met Charlotte and Michelle, I accompanied Lorraine when she went to Bob’s house to check on his television. I’d never been inside the place before and the rainy morning and overcast skies somehow made the mission all that more spooky. Still, I was curious to see how the man lived.
We knocked on the back door and stood under an awning out of the rain, waiting for McDermitt’s version of Boo Radley to come to the door, as I eyed the lineup of small rocks and other oddities Bob had lined up on the railing. Like a fish or a field crow, he was obviously attracted to shiny things. When I first arrived, he walked the neighborhood showing off an antique child’s spoon he’d found in the dirt, now dull and tarnished but for Bob a revelation.
Lorraine is like Mother Theresa by my side and I am yet again amazed by her capacity for empathy when it comes to this man her husband can barely tolerate.
She opened the screen door and called inside. We could hear the television so we knew he was in there. We were carrying two industrial-sized plastic jars of peanut butter, complements of the local Baptist minister, to bribe our way inside, if necessary.
Suddenly, Bob was there at the door, appearing like an apparition, and suddenly I was the one who was flinching.
He stood by to let us in. He was used to Lorraine’s visits but his blue eyes widened at seeing me. We handed him the peanut butter and he seemed to relax, and he quickly morphed into a warm and engaging social host, leading us into the living room.
Lorraine asked about the TV, whether Bob had figured out how to work the remote and tune in his favorite religious shows and old westerns. As the two spoke, my eyes scanned the room. I had become so curious about this man and now here I was, finally inside his home, drinking in the smallest details. I felt like I had entered King Tut’s tomb, a psychiatrist with my notebook at the ready.
On a table next to his easy chair, left near a space heater, was a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich on paper plate. In the kitchen, a pair of work gloves was propped in front of another heater. Bob was anything but a hoarder, but his furnishings suggested an impulse to collect seemingly unconnected keepsakes.
On one wall hung unopened packages containing two locks and a set of paint brushes. A life-sized head of a Disney princess looked down from atop the refrigerator.
There were stuffed animals, bears and birds, a leather belt bearing the name Bob, a poster of Marilyn Monroe wearing a Los angles Lakers basketball jersey and a half-dozen calendars hung around the two-bedroom home, each the dates marked off with a large X, like Bob was a convict marking time.
On his bedroom wall, above an old picture of Whisper, was a list of a dozen people in Bob’s life, with tier birthdays written in. On the television box, Charlotte has taped a large warning letter, just in case bob decided to start giving away his possessions, like he’s done in the past.
“Bob, do not send this back or give it away. It belongs to your sister Charlotte, not Direct TV or your friends. We will be checking on this equipment. Do not give it away or you will pay for it.”
Bob and Lorraine have an easy relationship and she stood in the kitchen teasing him about his typical pranks — like pretending you broke one of his bones when you shook his hand, or how he’ll reach out toward your shoulder and then tweak your nose. She grabbed Bob’s arm to show his he has written his age, 81, on the side of his hand, as if he could let himself — or anyone else — forget.
He led us into the second bedroom and pointed toward the bed. He’d picked up a woman hitchhiker the other night, he said, and let here sleep here.
Lorraine clucked dismissively. “Bob, that’s dangerous,” she said. “These days, people will hit you over the head for less than a dime.”
He showed us how the intruder had slid in through the kitchen window the night of the robbery. Was he afraid? “No,” Bob said, “I was ready to whup him.”
We turned to leave, to walk back out the way we’d come, into the steady rain. But now the door was closed and on its back hung a sign, no doubt put there by Charlotte and Michelle, his two women protectors.
“We love you!” it said.
Before I left McDermitt, I bought a painting that depicts a pack of wild mustang. The piece had been on display at a coffee house on the Oregon side of the state line, just down a dirt road from my house.
As I walked home, I ran into Bob. He was raking leaves along the back alley. If he remembered I was writing about him, he didn’t let on, or continue to avoid me. And after all my initial trepidation, I know that I would eventually miss the old cowboy.
I stopped and held up the painting so he could give it a good look. He was silent for a few moments, as though it brought back memories.
“There used to be a lot of wild mustangs out there in those mountains,” he said, pointing northwest, into Oregon. “Cowboys used to catch ‘em, take ‘em home and break ‘em. But they put a stop to that.”
I asked if Bob he’d ever broken a Mustang.
“No,” he said, “but I broke plenty of horses.”
Then he pointed out all the designs he’d drawn in the dirt like I’d never seen them before, the along with his rock collection, lined up along the back railing, like a western sculpture.
“Bob, you’re an artist,” I said.
He nodded and began talking about Whisper. “I got that dog when it was just an itty-bitty thing,” he said, cradling the air in his arms.
“Why don’t you get another dog?”
He shook his head.
“It doesn’t have to be a puppy. You could drive down to Winnemucca, go to the pound and pick out and old dog nobody else wants. Save its life. That way, it’ll be old, like you are. You two might even go together.”
Bob liked that idea. Then he lied again, saying he was 71.
“Bob, you’re 81,” I said. “Remember? You showed me your license.”
When we parted ways, he yelled out.
“See ya later, alligator! After awhile, crocodile!”
Then he went back to sweeping the road outside somebody else’s house.
Old Bob doesn’t know this, but Charlotte and Michelle already have his gravestone picked out, its epitaph ready. They’ll place it there in the McDermitt cemetery, right next to those of his parents.
For years, every Sunday morning, he has gone there to pay his respects, spend a few quiet moments, before making his daily rounds in the old pickup truck. Who knows what he says to them?
Bob still keeps in touch with his brothers. Reno lives in Alaska and Chuck in Idaho. He’ll knock on Vickie Easterday’s door or visit Joe White Buffalo and ask to use their phone for a call.
Vickie said Bob showed her a letter he’d received from one of his long-lost progeny, a daughter or a granddaughter, who apparently wants to reconnect.
At this point, Charlotte and Michelle hope they leave Bob be, so he can live out his last years in McDermitt, a town that for the most part has accepted him for who he is.
Eventually, he’ll be placed there next to Don and Lois. The gravestone will say “Robert Donald Grubaugh — Cowboy Bob,” and there will be a likeness of Whisper there, the eccentric old buckeroo and his beloved canine companion.