By Andrew Somerville

Colorful characters and odd circumstances converged to produce the unique O RO ranch and its magnificent horses. This story connects an ill-fated explorer, the claim of a sheep ranching family, one ranching family ruined by lack of water and another determined to will the ranch into existence.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca apparently treated his Indigenous American hosts well and learned from them during his wandering on the continent after his Spanish expedition’s 1542 shipwreck. He appears to have developed the reputation of being a faith healer to tribes he met along his journey. Later, he was appointed governor of Rio de la Plata (Paraguay), attempted to treat the Indigenous peoples there fairly, angered Spanish settlers and was charged with misrule. He died in poverty in Spain, c.1560.

Don Luis María Cabeza de Baca, seemed very different from the celebrated Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca he claimed as his ancestor. He was a wealthy sheep herder with a family hacienda in Peña Blanca, in what is now New Mexico, where the Indigenous Puebloans accused him of intimidation and fraud. He was likely killed in 1827 by a Mexican soldier over refusing to surrender contraband pelts belonging to an American. The Americans, among various other foreigners, often hunted pelts illegally in what was then Mexican territory in the 1820s.