At 98, Altie Smith is still sharp as a tack, regaling anyone willing to listen about life on the ranch.
It’s a mere legend that he was born with a lasso in his hand — but not by much.
“I was around cattle and horses all my life,” he explained this week. “I was just used to being that way.”
Smith, who still lives in an Iola apartment with wife Lula Bell — they’ll celebrate their 80th wedding anniversary later this month — recalled perhaps his wildest day on the ranch, more than 50 years ago.
It was the day Smith roped a bear.
SMITH grew up in Iola, the son of Archie and Orpha Smith. Archie, like his son, was a lifelong cowboy and owned a corral at the edge of town.
Young Smith learned the ins and outs of ranching at a ripe young age.
“We’d rope cattle for branding or whatever,” he recalled. “I roped pretty much everything I could.”
It was a skill that served him well as an adult, when Smith ventured out to New Mexico to work on an 85,000-acre ranch, not far from Cimarron, at the eastern slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
It was a bright summer morning when Smith’s boss had gone out to check on the cattle herd, probably five miles away, when he returned in a rush.
“Get the truck and follow me, and bring a rope,” the boss barked. “We spotted a bear.”
Smith loaded up in a pickup with a coworker, drove probably five miles east or so, to see the full-sized bear, covered with a brilliant shade of dark red hair.
“He was just standing there,” Smith recalled.
The bear quickly noticed the pickups surrounding him, and took off in a fast gallop
“We didn’t crowd him, but we just followed him,” Smith said.
