Carl G. Stevenson

Inducted in 2012

Mar 1

Red Rock - Pinal County

Inducted in 2012

Carl Stevenson came from something other than a ranching background. Developing a passion for working with livestock took a while.

Born in 1917 in Hollywood, California, Carl was the son of an attorney who died during the 1918 flu epidemic. His mother never remarried. They lived with each of Carl's grandparents at different times until Carl's maternal grandfather, a contractor by trade, built them a house in the San Fernando Valley, where Carl grew up. " I graduated from high school in 1935. I then went to the University of California at Davis. I graduated in 1940," he said Carl spent a couple of summers and whatever other time he could find in Chugwater, Wyoming, working on a ranch. "I stayed a couple of semesters in Alamosa, Colorado, with a horse trader named Gil Traveler. We traded a lot of horses. I rode and broke a lot of horses for him."

Not long after he graduated from college, Carl was drafted into the Army. Less than a year later, Pearl Harbor was bombed, throwing the United States into the heart of the conflict. With his agricultural experience, he was assigned to the veterinary corps, "which is a tiny department in the Army,” he remembers. "They sent ten of us to veterinary school for a ten-day crash course. I came out of that with a rating of veterinary technician. Afterward, I returned to my outfit and asked to be sent to the horseshoeing school."

The 1 Cavalry Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, to which Carl was assigned, was still a cavalry division. "I had shod horses a little bit before that. I got in the horseshoeing school, and they made me an instructor after a little while, and then not too long after that, they put me in charge of the school." During his time at Fort Bliss, the Army held maneuvers pitting the 1 Cavalry Division against a mechanized division from Louisiana. The mechanized division won. "Of course, the veterinary corps was left out of it. A little later, we were divided in half. Half of us went to Europe, and half of us went to the Pacific. I oversaw the horseshoeing school, and they dismounted the cavalry. That took those horses away." Even though the horses were gone, Carl was kept busy. "They brought two thousand mules in and told me they had to be shod. I had nine forges with two men to a forge, students or Army boys I had taught to shoe." When all two thousand were shod, Carl and a veterinarian in their outfit loaded the mules onto a train and took them to Camp Carson, Colorado, where they were given to mountain troops to be used as pack mules. "I thought they had many more mules than needed," he said. That job was completed, and Carl and his outfit headed for Europe.

Their first stop was North Africa, where Carl was assigned to work with the horse-mounted Moroccan troops. He spent the winter of 1944-1945 in Grenoble, France, where he and ten other men were assigned to provide a veterinary hospital behind Patton's advancing tanks as they crossed the Rhine. Discharged in 1945, Carl returned home and joined his UC Davis classmates working on a ranch in northern California.

Carl and Pat were married in 1947, and in 1951, the young couple and their three children moved to Continental, Arizona, to join the developing cattle feeding industry. "Farmers Investment Company hired me in 1951 to come to Arizona and build a feed yard and then build a second feed yard," he said. "We pastured cattle where Green Valley is today. It was all open country then, and we ran a lot of cattle on the desert." Farmers Investment also pastured cattle on a large acreage at Aguila. "I don't know how big. It was 30 miles across, and we ran a lot of cattle up there. I was in charge of that. We had a total of about 18,000 cattle." When cattle prices dropped in 1963, Carl told his wife that this would be a good time if they were ever going back out on their own. He was sure that prices would rebound. "We came to Red Rock, and I purchased this piece of ground we're on here on a shoestring, and we made it work."

Only some people thought he was making a wise decision. Carl had a packer in Los Angeles named Joe Goldstein to whom he sold most of the cattle from Continental. "We had become friends, mostly over the phone." When Carl told Joe where he was setting up shop, Joe didn't think the prospects sounded very promising.

"He flew into Tucson, rented a car, drove out here, and looked at this property. He got a hold of me and said, 'Carl, you don't want to go there. That's the worst place in the world.' I said Joe, I put a thousand dollars down to hold it until I could raise some money." Joe offered to give Carl the thousand dollars if he wanted to find something else, but Carl decided to stay.

When faced with a challenge, Carl's resourcefulness shone through. As he was working to build the business in the early days, Carl got a call from one of the Greeno brothers in Wyoming. He knew I was creating this feed yard. He said, “Carl, I've got three loads on the way for you. I'll get you started.” I said, “I haven't got anything ready to feed yet.” Greeno replied, “Well, that's your problem.” Not one to let the grass grow under his feet, Carl bought a couple of semi-loads of feed from another feedlot and fed them until he got going. When Joe returned and looked at what Carl was accomplishing, he said Carl's commitment to his vision was unwavering. “Well, you've done it. Let's feed some cattle. I'll partner with you.” Carl told Joe that he didn't have the money to buy cows yet, but that didn't deter him. He told Carl that was okay, showing his dedication to his goals. Joe still wanted to partner with him. "He fed a lot of cattle over the years with me." Carl said, "I could get cattle about as fast as I could build pens, so we kept enlarging it. We never borrowed any money to enlarge. We just did it on our cash flow. We started with five or six hundred cattle and got up to 28,000." He pastured cattle as far away as the Chino Valley area and Willcox.

At one point, Carl became involved in building a large packing plant near Brawley, California. He had a substantial interest in the plant, so his partners sued him for their losses when he decided to pull out. It was an unsettling time, but "we got through it," he remembers. The feed being used by cattle feeders in Arizona at the time was inferior to what some other areas were feeding. "We don't have corn in this country like the rest of them do, but we have a lot of Milo and sorghum grown here, and that's what we were feeding lots of."

In 1961-1962, Dr. Bill Hale of the University of Arizona was experimenting with a new way of flaking grain. "He decided that if he could properly process, steam cook, roll, and break it, he could get the same food value because it has more protein than corn. So they worked together on that. Carl would try it at the feed yard. “I put in a cooking system and a growing system down at Continental, and we were speed-growing grain the way he had developed it.” He was the first to do that, and we were about the first ones to use it. Then, of course, we use it up here too." Bruce Taylor was hired as dean of the Department of Agriculture at the University of Arizona in the 1950s, and he and Carl developed a friendship. "He wanted to try feeding fat because we had a little rendering works in Tucson. They had no outlet for fat, so we could buy it really cheap. It has about two ¼ times the energy of corn or grain, so we started feeding fat then. We developed feeding fat and rolled grain through Dr. Hale. He's been recognized all over the world for it."

Pat died of cancer in 1971. Carl established an endowment and scholarship at the University of Arizona in her name. A few years later, Carl found love a second time when he married Betty Schroeder.

In the 1980s, Carl was one of the movement's leaders to merge the Arizona Cattle Growers and the Cattle Feeders into the Arizona Cattlemen's Association.

His son does most of the heavy work today. "My son spent ten years rodeoing. He's quite a roper, one of the best. When he quit after ten years of being on the rodeo circuit, he came home and said I'm ready to go to work, and that's about all he's ever done since.”