The following is excerpted from a conversation with Jane Hollister Wheelwright and her husband, Jo Wheelwright. This informal interview took place in October of 1999 and was conducted by John Kiewit and Cynthia Carbone Ward.

The seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back
again to where they were. Black Elk

"I can't remember the dates or timeline of events," says Jane Hollister Wheelwright, " because everything becomes cyclical. There's no stream that you can follow. It's just cycles, over and over."

Ranch life seems to teach this. Our history is not simply a linear progression of events but a circle of seasons fading into each other. Jane and her husband Jo Wheelwright are reminiscing from Tepitates, the "high and sacred place" where they make their home. The day is hot and still, and the room is awash in sunlight. We let sequence be damned and dance among the decades, but our focus is the Ranch.

"My father, John James Hollister, was the Ranch, and the Ranch was my father," Jane tells us. "He was born here and lived his whole life here. He loved this place. He was a gentle man, not a big, noisy scrapper, as some were."

"He was gentle and polite," Jo agrees. "When I was studying French literature, he read the English translations of the books I thought were good. He was interested enough to do that. I can just see him with his foot up in the arm of his rocking chair, reading."
"He was more of an environmentalist than a lot of environmentalists now," Jane continues, "but he didn't know it by that name. It was wilderness when he came here. He settled in that canyon where the house is, and he developed it. And he was the first one to do that. But he could see that the wildlife was an integral and necessary part of the land. He had a natural wisdom. He was very observant. He didn't miss anything."

In addition to her twin brother Clint, Jane had two older brothers: Jack and Joe. They were schooled at Harvard and Yale, partly because Jane's mother was, as Jo Wheelwright irreverently puts it, "drawn to the snottiest places she could find."

"It was to compensate for living in the sagebrush," Jane quickly retorts.

There was a kind of ongoing war between the East Coast educated brothers and their father, who had learned a great deal through experience. At one point, the brothers had the bright idea of planting elephant grass at the Ranch and finally convinced their father to let them try it.

"But the cattle wouldn't eat it," Jane tells us. "It was too tough. And so they had a very expensive laugh over that."

There were actually five ranches back then. And when Jane's grandfather, William Welles Hollister, died, his wife had decided to sell it all.

"My grandmother hated the Ranch," Jane says, "because her husband -- that was my grandfather -- was away all the time, and it was always 'the Ranch.' She was lonely."

"And so my father was sent to look it all over, because he was supposed to help set an asking price, and he did it on horseback. He came down the Santa Anita Canyon and found the grass so tall that he could hardly see his way. He could tie the grass across his saddle -- it was that high! And he said grass like that should feed an awful lot of cattle. So he went to his mother and said, 'We're not selling.' I don't know what she did. That part of the story's not told."

"But that was the beginning. He stopped the sale. And he stood up against the whole family on that."

"...what he saw was that cattle turned loose on their own will find their way up into all these places, and they'll get fat on it."

"And not only that -- he saw how beautiful it was."

"It's just as beautiful to me, Jane, as it was when Clinty brought me out here in 1927," Jo says, "and that's quite a few years ago."

"Yeah, that's a long time," Jane replies.