“There’s so much I appreciate about where I’m from. With a trout stream in the front yard and the Beartooth Mountains extending straight up into the sky, Heyneman’s childhood home was “staggeringly beautiful, like a Sierra Club poster,” he says. Padlock Ranch Photo: John NoltnerThe good ol’ days stretch back to Bench Ranch, a family-sized cattle operation at the base of the Rockies near Fishtail, Montana. But get him talking about the long, laborious hours he spent at Padlock post-Carleton-when getting his hands dirty in the outdoors felt like the truest calling he could hope to hear-and the stoic, often measured Heyneman gets a Christmas-morning twinkle in his eye. He has a full-time job as executive director of Plank Stewardship Initiative, an educational resource for high plains land managers and landowners. And he’s on a ranch-Padlock in Sheridan, Wyoming, the 400,000-acre cattle operation started by his grandfather and Susan’s father, Homer Scott, in 1943.Īt 51, Heyneman no longer spends his days building fences or roping calves. Susan got one of her predictions right: John flies small planes, but there’s been no summiting of Everest. It’s been 41 years since Heyneman ’89 saw his future in print. “Crow Country,” by Wallace and Page Stegner Privately, Susan thinks he may be off flying airplanes or climbing Everest. Here is the one who will be fully competent to take over the ranch.
He is an all-purpose ranch Superkid, a 4-H’er, a great-egg-producer and calf-raiser, a bull-rider and bronc wrangler who prefers to ride backwards, or upside down, without saddle, bridle, or hackamore. Susan and Stegner became friends, and he visited Big Sky Country to write about the Heyneman clan-Susan, husband Jack, “and their five feral children,” Heyneman jokes-for an essay about American West ranchers in Harper’s.īut of John, eleven, there is little doubt.
The best honor she could think to bestow? Name a Red Angus bull on the family’s Montana ranch after him. It’s an afterthought, an amusing aside about how Heyneman’s mother, Susan, having read Stegner’s Angle of Repose, wrote him to say that the book helped her survive Montana’s harsh winters. John Heyneman has already spilled his life story when he mentions his mom’s friendship with novelist Wallace Stegner. There aren’t many 11-year-olds from rural Montana whose destiny was mapped out in a magazine essay by a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer.
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