Barbed ire: Flap over land turns ranch life prickly

Border war pits pioneering family, relative newcomer

Joe Garner, Rocky Mountain News

Published March 3, 2007 at midnight

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The Christmas cards stopped last December, about six months after the first lawsuit was filed.

"It's sad when you think people are your friends and neighbors and then something like this comes out of the blue," said Margaret Lamb, 87, of Creede. She is the matriarch of a pioneer family snared in a tangle of lawsuits over land that is the crown jewel of their ranch in the Upper Rio Grande Valley.

The Lambs filed suit in May, asking the courts to determine ownership of 8.2 acres of their Soward Ranch. The lawsuit was filed, they said, after their neighbor announced his intention to move a fence to claim the tract, although the fence has been the boundary between the two ranches since 1894.

The seeds of the dispute were sewn more than 100 years ago by a government more interested in converting land into cash than in the precision of its surveys. It's a story likely to be replayed again and again, as 19th-century errors are forced to light in 21st-century disputes.

Located in the shadow of the Continental Divide, the Soward Ranch has been handed down through four generations of their family since Daniel Webster Soward, Margaret Lamb's grandfather, homesteaded the first tract in 1886.

Their neighbor, and now adversary, is Dallas restaurateur and commercial real-estate developer Herbert B. Story Jr. He countered with a lawsuit against the Lambs in August, claiming the tract at the confluence of Trout Creek and the Rio Grande as part of his Antelope Park Ranch, which he bought 25 years ago.

"It doesn't seem to us, or our lawyer, that he has much of a case," Lamb said. "But, sometimes, people with money do think they can push other people around."

Eatery the cornerstone

In the trendy Dallas neighborhood called Uptown, movers and shakers gather at the S&D Oyster Co., which Herb and Mary Kay Story named for their children, Stephanie and Doak. A landmark since it opened in 1976 in a century-old brick building at 2701 McKinney Ave., the eatery secured its reputation with New Orleans-style seafood.

Following the success of the restaurant, Story also came to be identified in the Dallas newspaper as a commercial real-estate developer as well as a host at the restaurant.

Story, 63, and his attorney declined to talk with the Rocky Mountain News about the lawsuits, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver.

Restaurant patrons throughout the years have included politicians, football fans and R. Scott Lamb, 49, Margaret Lamb's son. At the time, he was working in Texas before returning to Creede to help manage the Soward Ranch, which has evolved into a guest ranch since the first paying vacationers arrived in 1932.

"It's not like a classic dude ranch since we don't have horses and trail rides," said R. Scott Lamb, an owner of the ranch along with his mother, brother and sister. "It's more a fishing resort, where families come year after year."

The meadows are leased to another rancher and the cattle that graze each summer are "mostly decoration," he said.

Neighborly friendship

The boundary between the two ranches is a fence that has been in place for more than 100 years, which follows the original survey of the Soward Ranch, according to the Lambs.

However, Story claims that the true boundary lies to the east of the fence, which would give him title to the 8-plus acres. The acreage includes the fishery at the confluence of Trout Creek and the Rio Grande, which is of inestimable value in attracting paying guests to fill the Lambs' 10 cabins from May 15 to Oct. 15.

Like other Texans escaping the summer heat, Story first came to Creede years ago with his father, a certified public accountant from Wichita Falls, the Lambs said.

Then, after graduating from Southern Methodist University, serving as Navy pilot and launching his own career, Story became their neighbor, with his 680-acre spread adjacent to the Lambs' 1,320 acres. He built a big ranch house with a wrap-around porch within sight of the Lambs' old-fashioned ranch house.

The Lambs attended the Storys' open house and began to exchange Christmas greetings with their neighbors. Margaret Lamb kept some of the Storys' cards, traditionally a family photograph chronicling the course of their lives and their three children. One child died as a boy. The two older children grew up, married and started families of their own, making Herb and Mary Kay grandparents.

"I guess my characterization of Mr. Story is that he had a Southern civility, not abrasive at all," R. Scott Lamb said. "He is an attractive person. He had impeccable manners."

"One of the things that has made this so disappointing is that it has brought an end to a relationship with a neighbor we liked."

Still, Story has made it known that he was not one of those all-hat-and-no-cattle cowboys, Lamb said. The Texan offered "a pretty sweet price" for part of the Soward Ranch when the Lambs faced an inheritance-tax bill, but they turned him down, he said.

"Herb wanted that piece of property," Lamb said.

He said the only dispute over the property line between the two ranches occurred shortly after Story bought the Antelope Park Ranch. Lamb said his late father, J. Howard Lamb, typically a placid man, found, uprooted and threw a fence post into the river, angered because he understood the fence post represented Story's claim on land that had been considered part of the Soward Ranch for decades.

"My father never told me the story," Lamb said. "Mr. Story told me the story after he died."

Rushed surveys

Disputed surveys and fence lines may seem like part of the Old West, but the mistakes early surveyors committed more than 100 years ago in trying to impose sections and townships on Colorado's rugged mountains can still be a bonanza for lawyers.

"For about eight or 10 years, just after the Civil War, the government in Washington was in a big hurry to get the state surveyed. They wanted to sell it to pay off the war debt," said Robert Chichester, a member of the Professional Land Surveyors of Colorado who is student of historic surveys.

"The early surveyors had no formal training," Chichester said. "They came out West after the war because they were looking for work. They would make up their notes from what they did in the field in a barroom or in the light in their tents."

Duane Smith, a Southwest studies and history professor at Fort Lewis College in Durango, said flawed or fraudulent 19th-century surveys led to resurveys to establish mining claims, Indian reservations and national parks.

"I think there could still be time bombs all over the state because of problems in the first surveys," Smith said. "They won't explode unless someone pushes the issue."

Family legacy

"Ask any title company, when you say, 'Mineral County,' they cringe," said Bill Philbern, owner of Blue Creek Lodge, another Creede-area guest ranch.

In the 1990s, the U.S. Forest Service began a resurvey of the area to correct errors in a survey done 50 years earlier, he said.

"According to the 1940s resurvey, the government said none of our land existed," Philbern said. "They said we were trespassing on government land. They threatened to put us in prison and give us quarter-of-a-million-dollar fines."

After lengthy appeals to Washington, the controversy was resolved, he said.

Philbern was allowed to keep his 25 acres and buy five more from the government to square off his property lines.

For now, the Lambs continue in federal court against Story, who is represented by Patton Boggs, a Washington-based firm ranked by American Lawyer as one of the nation's top 100 law firms, and by Capitol Hill publications as the nation's premier lobbying firm, among other distinctions.

"The size of the law firm doesn't change the law," R. Scott Lamb said, quoting the adage of his Denver attorney, Frank Visciano, of Senn Visciano Kirchenbaum.

The principle of real-estate law at the center of the case is adverse possession. The Lambs contend that decades of their use of the 8.2 acres gives them title to the property, even though the legal description does not follow the fence line.

And, as a consequence, Story may have been paying taxes on the property since 1982 because the tax bill has been based on the legal description, not actual use.

"That fence has been an acceptable property line between the two ranches since time immemorial," Lamb said. "My great-grandfather meant for that fence to be there.

"I feel like I'm in the role as the defender of my family legacy, and I won't shirk from that duty."In her own words

Margaret Lamb, 87, the matriarch of the family that owns the Soward Ranch near Creede, on growing up there:

The ranch is my whole life. I grew up on the ranch. After I started school, I spent the winters in Creede with my grandmother, but I couldn't wait for summer so I could be back at the ranch.

We always had a lot of horses, and I always rode. It seemed like the cowboys always did the hard things, and I just did the fun things. Maybe they spoiled me.

I had a beautiful brown horse, when I was maybe 7 or 8. I called her Brown Polly. My grandfather taught her to kneel down on her front knees so I could get on.

Creede was an old mining town. Men went to work every morning in the old mines. They worked hard. There was lots of drinking. Miners drink.

I had friends I went through school with. It was a pretty good life for a kid.

After I graduated in 1937, I enrolled at University of Denver to study business and retail store management. It sounded romantic to a young girl to go to New York, buy dresses and bring them back to sell in a store.

It was a sacrifice for my mother, but she just always indicated I was going on to college. Fortunately, I did well in school, so I got a half-tuition scholarship. My father would give me the other half. I lived with a family in Denver and worked for my room and board.

There were other girls, but most of them were not rural girls, they were city people.

Margaret Lamb had to leave DU before her graduation because of her father's illness and death. She took over his position as the Creede postmaster until she married in April 1945, started a family and continued to operate the Soward Ranch.

garnerj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5421

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