Old-school cowboy Bill Cawley is elated to still be flood-irrigating pastures with his old weathered shovel and working cattle.

Cawley has managed the historic Walton Ranch at the base of the Teton Range near Jackson since 1985, but was a little concerned about his future — and the future of his employees — when the ranch hit the market in 2011 for $100 million.

The 1,846-acre property recently sold to a couple from the East (he’s the CEO of a large American chain of clothing retailers). The asking price for the ranch was lowered several times to the final price of $39 million, or $21,127 per acre. The actual selling price was not disclosed.

OLD SCHOOL: Bill Cawley loves his work—and the views—on the Walton Ranch, at the foot of the Tetons in Wyoming.

Cawley says that the new owners wanted to continue running the ranch as a working cattle operation, and they invited him and wife Carol, along will four full-time hands, to remain on board.

“Nothing has really changed. Right now, as we’ve done for many years, we’re in the middle of calving, and soon we’ll be irrigating,” Cawley said in mid-April. “I’ve done this kind of work since the 1960s, and I hope to still be ranching in five years.”

Cawley turns 74 in July and started chuckling when asked when he was planning to retire.

“I guess I’m a lot like the new owner of the ranch; we both love to work and stay busy,” Cawley says.

Conservation easement restriction
The Walton Ranch took about five years to sell, in part because the entire acreage was placed under an agricultural conservation easement by the late Paul and Betty Walton, who assembled the ranch in the late 1950s and 1960s.

The easement prohibits any subdivisions and commercial activity, which is very unlike most of the private property in Jackson Hole, which has been developed into high-end golf courses, resorts and rural subdivisions crammed with multi-million-dollar homes.

Though ranches in Teton County and other scenic areas of Wyoming won’t pay for themselves in terms of cattle, they still provide opportunities for many cowboys and cowgirls, both young and old, to work in agriculture.

And for people like Cawley, managing a ranch is the next best thing to owning one.

“The new owner has been great to work with. When he bought the ranch, he said, ‘Let’s keep it the same, so we did.’”

Bringing the sellers (the heirs of Paul and Betty Walton) and buyers together were Ron Morris and Billy Long of Ranch Marketing Associates and Joel Leadbetter and Tim Murphy of Hall and Hall Realtors.