Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame: Joseph Rex Wardell Ran Cattle For 53 Years

Sometimes younger kids in big families get away with more than their older siblings. But for Joseph Rex Wardell, the seventh child of Sublette County homesteaders, the expectations were still high.

The seventh of nine children born in 1901, Rex learned early how to work on the ranch at the “Forks of the River” in the Upper Green River Valley.

He came of age on the horse ranch and, like his brothers, had ample opportunity for working with and breaking horses. The family sold them to the Army for use on the battlefields in World War I.

At age 9, Rex earned his first saddle working as a horse wrangler for Tom Conner. He managed to stay in the country school on a neighboring ranch until he was 12 or 13.

By then, he was already a hand with a horse, and there was plenty of work to be done with the mounts the Army needed. So, he ended his formal education and put his saddle to work making a living.

A Cowboy Job

Before 1920, Rex worked on a ranch near Cokeville that raised hogs. It was enough of a stink for him to swear off raising pigs for good, so he headed back to Sublette County where he worked for Abner and K. Luman.

Wanderlust sometimes gets to a young man, so Rex turned his back on Wyoming for a spell and went to Deeth, Nevada, where he found a cowboy job.

But the pull of the green got to him so he came back home and went to work for the Upper Green River Cattle Association, a job he would hold for 53 years from 1923 to 1976, including 44 years as foreman.

This was a cowboy job through and through.

For many years, his home was a cow camp with chuckwagon and roundup tents. He rode and worked horseback covering country from Opal to the Gros Ventre near Jackson and almost to Dubois.

Although he worked for the Association, Rex cared for all livestock he encountered, making sure they were gathered and returned home regardless of ownership.

He and his crew helped ranchers in neighboring grazing allotments when the help was needed.

Years of working with livestock on various ranches and trailing cattle to the railroad gained Rex a reputation of integrity.

Rex had no children of his own, but he was a mentor to several generations of kids in the area who spent time working on the roundup with him.

He was a living history book about the ranches and cowboys he'd grown to know through a lifetime of work.

Life Had A Routine

His years working with the ranchers in the Association usually found him camped on the Little Colorado Desert during the latter part of March preparing to distribute cattle over the range keeping them on good feed and water.

This could be challenging, particularly with the heavy, wet snows of a Wyoming spring hit the area.

As the weather improved in early summer, he drifted the cattle north to the mountains moving the horse herd and camp as he and his crew pushed cattle to the summer pastures in the Upper Green River Valley.

They branded the calves from on the desert as they were rounded up along the way.

When summer turned to fall, the cattle drifted south and the riders gathered and followed them home to be sorted and then shipped on the railroad from stockyards at Opal or the Winton stockyards north of Rock Springs.

Cattle don’t always come out of the mountains when you want them to, so Rex spent the greater part of winter gathering strays and getting them to home ranches.

For most of his life, this work was done horseback stopping overnight at ranches along the way because he did not have or use a truck or horse trailer for most of his cowboying years.

Rex Wardell was inducted into the Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame with the first class of inductees in 2014.