V6 ranch History
Established 1961
History of the v6 ranch as told by jack Varian
Driving 1,000 V6 Cattle through Parkfield on their way home from Estrella in 1962. 24 miles in two days.
In the summer of 1958 I graduated from Cal Poly with a degree in Animal Husbandry. Newly married to my wife Zera, we were now ready to become full time cattle ranchers. With some help from my parents, Zee and I bought 2,740 acres for $90,000. We got 2 houses, a small shed but no barn. What I would discover over time, was a road, and if you followed it long enough it would lead you to a mythical place called "Pinch Gut Canyon where labor and heart ache were scattered about. This ranch was definitely not a fixer upper as Mother Nature had reserved it for chamise brush, oak trees, and poverty grass. But it was the nicest place to live ever if you were a Black Tail Deer.
After 3 years of spending a fair amount of time crawling through the brush in search of my cattle I met a gentleman from Los Angeles who loved to deer hunt. He wanted to know if I would be interested in selling our Cantinas Ranch, as it was called by the locals. I wanted to hug him, but then I thought better of it as this was no way to negotiate with confidence. After much paper signing Zee and I were no longer ranchers but lookers. We now needed a place to keep our dogs, horses, a baby girl named Katherine, and one more in the baby girl on the way that we would name Lillian.
If you want to be a real rancher you go north, young man, to Nevada, Oregon, or New Meadows, Idaho where in August it is cow heaven. But, as a native would tell me, "you had better like feeding hay to your cows for 6 months and shoveling lots of snow." Zee and I looked at each other, for a moment, through our born-in-California eyes and then it took but a second to get my key in the ignition and our station wagon roared into life.
We headed back to Sissy Land where snow is for skiing and if you played your cards right Mother Nature would provide ample grass so very little hay is needed. We hadn't been home but a couple of weeks when we got a call from a rancher friend of ours who knew I was looking for a new place to call home, a place where we could have a "Do Over." My friend said his brother, a realtor, had a listing on a pretty nice ranch of some 8,000 acres near the little town of Parkfield, in Southern Monterey county. The very next day we met the owner of the ranch and he showed us around.
We all know what love-at-first-sight is. Well, Zee and I were immediately smitten with this land that laid at the headwaters of the Little Cholame Creek. Cholame is a Yokut Indian word meaning the Beautiful One. They sure knew what they were talking about and for me this valley is living proof that Camelot is alive and well. After another round of paperwork, this time as a buyer, in the month of November 1961 we closed escrow on what would become The V6 Ranch. First Zee would have to bear two more boys, John and Gregory, to make the Varian crew 6 members strong, hence the V6 brand.
The Varian Family, 1969
The Taylor's who we bought from kept their house, corrals and 2,700 acres leaving us with nothing but one old barn. Back then, if you wanted to build a house you just built it. So, through the winter of 1961 we built a wonderful house of 1,000 Sq. Feet that would serve us well until 1975 when we built the house we presently live in. The spring of 1962 was time to set up camp. We cooked our first meal and spent the night and have been camping here with Mother Nature’s permission for almost 60 years.
Zera and I casted our lot with all our energy and I hope with a modicum of common sense and we became 6 and The V6 came into being. Now we are 19 strong and Zee and I look back with no regrets. Zera left a life in Culver City, CA and I left a life in Palo Alto, California. There is now 20,000 acres, 3,000 of which our son Greg and his family own and 17,000 that the V6 owns. The whole of it is on loan from Mother Nature.
The loan is protected by a conservation easement that says "this land can never be divided into smaller parcels,” meaning this land will remain beautiful, open landscape forever, however long that is.
So we invite you all to come and enjoy this magical place called The V6 Ranch and the Cholame Valley and out of respect to Mother Nature, please make your footprint as small as possible.
Sincerely,
Jack Varian
Early History
The V6 Ranch sits at the heart of California’s rich history. For thousands of years this land has provided a home for humans from the Tachi Yokut indigenous people to the Varian Family who live on it today, as well as thousands of species of plants and animals.
tachi yokut tribe
This valley was once home to a thriving community of Yokut Native Americans, of the Tachi tribe. They gave this valley the name Cholame (pronounced “show-LAM”) meaning “the beautiful one”. The Yokuts were made up of 40-50 tribes throughout central California, each with its own territory and dialect of the language. It is believed that there were as many as 70,000 Yokut in the 1770s, a number which had tragically fallen to just 600 by 1910.
The Tachi Yokuts lived in the Cholame Valley seasonally, hunting, gathering and trading in the area. Evidence of their time here can be found all over the V6 Ranch, including large grinding stones, spear and arrowheads, bowls, beads and much more. The Yokut were expert artisans, making ornate baskets and painted rock art. They would trade with tribes from around the state, with what is believed to have been a major state-wide trading hub located where the Parkfield CAL FIRE station now stands.
Joaquin Murrietta - the robin hood of the west
Known as “The Robin Hood of the West” and the inspiration for the character “Zorro”, Joaquín Murrieta was a famous outlaw and horse thief during the California Gold Rush. Murrieta and “The Five Joaquins Gang” robbed and killed miners and settlers, seeking revenge for the murder of his brother and wife. Murrieta and three members of his gang were killed in 1853 in the Diablo Mountains near Parkfield and Coalinga, after hiding stolen horses in what Parkfield locals call “The Dark Hole". Murrieta’s head and the hand of his associate “Three Fingered Jack” were put in whiskey jars and brought to Sacramento to collect the $1000 reward, and then were brought on tour around California where spectators could pay $1 to see the bandit’s remains. The head and hand were eventually lost in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.
Homesteading
The first white settlers arrived in the area in 1854 and were followed by a steady stream of homesteaders, attracted to the area by Lincoln’s Homestead Act in 1862. Much of the V6 Ranch was broken up into 150 acre parcels. While no homesteads are standing today, the sites are still dotted with wagons, fruit trees, fence posts, and a lone chimney standing in the far reaches of the ranch.
By the turn of the century, quicksilver and coal had been discovered, and the hope for oil discovery had transformed Parkfield into a robust town of 900 people. Parkfield's prosperity however, was short lived. The quicksilver mines depleted and the coal mines flooded, eventually leaving only the homesteaders behind. They too ended up abandoning the area, unable to yield living off the land.