Paige Drummond can admit this now: She never thought she’d return to the family ranch. Not like this anyway, straddling and branding calves as her daily job. Ladd has recruited all of his kids to help out on the ranch over the years, basically whenever they weren’t in school or playing sports, but this time is different for Paige. Last fall she quit her corporate job in Dallas and moved home to Pawhuska to work full-time on the family ranch. Turns out that spending every day in an office can be tough for someone who grew up in wide, open spaces. She’s 24 now, the second oldest of Ree and Ladd’s children (read about her recent engagement here!), and she’s the first to come back to work for the family business.
When Paige is on duty, you can’t help but notice her in the mix. You just don’t see too many stunning 6-foot blondes rounding up cattle. But no one around here wondered for a second if she could handle the job. “She can really hold her own with the cowboys,” Ree says. “She’s not learning it for the first time. She grew up doing this.” Paige says the same thing, yet that doesn’t change the fact that sometimes she’s the only woman in the pens, getting kicked and bruised and covered in mud as she wrestles with baby calves.
On this Tuesday in early June, she woke up at 3:30 a.m. to feed the horses, saddle hers up, get him into the trailer and drive an hour-plus to Kansas to work cattle on land the Drummonds lease from a family friend. By 10:30 a.m., she had helped round up, vaccinate and brand about 150 Black Angus calves and moved on to another pasture to do it all again. The work is unrelenting.
“I don’t think a lot of people understand what it’s really like,” she says. “Ranch life is glamorized on TV. You see people riding horses and it looks wonderful. If you could ride your horse all day, every day, everyone would want this job. But 90 percent of the time it’s just hard, hard work. You’re getting kicked, you’re getting crap on you, you’re fixing fence, you’re doctoring cattle...it’s a time-consuming, exhausting—yet rewarding—profession."
Most days, the cowboys don’t stop for snacks or lunch, just an occasional Dr Pepper from a cooler. And there are no bathroom breaks because there are no bathrooms. “You just have to pop a squat!” Paige says. Today, she and the Kansas crew worked straight through until after noon, so by the time she drove back to the ranch, unsaddled and then drove another half hour back to her house in Pawhuska, she had clocked a 13-hour day. The night before, she got home at 10 p.m. from repairing water gaps (portions of fence that stretch over creeks and draws) washed out by a storm. She lives in her late grandpa Chuck Drummond’s house now, and you have to imagine that he’d be awfully proud to see her here, coming home after a long day of work.
In some ways, Paige feels like she has to work a little harder at this than everyone else—one, to eliminate any shred of a doubt from the cowboys, and two, because she works for her dad, and that carries a whole different level of responsibility. “My dad is the type of person who, when you get back from working cattle and you’ve been going from five to three, he’s like, ‘OK, let’s find something else to do.’ ” Just the other day, Bryce and Todd, Paige’s brothers, were home from college and out with friends until three or four in the morning, and Ladd woke them up at 8 a.m. to go clean a workshop that likely hadn’t been touched in years. “My dad was so proud of this,” Paige says, laughing.
She knows deep down that he’s thrilled to have her back, but she also knows that he’ll support her whether she sticks with this for the long haul or not. For now, this is where Paige’s heart is, even on the toughest days. “When it’s hot and the tensions are high, it’s easy to question my decision a little...but the flip side is that I’m so thankful for this place and the opportunity. I will always love it here.”
This story originally appeared in the Fall 2024 issue.
