WHEATLAND – You may have heard the old cowboy song about punchin’ longhorn cattle on the Old Chisum Trail, but evidently the cows took a detour and have shown up in Platte County.

Robert, 61,  and Julie, 58, Balzan have been a consummate power team, working together for over 25 years, teaching together, coaching together and ranching together.

Robert was born in Torrington and grew up in Sunrise, where his family was the last family to leave the mining community when the mine was shut down.

“My dad was a miner,” he said. “Actually, we were the last family to live there before they sold it and changed operations to Pueblo. My dad was there 40 years mining and in fact our house is still there, one of the last remaining houses in the community.”

Balzan said he was sad to have to leave the community and it was sad to see things torn down and explained that it was one of the nicest schools in the area. The hospital which was very nice was the building that Balzan’s dad was born in. There were three generations of Balzans who worked in the mines including his grandfather, his father and his brother. The mine ceased operations in Guernsey in 1982.

Before they left, Balzan said he remembers setting pins at the bowling alley  in the basement of the YMCA building which was built in 1917 by John D. Rockefeller Jr.

“I very much enjoyed it,” Balzan said. “And the reason is, Sunrise had many ethnicities. We were Italian, and we had Greeks, Jewish people; we had black people, Chinese people, so it was kind of a conglomerate of everybody. Prejudice wasn’t a word we even heard. We did things together.”

Julie was from the Midwest also, but well east of Wyoming.

“I was born in Kansas,” she said. “My parents were students at college at Emporia State. They had classmates that all lived in this house where the kids all played together and the parents studied. They’d watch each other’s kids while somebody else went to class. I got to do a lot of grandparent time as I had grandparents that had a farm, and when it was time for finals, I got to go stay with my grandma”

Both of the Balzans had picked up a little farming knowledge throughout their lives which prepared them to run their own ranch in Wheatland.

Although both Robert and Julie graduated from the University of Wyoming, they really didn’t know each other until they both landed teaching jobs in Kaycee.

“We were teachers in Kaycee,” she said. “He was the science teacher and also the head basketball coach. He needed an assistant and chose me. I learned that when you are coaching kids, they just give you all their heart.”

The couple said they had a very good friendship, going on basketball trips together and to scouting trips. They didn’t know right away that perhaps they would team up as forever teammates. Over time, the friendship was strong enough that Julie was asked by Robert to go on a family vacation with him and his parents to Chicago.

“I just called her up and asked if she’d go to Chicago with us and she said yes,” Balzan said. “I wanted to see what she would answer just to see where her heart was. The couple remained friends until one day after basketball practice when the couple was shutting down the gym that Robert asked her if she wanted to marry him.

It surprised Julie when she was first asked.

“I thought perhaps it was more of just the friends thing and that we would be friends forever,” she said. 

After marriage, the couple moved to Wheatland to take teaching jobs. Robert taught math and science and also was a girls and boys basketball coach and also the track coach. Julie taught for 26 years as a life skills teacher.

In the spring of 1990, the couple began to purchase parcels of land in the eastern portion of Wheatland and they began to raise Herford cattle.

“When I went back to get my teaching degree because my degree was in wildlife, I began working at Jimmy Grieves place and he was a longhorn guru,” he said. “Because I taught, longhorns were easy to take care of. You didn’t really have to do anything, you just needed to have a pasture for them. During branding we doctor them a little bit, and that’s it.”

They also learned that the life span of a longhorn is long. They have a 19-year-old cow that is still calving. The couple agree they are just easy keepers. He also said there are so many purposes in using the hides, the meat and the horns.

“Some people get them just for pets,” he said. “They domesticate pretty well and they are very personable for a cow. But they’re different. If you are on horseback, you’d better know what you’re running because it’s way different from angus or Hereford. Longhorns think different. They have a lead cow and the herd always responds to that lead cow.”

Another feature of longhorns is they are very territorial and when predators such as coyotes, eagles, lions or hawks come around, the herd will actually circle up and kill the predator. It is an advantage for sheep farmers because longhorns will actually protect the sheep from coyotes.

A fun fact about longhorn cattle is they keep their horns for life.

“The horns are always warm and they are always growing,” Julie said. “There is a blood supply to the whole horn so when it snows, the horn gets a layer of snow and really cool looking icicles form on the horns.”

The number of cattle processed each year varies with the requests that come in.

“We sell them yearlings and then let them feed and raise them, or we can sell fully grass fed,” Julie said. “We also sell pure longhorn and we have some angus cross. Longhorn meat is very lean.”