After five decades as a Cochise County rancher's wife, Bess Shugart is full of stories.
They're stories of a life most folks come to know through Zane Grey novels, movies and history books.
But for Bess, her husband Jim Shugart and their four children, ranching was real.
It was a life they lived.
And now some of the Shugart family's treasured photos, including one that made the cover of Life Magazine, will be featured in this weekend's Historic Art Exhibition, an exhibit sponsored by the city of Sierra Vista's Art and Humanities Commission.
The event is a collection of local family treasures, all at least 50 years old.
Bess and Jim Shugart raised their four children, Virginia, Button, Doris and Molly, in rugged ranching country known as the Little Boquillas Cattle Co.
For the first few years of their marriage, the couple made their home in different ranch camps within the massive stretch of land that comprised the Little Boquillas Ranch.
"The ranch was just huge, part of a Mexican land grant," Bess said. "It stretched from Mexico, ran through Hereford and went down as far as St. David, along both sides of the San Pedro River, with the exception of the Escapule Ranch."
The ranch was divided into eight camps where ranch hands and their families lived.
They were moved around a lot, based on family size, available schools and where certain cowboying skills were most needed.
But it was the Hereford Camp the Shugarts called home for most of their ranching days in this area.
Life on the Little Boquillas was a good one, Bess said, filled with days of riding fences, gathering strays, roundups, branding and shipping cattle. In those days, cattle were actually shipped out of Hereford, with California as a primary destination, at least for the Little Boquillas.
Sometime around the 1950s, there was a growing infatuation with cowpunchers and their lives, attracting a number of writers and photographers from publications to different ranches and the families who worked them.
It so happened the Shugarts became one of the attractions.
Photographer Ray Manley, who owned Western Ways Studio in Tucson, took a photo of Jim Shugart, along with a lineup of local cowboys, which was featured in a September 1951 edition of Arizona Highways.
Two years later, another one of Jim Shugart's photos appeared in a September 1953 edition of National Geographic magazine.
Taken by the same photographer, this time Shugart is on the back of a horse, carrying a calf on the front of his saddle.
Those photos were just the start.
The family really got noticed when Allan Grant, a Life magazine photographer, along with Life writer Dorothy Jane Esser, visited the Shugart family for a week in 1954.
The two tagged along with Jim, the couple's 8-year-old daughter, Virginia, and 6-year-old son, Button (Jim Jr.), as they tended to a number of daily ranch chores.
Father and son were featured on the cover of Life magazine in its Aug. 9, 1954, edition.
That magazine is one of the family treasures on display at the commission's art exhibit this weekend.
Little did the Shugarts know that those photos, titled "Working Cowhand, Six Years Old," would be seen all over the world.
In a letter from Life magazine, dated June 27, 1954, the Shugarts were asked to sign a paper waiving their rights to the photos.
Life paid the family $1 for the photos taken by Grant during his week at the ranch.
Those same photos of Button were later seen in publications throughout Europe, as well as other publications in the United States.
In addition, a huge cutout image of Button and his father, which was taken from the cover of Life magazine, was featured on the side of a bank in Texas in the 1970s.
"The bank was United Savings of Texas, and those banks were all over the state," Bess Shugart chuckled. "We thought it was really funny."
Bess Shugart, now 84, lives in Palominas.
She has meticulously kept every article and publication about her family in a house filled with memorabilia and family treasures.
After 49 years of marriage, Jim died in 1993.
The youngster the world knew as Button is now 61 years old.
He lives in California, where he owns a horse boarding and training business.
In summing up her family's ranching experiences, Bess, who has six grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren, said, "For us, ranching was just a way of life. It was surprising to us that people were so fascinated by our lifestyle
