Martin J. “Sprout” Wardell was born Feb. 9, 1933, on the coldest night of record in Murray, Utah, near where his mother’s family farmed. His parents, Martin and Alice, brought him home to his grandfather’s homestead ranch at the forks of the New Fork and Green Rivers, east of Big Piney. He would call this place home for a lifetime, regardless of where he might be employed. As a baby, Sprouts father dubbed him “little Sprout” and to his mother’s dismay, the nickname stuck.
Early March 1938, Upper Green River Cattlemen’s Association foreman, Uncle Rex Wardell on his way to the cow camp on the little Colorado Desert, came to the Wardell ranch gathering to pick up the Association branding irons and camp cook stove. Roy Steele was the branding truck driver and Sprout hired out at age five to ride with Roy, pulling and carrying sagebrush for the branding fires to keep the irons hot wherever the cowboys gathered cows and calves to brand.
At this time there were no fenced allotments on the Little Colorado, so Rex and crew branded calves from the Churndash Ranch near Fontenelle on the west, to north and north east of Farson, and east toward Boulder. When the crew finally headed the chuck wagon toward the mountains, crossing the New Fork River and onto the Mesa, Sprout’s job was finished. After weeks of branding and pulling brush, his pay from foreman Rex was a whole quarter tucked into a Bull Durham tobacco sack.
Every spring after 1938, on the first day out of school, he rode horseback to cow camp on the desert, to work.
Riding horseback to grade school, as did most of the students and teachers, Sprout attended the Riverside School on the Green River. Due to at least three of his teachers boarding with his parents, mischief was kept to a minimum. Martin “Sprout” Wardell graduated from Big Piney High School in 1951. He, like others in their teens and twenties, participated in rodeo events around the country. Though most of his horsemanship skills came about from long days in the saddle, working, branding, and trailing cattle on the drift, he was well respected for his knowledge of brands, roping at ranch brandings, and his ability with the branding irons.
In the spring of 1942, during WWII at age nine, Foreman Rex Wardell added Sprout to the Association customary payroll. When Association secretary, Frank Steele, questioned the wisdom of hiring a nine-year-old kid, Rex answered, “That kid comes with his own horses and can ride them, has a fair knowledge of the land our work covers, and has no problem getting up and out on early mornings. That nine-year-old earns his pay.”
That yearly job was interrupted only briefly by a call to duty, when he and a friend, Bob Olson, enlisted in the US Army, from August 1953 to June 1955. He had toured Germany by boot power. On his return home on June 2, 1955, Rex’s crew was moving off the desert to the Upper Green River Cattle Allotment. Sprout rode with them until later in the summer and then joined his dad to work at Stan Decker’s GP Bar Ranch at Green River Lake until the end of the season. Thus began a long association with the Decker family and that business. There he became acquainted with Jane, his future wife. Along with working on the family ranch, Sprout spent over 30 years guiding summer and fall guests for guest ranches and his own guest business.
With his purchase of Uncle Jim Warden’s ranch in 1968, he acquired a brand and cattle of his own, thereby becoming a member of the Upper Green River Cattle Association. One year later, his holdings, combined with his dad’s home place, enabled Sprout and Jane and their son, to work their way into a three-generation working cattle ranch.
He spent year working on the home ranch, the Drift, gathering ranch horses off of the desert and breaking some for working saddle stock, and packing and guiding for guest ranches. He lived a lifetime career using his cowboy skills doing the kind of work he loved, with family, neighbors and friends, who made it all worthwhile. Perhaps because in his youth he was taught and looked after by some of the older cowboys, he was kind to and protective of children, respectful of the elderly, and he hoped to be thought of as a helpful good neighbor.
In the fall of 2015, after gathering cattle off the Drift, he hung up his chaps and passed his saddle and spurs on to the younger generation. Building onto a ranch started by his family in 1897 and working on the Drift for a period of over 77 years, may not be a record, but he was satisfied with the journey taken and whatever he had given to, or received from it. He was a cowboy.