M L Ranch

The ML Ranch is significant in the area of agriculture, for its association with the growth of the open-range cattle ranching industry in the Big Horn Basin during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The four ranch buildings are eligible for the National Register for their association with the establishment and development of open-range cattle ranching operations in northern Wyoming. They are also eligible for their association with Henry clay Lovell, important for his contributions to Wyoming's early cattle ranching industry in the Big Horn Basin. The period of significance dates from 1880, when Lovell established his first camps in the Basin, to 1903, the date of Lovell's death. The year 1883 is listed as a significant date as that is when the ML Ranch site was established as a line camp. The following year it became the headquarters for ranch operations.

Cattle Ranching on the High Plains, 1870-1900 The growth of the cattle industry on the Great Plains began in the American Southwest after the Civil War when Texas cowboys began driving large herds along the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas, the Western Trail to Dodge City, Kansas and the Sedalia Trail to Sedalia, Missouri. Each was the site of a railroad terminus. There the rancher could fetch $35. a head, compared to their market value in Texas of $3. or $4 a head. From those towns, cattle were transported to the stockyards of the Midwest.

Ranching spread from Kansas to Colorado, where 1,000,000 heads of longhorns grazed within the borders of the territory by 1869. The cattle frontier advanced to Wyoming in 1868 when a Colorado rancher, J. W. Iliff, drove one of his herds to the plains near Cheyenne. The beef was then sold (at an exorbitant profit) to construction crews on the Union Pacific Railroad and to miners prospecting the South Pass region. By 1871 100,000 cattle were pastured there, most owned by small ranchers possessing several hundred heads. The Panic of 1873 encouraged the stocking of the northern range by lowering the price of Texan cattle. The initial center of the cattle industry in Wyoming was Laramie Valley and in the plateau country just west of the Laramie Mountains. When those areas filled up, ranchers spread herds over most of the territory.

It soon became apparent to cattlemen on the High Plains that the greatest profits to be made were not from local markets but from those outside their territories. Only two things were needed to expand the cattle industry: adequate markets and improved steers. Both were provided in the 1870s when railroads (complete with refrigerated cars) began to transverse the West, when improvements in meat handling and slaughtering widened the market for beef, and when new breeds of cattle were developed. During the 1870s cattlemen in Montana began driving their stock to southern Wyoming to be shipped by Union Pacific Railroad to eastern buyers. By 1883 600,000 cattle, an equal number of sheep, and a large number of horses filled the territorial range of eastern and central Montana to capacity. Meanwhile, during the 1870s, cattle ranching expanded into the Dakota Territory.