Broken O Ranch was advertised in Times Square
There it was, backlit on Times Square, high above honking taxis and rushing pedestrians: the big sky, jagged mountains, and serene golden prairie of the Broken O Ranch. It was The Land Report’s Deal of the Year, putting almost 124,000 unbroken acres, the largest swath of irrigated farmland in Montana and one of the biggest land transfers in the state’s history, right into the big, capable hands of St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke.
The ranch listed for $132.5 million. Kroenke’s not saying what he paid, but Forbes assured its readers that the deal, forged in November 2012, hit nine figures. The acquisition slid Kroenke up from No. 10 to No. 8 on The Land Report’s list of the top 100 private U.S. landowners.
Every once in a while, somebody on his way to Mamma Mia! craned his neck and squinted up at that sign in Times Square, perhaps imagining hawks soaring above the valleys or rainbow trout leaping in the Sun River, a 20-mile ribbon of water running right through the ranch like grace through a convert’s heart. Drought’s parched other Montana ranches, but not this one.
This one’s special, and Kroenke knew it.
Kroenke already owns the largest working ranch in Canada, as well as Montana’s Cedar Creek and PV ranches, a ranch in Wyoming, and a ranch in Arizona. He likes ranching. He no doubt had feelers out with various brokers. And then he heard about the Broken O, a huge sweep of hills and valleys stretched along the Rocky Mountain Front.
The Sun River that runs through the ranch descends from snowmelt in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, home to grizzly and black bears, moose, elk, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, wolverines, wildcats, and lynx. There are streams on the ranch, too, alive with brown and rainbow trout, and creeks that the antelope and white-tailed deer sip from, and wide fields of alfalfa and hay and winter wheat. The cattle operation is vast, and the ranch isn’t eligible for farm-subsidy funds because it generates too much revenue.
Not that Kroenke’s cash-short: On Forbes’ 2013 list of the world’s billionaires, he made No. 248, with $5 billion in net worth—up from $3.9 billion the previous March. He owns a long list of pro sports teams. (He provoked a barrage of press commentary in Great Britain when he began his takeover of its Arsenal football team in 2008. After the Broken O deal, the Daily Mail reported “speculation by heavyweight Arsenal insiders” (which Arsenal strongly refutes) that he’d now sell the team. At press time, he hadn’t done so. Instead, he’d decided to bid on the Outdoor Channel.) He also owns wineries, a $20 million home in Aspen, Colo., a Tuscan villa in Malibu, Calif., a yacht, and a jet. But he wears cowboy boots with his suits, and on his office walls hang cowboy paintings.
The Broken O started coming together in 1852, when another Missourian, Daniel Flowerree, went west hunting for gold. He found some. And after staking mining claims around Helena, Mont., he turned his attention to cattle ranching—familiar from home, but even easier on Montana’s wide-open, grassy prairies. He came back to Missouri, bought 65 head of mother cows, and trailed them out to his new Montana ranch.
Less than 50 years later, the 1890 census announced that the U.S.’s population was now so dispersed, the frontier had officially disappeared. Alarmed, historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a landmark (forgive the pun) paper to the American Historical Association. He said the Western frontier had shaped our democracy by providing a way for Americans to reinvent themselves a second or third time; a release from stale, rigid European ways; an outlet for the tensions of social crowding.
What would happen when it was gone?
Today, the Wild West has been tamed, and much of it is broken into bits. Legacy ranches as large as the Broken O—its acreage spread across three counties—are the iconic exceptions.
But the impulse to own them still burns.
Bill and Desiree Moore, who made their money with Kelly-Moore Paint Company, spent two decades assembling the Broken O. Desiree, widowed in 2004, died in 2010, and residents of Augusta, Mont., the tiny town the ranch sustains, waited nervously to see whether the Moores’ kids would sell the place intact. Mike Swan, owner and managing broker of Swan Land Company in Bozeman, Mont., says they were determined to do so. “A few speculators looked at the possibility of carving it up, but it was never an imminent threat.”
Once Kroenke expressed interest, the deal took only two months to negotiate. Broken O’s manager and broker were both friends of Swan’s. “We all grew up on cattle ranches, so we spoke the same language,” he says. As for Kroenke, “It was so much fun being on the ranch with him, because he was just continually taken aback by the beauty,” Swan adds. “The wildlife, the water, the cattle—he’d stand there and just smile. The Rocky Mountain Front is one of the most dramatic features in the entire mountain chain. It’s a true prairie-to-peaks zone: You go from rolling prairie to dramatic, snow-topped peaks in 15 or 20 miles.”
This part of Montana’s been lucky: Years ago, David Letterman bought Deep Creek Ranch, just north of the Broken O, and he buys neighboring plots whenever they come on the market; he’s made a name for himself as a conservationist. Gordon Dyal, co-chair of investment banking at Goldman Sachs, bought himself the nearby Diamond 4D ranch—and serves on the board of trustees of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “The ‘not carving it up’ thing seems to be big with these bigwig new landowners,” a resident remarks.
It helps that land—especially revenue-generating land—is in demand again.
“It wasn’t too long ago that people were hungry for double-digit returns,” says Eric O’Keefe, editor of The Land Report. “Now, when you’re looking at very safe, rock-solid investments generating 1, 2, or 3 percent returns, the 4, 5, and 6 percent returns you can get off timberland, a ranch, or a productive farm are increasingly attractive. Ag colleges maintain lists of property values, and you can see the slow, steady rise of land. It’s a tangible asset. And tangible assets, since the Great Recession, have had a real boom in popularity. There’s a lot of distrust and unease about Wall Street and Washington.”
It feels like old times: people going west for freedom and fortune.
The new buyers aren’t just billionaires who like to put on their chaps or waders, either. Suddenly, a lot of American farmers are buying land, too. “The global demand for American foodstuffs is pushing up commodity prices,” O’Keefe explains. “American farmers, for the first time in forever, are making tremendous profits. And their drought losses have been covered by crop insurance, so they are carrying next to no debt. They are sinking their profits back into the land.
“This is not about trading—land’s not liquid—but it’s a great safe haven,” he continues. “And for an operator like Kroenke or the nation’s largest landowner, John Malone, these guys have very long perspectives. When someone like Stan Kroenke comes along and buys Broken O, he adds 124,000 acres to hundreds of thousands that his team is already overseeing.”
When O’Keefe announced the Deal of the Year, he heard the echo of history: “St. Louis and that whole Western edge—the number of families from that part of the country who struck out and put together an empire. From St. Louis, where couldn’t you go? You had the superhighway of the 18th and 19th centuries right there.”
He’s not surprised that it was somebody like Kroenke, not a foreign investor, who bought the Broken O. Other commercial transactions move easily across the oceans, but “you almost have to be from a landowning family to be drawn to investing in American land,” O’Keefe says. When you grow up close to the land, you’re comfortable with its expanse; you understand the thrill of staking your claim on it.
“When you get outdoors and get a little breathing room and get a little bit of the weight off your shoulders, it’s just…invigorating,” O’Keefe adds. “When was the last time you had fun with a stock certificate? How much enjoyment can you get out of a partnership stake? I get the idea that Mr. Kroenke is very pleased when he can get his boots on the ground.”
The Land Report 100 counts individuals, not corporations or the Mormon church. Malone holds the No. 1 spot, with 2.2 million acres (or 151 Manhattan islands), and Ted Turner is a close second, also clearing 2 million acres. The bottom slot is a tie, at about 100,000 acres. And St. Louis’ Williams family comes in halfway, tied for No. 52, its main holding the historic Pitchfork Ranch near Guthrie, Texas.
Pitchfork Land and Cattle Company has always been headquartered in St. Louis. Its holdings include land near Laramie, Wyo., and Eskridge, Kan. But the 165,000-acre home ranch in Texas is where Pitchfork breeds its signature Pitchfork Gray quarter horses, gray with a black mane and tail; where oil wells are sunk thousands of feet into the Tannehill sands; where more than 100 windmills spin; where Angus, Hereford, and crossbred “black baldy” cattle graze on 80 pastures.
St. Louisan Eugene F. Williams bought into the ranch in 1882, when he traveled to Texas for the Hamilton-Brown Shoe Company. Today, another Eugene F. Williams, the founder’s great–grandson (Eugene F. Williams III), is president and CEO. The ranch has never sold an acre; it’s now more than triple its original size. St. Louisans fly down to Pitchfork to hunt deer, boar, or game birds, and the ranch recently started a commercial hunting operation.
Today, the chairman of the Pitchfork’s board is Eugene F. Williams Jr.; the vice presidents include Mary Randolph Ballinger and Adalbert von Gontard III, the latter of whom’s father worked with August Busch Sr. at the brewery; and Christopher Ballinger is treasurer. (The Ballingers and Williams Jr. live in St. Louis, and they remain active in the ranch’s management.)
Another Pitchfork vice president, Jerry Bob Daniel, is a plainspoken Texan who married into the ranch back in 1981. He’d fallen in love with Eugenie von Gontard, daughter of Adalbert and great-great-granddaughter of Adolphus Busch, when she came down to Texas. After a girlhood of polo and fox-hunting, she wanted to test her mettle by working on the ranch. She, too, wound up reinventing herself.
The West appeals to Busches. Five years ago, Adolphus Busch IV and Peter von Gontard bought a 400-acre ranch in Idaho’s Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness. It’s land that Busch describes as “so wide open, 400 acres looks like a million.” (He recently gifted his share to his kids.)
And back in 1993, Drum Hadley, grandson of Adolphus Busch III, became one of the new legends of the West when he used family money to rescue the famous Gray Ranch, once owned by publisher William Randolph Hearst. It’s a clear-lit, rough-magicked landscape of mountains, desert grasses and sagebrush, and the deep-slashed trunks of pinyon pines and old-growth, smoky-berried junipers that thrive, improbably, in the dry heat. The Nature Conservancy had proclaimed it one of its Last Great Places and hurriedly bought it to keep it from being divided. Hadley took the place off of the conservancy’s hands, granting a conservation easement to the organization, and preserved its 500 square miles as a working cattle ranch.
A published poet and a bona fide cowboy, Hadley had worked on ranches his whole life. With the Gray, he wanted to prove that it was possible to live off the land and still respect it. He imported black-tailed prairie dogs; kept enough wilderness for jaguars; and invented the grassbanks concept that lets ranchers borrow each other’s available land for forage. (The practice makes it easier for the land to tolerate drought, as well as get an occasional rest from grazing.)
The Gray is now called the Diamond A, and Hadley’s son, Seth, runs it—which is fitting. In The Future of the Wild: Radical Conservation for a Crowded World, author Jonathan Adams tells the story of young Seth talking his father and his grandmother, Jacqueline “Puddie” Hadley, into pooling their beer money to save the land. And win back the West.
