Gene Wollen was born Douglas. He was the youngest of four children and he was born to be a cowboy. He had a great love of horses. He learned to walk at the early age of nine months and his mother would catch him headed to the barn and corrals where the horses were. Gene...
Charles Randall “Tuffy” Van Patten was born in Lander and grew up on his parents’ ranch. He spent most of his time in the saddle. He broke horses, herded cattle, and ran wild horses. Many of them become his saddle horses. As an adult, he worked for many ranchers including...
Bill Tanner was born in South Park in 1906, the fourth of 10 children. His parents, Frank and Julianne Tanner, were early day pioneers of Jackson’s Hole, homesteading what is now part of the U Lazy U ranch. When Bill was 9 or 10, he was helping his dad freight over Teton...
Dallas was born in 1943 on a sheep and cattle ranch in Albany County and has been a cowboy for most of his life working with sheep and/or cattle. As a young man Dallas learned how to break horses to ride. He managed many ranches in the Centennial Valley from 1967 until...
Matilda “Tillie” Mae Bock was born in1902, on the Double Spear Ranch in Weston County. When her dad Julius “Jule” Bock, needed cowboy help, he turned to Tillie and her sister Clara, since they were the eldest children in the family. Her father had homesteaded when he was...
John “Jack” Schelldorf was born in South Dakota in 1931 and that fall Jack and his parents moved to what is now the Schelldorf Ranch south of Sundance. When Jack was school age, he had to ride his horses every day to attend the Hewes Country School and Black Flats Country...
Kaye has been a cattle rancher most of her life, but her true love lies with her horses. When Kaye was two, her parents moved to the ranch outside of Robertson that they would eventually purchase and that Kaye still owns. Shortly after moving there, her dad bought a stud...
Carl was born and raised in Missouri, the oldest of ten children. He left home when he was about 13 and came to Wyoming where he joined his uncle, Fred Hanes and began the life of a cowboy. Fred had a place on Dinwoody Creek between Dubois and Crowheart. As a younger man,...
Alva was born on a homestead near Chugwater to Bert and Agnes Miller. Early in his life, the family moved to the Whitcomb Ranch on Chugwater Creek, about six miles west of Chugwater, where Bert was the foreman for the Swan Land and Cattle Company ranches west of Chugwater....
Ron was born in Nebraska. When he was young, his family moved to Ovid, Colorado, and he began doing cowboy work, breaking a mustang for his own use. He married when he was 20 and moved around northeastern Colorado, working at various cowboy jobs. When he started working...
Gary Steele Lozier was born in Jackson Hole but he lived in Sublette County his entire life. His mother, Ellen Steele Lozier is third generation of an original pioneer Wyoming rancher who settled in the Silver Creek/Boulder area in 1886. Gary’s father, Jack Lozier’s...
Steven C. James was born in Jackson Hole but at age seven he moved with his family to Daniel, where he has been engaged in ranching for his entire life. As a child in Jackson Hole, he helped herd 1,500 head of cattle from the family ranch south of Jackson to Moran for...
Norman C. Hanks was born in Jay Em and was the eldest of six kids, who he would help raise and mentor throughout his life. Norman grew up tending a small herd of ranch animals and learned how to work and train teams of horse. They were later used on a small ranch and...
Samuel Reed Hampton, called Sam or Sammy, was born in Washakie County. He has lived his entire life in the sheep and cattle business on the family ranch. From age six, Sammy was riding his pinto pony Bugs bareback across the Big Horn Basin badlands all the way to the...
John P. Gammon was born in Buffalo and grew up on the Gammon Ranch (also known as the historic TA Ranch from the Johnson County Cattle War) approximately 13 miles south of Buffalo. At a very young age, John started riding and driving horses, along with caring for the...
The Ellis ranch on Upper North Fork of the Popo Agie River near Lander was purchased in 1918 by Richard D. “Dick” Ellis’ great grandparents, William H. “Doc” and Frances A. Ellis. Dick grew up in that house and is an active partner in Ellis Land and Livestock. He started...
Jim Dowdy was born in Weld County Colorado, the eleventh child of twelve. The midwife who delivered him was Rattlesnake Kate, famous in her own right. Jim grew up farming and ranching in Colorado. In the summers he went up in the mountains to his sister’s place to put up...
Kevin is a third-generation cowboy/rancher of the Campbell Cattle Company in Bondurant. His grandfather, Lennie Campbell, came to the Hoback Basin (then called the Fall River Basin) and homesteaded in 1910. He was granted ownership in 1913 and bought the Bondurant place in...
John C. Budd was born in 1878 to a pioneer family which was beginning a new life on the banks of North Piney Creek, near Big Piney. His father, Daniel B. Budd had trailed a herd of cattle from Nevada to Point of Rocks, but he stopped for the winter in the area that became...
Any time someone talks about the Hoodoo Ranch in Cody, they say “George Brown” in the same sentence. George’s grandfather, George Merrill, came to Wyoming in the late 1800s and had a lasting imprint on the cattle industry in the Big Horn Basin. In 1908, when the Rocky...
Steve grew up in South Dakota on a ranch with his five siblings. Growing up the children were taught how to work both cattle and sheep on horseback as well as feed with a team of horses. After graduating high school Steve married his wife of 49 years Debbie Jacobson....
Matt was born into the cowboy life, traveling with his parents to a ranch job in Lodge Grass, Montana, in 1960 where he began his life in the saddle. The family in 1963 moved to Faddis Kennedy Cattle Co. north of Gillette where he worked along with his parents until they...
In 1884, the Keeline Ranch, which still operated on open range, picked up a red-headed cowboy named George Amos, who became their foreman. Amos oversaw an operation that was one of the biggest in Wyoming. The Keeline Ranch had several hundred saddle horses plus three...