Ronald McDonald

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 for Ray Moore, a cutting horse breeder out of Briggsdale, Colorado, his cowboy career really took off. He was the trainer for the cutting horse program. In 1960, Ron moved his family to Wyoming where he took a job breaking colts and feeding cows at Table Mountain for the Hyde Merritt Ranch. The hard Wyoming winter drove them back to Colorado. For the next three decades, Ron worked at ranches in Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming, always making a living on the back of a horse. In 1977, he took a ranch job out of Laramie on the Bennick Ranch. The ranch already had 200 mother cows, when ranch owner Ben Houston, who didn’t know much about the Laramie winters, brought Ron another 150 first year heifers to calve out in January. They fed the cattle with teams of horses through the winter and spring. Ron remained at the Bennick Ranch until the ranch sold. He then found work in Colorado for a year. In 1982, Ron returned to Wyoming where he became a Wyoming Brand Inspector stationed in Burns. In 1989, he was promoted to District Four Supervisor that covered Laramie, Albany, Carbon, and half of Sweetwater counties. Ron retired from the Department of Wyoming State Brand Inspector in June of 2020.