Where History and Beauty Meet

Oil on Canvas
14″ x 11″
$600
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Ellis Cattle Company
Magnificently placed with a view of the mountains, the Ellis Cattle Company is ranched by the third A. A. Ellis generation to operate in this high country. In winter the cattle are driven down to their ranch north of Billings called 21 Mile Ranch. Even though the land has been in the family since 1886, when A. A., Jr. homesteaded the land, there is only the barn left of the original buildings.

The first A. A. Ellis and his wife, Lynthia, traveled to California from Ohio in search of gold. Unfortunately when returning to Ohio by way of the vessel, Central America, the ship, loaded with gold, sank. Banks collapsed with that sinking, and Alvin perished. Lynthia opened a boarding house to support her three children. Her two boys, Charles and Alvin, Jr. worked their way west getting jobs on various railroads and dabbled in cattle, which they bought from settlers headed for California and sold them to the Union Pacific to feed their construction crews. They then purchased 1,600 head in Oregon and trailed them to Montana. To survive the winter A.A. shot buffalo and sold the hides. In summer they sold their cattle to the Northern Pacific and returned to Oregon to trail a herd to Montana. In 1883, Alvin married an Oregon girl, and they built a home in Billings. He became a charter member of the Montana Stockgrowers in 1884. The organization was formed to stop cattle rustlers, and he rode with Granville Stuart and others to seek restitution from the rustlers in Musselshell. He then homesteaded the land now known as Ellis Cattle Company, though not without problems. First the land was given back to the Crows, and he was asked to pay for it. Then the government decreased the size of the reservation, and he was able to homestead it once again. He began as a horse rancher, but many of his 500 horses died of kidney failure by eating old grass rotting on the hills from a fungus. He then changed to cattle. His marriage dissolved, and he married Mattie Turttle, who gave him five children before dying in the last child birth. He passed away in 1942 at the age of 87.

Since then the land has been run by succeeding generations. Today third-generation Alvin IV oversee the operations of the ranch along with his sons and grandsons.