Gold, Grass, and Outlaws:

The Circle C Ranch and the Making of Montana’s Open Range

Origins on a Miner’s Stake

The story of the Circle C Ranch begins not on the range but underground, in the placer diggings of a gold rush that turned Montana from a cartographer’s abstraction into a populated territory. Robert Coburn, born in Ireland and emigrated first to Canada, arrived in Montana in 1863 and went directly to Virginia City and Alder Gulch, where he worked as a placer miner alongside thousands of others drawn by the same fever. When the richest surface gold at Alder Gulch began to thin, Coburn moved to Last Chance Gulch in Helena, where he eventually held three claims that reportedly produced three to four hundred dollars a day — a substantial return in an era when a skilled laborer earned a fraction of that annually. This was the stake that allowed him to think beyond the diggings and toward the open grasslands stretching north of the Missouri River (Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, “Circle C Ranch”).

Coburn’s entry into ranching did not begin all at once with the Circle C. Historical evidence suggests he had been involved in cattle operations for some years before the pivotal events of 1886. By the early 1880s, his name appears alongside other notable ranchers operating in central Montana’s Judith Basin region, including Granville Stuart and Conrad Kohrs, suggesting Coburn was already a recognized presence in the territorial cattle economy (Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, “The DHS Ranch”). His years of proximity to the open-range cattle industry gave him both the knowledge and the capital to make a decisive move when an opportunity presented itself in 1886.

That opportunity came in the form of the DHS Ranch, a cattle operation established by three of territorial Montana’s wealthiest men — Granville Stuart, Samuel Hauser, and Andrew Davis. The DHS brand derived directly from its founders’ initials. The ranch had run as many as twenty-five thousand head of cattle on the open range north of Lewistown. But its timing proved catastrophic. The winter of 1886 to 1887, now referred to as the Big Die-Up, struck the Northern Plains with a ferocity that permanently ended the era of open-range ranching as it had been practiced. Temperatures dropped to sixty-three degrees below zero in parts of Montana. Estimates suggest the territory lost as many as 362,000 head of cattle — roughly sixty percent of total Montana herds — in a single season (Montana Historical Society Education Office, Chapter 8). The DHS never recovered financially, and the surviving partners sought to exit. They sold the property to Robert Coburn, who had survived the disaster through a combination of reduced exposure and sound management (Billings Gazette, “Eastern Montana’s Matador Ranch History”).

The Circle C Takes Shape

In 1886, Robert Coburn purchased some thirty thousand acres of land from Granville Stuart at the foot of the Little Rocky Mountains, establishing what would become the home ranch on Beaver Creek just northeast of the mining community of Zortman, in what is now Phillips County (Coburn, Pioneer Cattleman in Montana). Despite the catastrophic winter that wiped out half his newly acquired stock, Coburn rebuilt. His cattle ranged across a vast territory, branded with the Half Circle C on the left ribs and thigh, while his horses carried the Circle C on the left shoulder. According to a 1936 article by rodeo promoter Guy Weadick, who had known Coburn personally, the animals ranged from the Missouri River on the south to the Milk River on the north, and from near the Bear Paw Mountains on the west to the Larb Hills on the east — a grazing territory that encompassed hundreds of thousands of acres of open federal and leased land (Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, “Circle C Ranch”).

Coburn’s reconstruction of the ranch after the winter disaster represented a broader adaptation taking place across Montana’s cattle industry. Where the great open-range outfits of the early 1880s had relied entirely on free grass and unchecked movement of herds, successful operators after 1887 began putting up hay, improving breeding stock, managing water, and paying closer attention to grazing pressure. Coburn exemplified this transition. He accumulated approximately eighty thousand acres of patented land, supplemented by some twenty thousand additional acres of grazing rights, creating a more stable and defensible operation than the improvised empires that had dominated the territorial period (Phillips County News, “Zortman’s Circle C Inducted into Cowboy Hall of Fame”).

The foreman of this rebuilt operation was Horace Dewitt Brewster, who had come to Montana as early as 1864 and worked for Coburn beginning with an earlier ranch on Flatwillow Creek near the Little Snowy Mountains before moving with him to the Circle C in the Little Rockies. Brewster served as foreman of the thirty-thousand-acre operation and was responsible for hiring, managing the hands, negotiating grazing leases with the Rocky Boy Reservation, occasionally representing the ranch at Stockgrowers Association meetings, and overseeing one of the last of the great open-range cattle roundups — the Judith Roundup. According to family accounts preserved by his grandson Neil Brewster and later cited in the Whitefish Pilot, Horace was known throughout the region as the most capable cowboy in Montana, a man who broke horses through patience rather than force (Whitefish Pilot, “Glacier Park’s Cowboy Ranger,” 20 February 2013). Walt Coburn, the rancher’s youngest son, would later describe Brewster as the man who taught him more about working cattle than anyone else in his life (Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, “Horace Dewitt Brewster”).

A Witness to the Territory’s Violence

The land around the Circle C was not peaceable country. The Little Rockies were a center of gold mining activity, and the broader region between the Missouri Breaks and the Milk River had long been a refuge for men who preferred to stay beyond the reach of law. Robert Coburn himself had witnessed the encounter with Chief Joseph’s band of Nez Perce in 1877, when the band stopped overnight at the Flatwillow Creek location on their flight toward Canada. According to family accounts relayed in Walt Coburn’s memoir, Robert went out to meet the Indians, instructing Brewster that if the encounter turned violent and Coburn was killed, Brewster was to shoot Coburn’s own wife and children rather than allow them to be captured — a grim calculus of frontier survival that underscores how tenuous the peace of even a well-established ranch could be (Whitefish Pilot, “Glacier Park’s Cowboy Ranger,” 20 February 2013).

By the 1890s, the region had become well-known as a haunt of the Wild Bunch, the loose confederation of outlaws led nominally by Butch Cassidy but encompassing a rotating cast of hardened criminals operating across the Northern Rockies and Plains. Among the most dangerous was Harvey Logan, known universally as Kid Curry, who had begun his criminal career not far from the Circle C in what was then Chouteau County, now Phillips County, where his brother and friend had operated a ranch at Rock Creek. Logan had killed a local miner named Pike Landusky in a saloon fight on December 27, 1894, and subsequently fled to join the Wild Bunch, eventually earning a reputation as its most lethal member, credited with killing as many as nine law enforcement officers (Legends of America, “Harvey Logan, aka ‘Kid Curry’”).

The Circle C’s connection to this outlaw world was direct and personal. Walt Coburn, then a teenager, was present on July 3, 1901, when Kid Curry and his associates stopped at the ranch seeking fresh horses shortly after robbing the Great Northern Railroad’s westbound Coast Flyer near Wagner, Montana — a robbery that netted the gang an estimated forty thousand dollars in unsigned National Bank of Montana notes being shipped to Helena (Numismatic News, “Bank Notes Forever Tied to Wild Bunch”). Young Walt, posted on a butte with a herd of horses on what he thought was a pointless errand assigned by his brother Bob, watched riders come toward him at speed. They swapped out the tired mounts for the fresh ones and left Walt holding their exhausted animals. Walt recognized Kid Curry among the riders and understood immediately what had occurred. Hours later, a posse from Glasgow arrived at the Circle C’s home ranch demanding fresh horses and food. Bob Coburn refused the horses but offered to feed the men at a dollar a head. Whatever transpired in the cookhouse that night, the posse reportedly fell ill several miles down the trail and never caught the outlaws (Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, “Circle C Ranch”).

The episode had a strange afterlife. Logan, while hiding in the Missouri Breaks following the robbery, killed rancher Jim Winters on July 25, 1901 — a man who had killed Logan’s brother Johnny years earlier. The Great Northern Railway, furious that Circle C horses had carried the gang, took a particular institutional dislike to the Coburn name. When Glacier National Park was established in 1910 and Major William Logan — the Fort Belknap Indian Agent — became its first superintendent, he brought Horace Brewster along as one of the park’s first rangers. The two men named a prominent peak Mount Coburn in honor of the ranching family. After Major Logan died, the Great Northern Railway, which had close ties to Glacier Park through its tourist operations, lobbied to have the peak renamed Mount Logan — which it was. The railroad, it appeared, had a long institutional memory (Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, “Circle C Ranch”).

The End of an Era: Sale to the Matador

By the second decade of the twentieth century, the open-range cattle industry that had made the Circle C possible was itself drawing to a close. Homestead laws, the encroachment of small farmers, shifting markets, and the basic mathematics of aging ownership combined to make large consolidated operations harder to maintain. Robert Coburn was by then an old man, and his sons, including Bob and Walt, were pulling in different directions. In 1915, Coburn sold the home ranch on Beaver Creek, together with approximately eighty thousand acres of patented land and some twenty thousand additional acres of rights, to the Matador Land and Cattle Company — a Texas-based operation controlled by Scottish investors from Dundee who had originally bought into the cattle business in 1882 (Billings Gazette, “Eastern Montana’s Matador Ranch History”; Texas State Historical Association, “Matador Land and Cattle Company”).

The Matador was itself one of the great cattle enterprises of the American West. Founded in 1879 in Motley County, Texas, the company had expanded its operations to include leased pastures in Kansas, South Dakota, Canada, and finally Montana, where from 1913 to 1928 it leased approximately five hundred thousand acres of northern rangeland. The purchase of the Circle C’s patented land on Beaver Creek gave the Matador a solid anchor for its Montana operations. By the time of the sale, the Matador’s total holdings and leases covered well over a million acres across multiple states, making it one of the largest cattle operations in the country (Texas State Historical Association, “Matador Ranch”).

The Coburn family moved the remainder of its cattle operation to Arizona following the sale, and Walt Coburn went off to a short stint in the Army Air Corps during the First World War and then an entirely different kind of life. Having grown up on the Circle C, spent summers learning to work cattle under Horace Brewster’s instruction, and witnessed up close the peculiar intersection of outlawry and ranching that characterized the region, Walt turned to writing. Beginning with a vignette in Argosy magazine in 1922, he built a prolific career as a writer of Western fiction, becoming known as “the Cowboy Author” and eventually producing close to two million words of fiction over three decades (University of Arizona Libraries, Walt Coburn Papers). His 1968 memoir, Pioneer Cattleman in Montana: The Story of the Circle C Ranch, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, remains the most detailed account of the ranch’s daily life and the primary source through which the operation is known to history.

Legacy and the Conservation Turn

The Matador’s Montana holdings passed through several more owners in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In 1936, after the Matador scaled back its northern operations, the Beaver Creek property was purchased by Pierre Itcaina and his partner Mike Arrambide, Basque sheepherders who had built the largest sheep operation in nearby Valley County. Itcaina had emigrated from the Basque region of southern France in 1910. For decades the ranch ran under their management as a sheep and cattle operation, representing yet another chapter in the long transformation of the land from open-range cattle country to a mixed-use agricultural landscape (Billings Gazette, “Eastern Montana’s Matador Ranch History”).

By the late 1990s, the land — still commonly referred to as the Matador Ranch — came to the attention of conservationists who recognized in its largely unbroken grasslands one of the last significant intact prairie ecosystems in the Northern Plains. In 1999, The Nature Conservancy acquired approximately sixteen thousand acres and entered into a partnership arrangement with a neighboring rancher, simultaneously attaching a perpetual conservation easement that prohibited development and subdivision. The purchase represented the largest land acquisition by the Montana chapter of the Conservancy to that point and nearly doubled its total Montana holdings. Brian Martin, the Conservancy’s Great Plains project director, noted that Montana’s grasslands held among the best prospects anywhere for large-scale prairie conservation, particularly given that at least seventy percent of natural grasslands in the region had already disappeared through crop production, drainage, and the spread of invasive plant species (Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce, “Nature Conservancy to Preserve Historic Ranch,” 2000).

As of the early twenty-first century, the ranch operates under The Nature Conservancy’s management as a grass bank, leasing grazing rights to neighboring cattle ranchers who in exchange make wildlife-friendly investments on their own lands. It is a model that attempts to reconcile the competing pressures of agricultural production and ecological preservation on the Northern Plains — a negotiation that the land itself, with its long history of successive owners and competing uses, might be said to have anticipated.

The Circle C Ranch, in the span of roughly three decades, moved from a miner’s gold claim to a vast open-range cattle operation, absorbed the shocks of the catastrophic winter of 1887, brushed shoulders with the Wild Bunch at the peak of its notoriety, and finally dissolved into the hands of a Scottish-owned Texas corporation. That arc — from individual immigrant ambition through corporate consolidation to eventual conservation — compresses into one piece of Phillips County landscape much of what happened to the Northern Plains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The brand is gone, and so are most of the men who rode under it. What remains is the grass, the Little Rockies on the horizon, and a paper trail extensive enough to suggest that history, unlike most of the open range, is not entirely without fences.

Works Cited

Billings Gazette. “Eastern Montana’s Matador Ranch History a Tale of the West’s Transition.” Montana Standard, originally published Billings Gazette. https://mtstandard.com/news/history-events/article_5bd7c674-1c64-530c-a234-2023b5bf17ba.html. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Coburn, Walt. Pioneer Cattleman in Montana: The Story of the Circle C Ranch. University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.

Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame. “Circle C Ranch.” https://montanacowboyfame.org/inductees/2015/1/circle-c-ranch. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame. “Horace Dewitt Brewster.” https://montanacowboyfame.org/inductees/2012/1/horace-dewitt-brewster. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame. “The DHS Ranch.” https://montanacowboyfame.org/inductees/2008/6/the-dhs-ranch. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Montana Historical Society Education Office. Montana: Stories of the Land. Chapter 8. Montana Historical Society, 2009. https://mhs.mt.gov/education/textbook/chapter8/Chapter8.pdf. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Phillips County News. “Zortman’s Circle C Inducted into Cowboy Hall of Fame.” 28 Aug. 2015. https://www.phillipscountynews.com/story/2015/08/28/news/zortmans-circle-c-inducted-into-cowboy-hall-of-fame/2278.html. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce. “Nature Conservancy to Preserve Historic Ranch.” 2000. https://www.djc.com/news/enviro/11003051.html. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Texas State Historical Association. “Matador Land and Cattle Company.” Handbook of Texas Online. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/matador-land-and-cattle-company. Accessed 28 June 2026.

University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections. “Walt Coburn Papers.” https://lib.arizona.edu/special-collections/collections/walt-coburn-papers. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Weadick, Guy. “Cowboys I Have Known.” 1936. Cited in Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame, “Circle C Ranch.”

Whitefish Pilot. “Glacier Park’s Cowboy Ranger.” 20 Feb. 2013. https://whitefishpilot.com/news/2013/feb/20/glacier-parks-cowboy-ranger-9/. Accessed 28 June 2026.