Working Ranch Magazine March/April 2025

looking back Bartlett Richards & Mr. Van Wyck’s Law

BY BERT ENTWISTLE

(Below) Bartlett Richards, center, with the crew.

n 1879, the town of Cheyenne, Wyoming must have been a wild new adventure for a young Bart lett Richards, fresh from Phillips Academy in An dover, Massachusetts. The Transcontinental Rail road had breached the country years ago and the range cattle industry was at its peak, shipping tens of thousands of cattle every year. Richards was born January 6, 1862, to Reverend J. DeForest Richards, a Congregational Church pastor, and Harriot Bartlett Jarvis. Reverend Richards died suddenly when his son Bartlett was ten. He was sent to the Phillips Academy and graduated in 1879. Like many young men of the time, he was encouraged to go West for his health, which was said to be poor. He could return in a year or so and find a proper occu pation. As far as young Bartlett was concerned, there was no reason to go back East; he had already found his future. He started working with cattle almost as soon as he got off the train. Within a year he had started the Ship Wheel Ranch in North East Wyoming, along the Belle Fourche River, and stocked it with a thousand head of cattle. Richards proved to be a good rancher and his success as a savvy businessman got him the job of managing the Rocky Mountain Cattle Company, the Lakotah Cattle Company, and the Bronson Ranch in Nebraska. By 1884, the American range cattle business was so suc cessful that the industry, with the help of wealthy foreign investors from places like England, was creating a class of wealthy “Cattle Barons” that were taking over much of the open range. Bartlett Richards was fast becoming one of the biggest and most aggressive of the group. 1885 turned out to be a significant year for Bartlett and his operations. His brother DeForest moved to Chadron, Nebraska when the Fremont, Elkhorn, and Missouri Valley Railroad reached the town. Knowing that it would be the next boomtown in the area, Bartlett opened a merchandis ing business and served as the county treasurer. Moving to Douglas, Wyoming, he opened a new merchandising busi ness named Richards and Lidell and the First National Bank of Douglas, naming Bartlett as vice president. DeForest also served as mayor of Douglas, commander of the Wyoming National Guard, and state senator. The second thing that would prove significant for the Richards brothers was a Nebraska politician by the name of Charles Van Wyck. He was sympathetic to the problems

PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN - PUBLIC DOMAIN

of the homesteaders, (sometimes called grangers) in their fight against the cattlemen. He successfully sponsored and passed a bill in Congress called the Van Wyck Fence Law that prohibited anyone from fencing off public domain lands. After coming through the great blizzard year of 1886/1887, the Richards outfits suffered a significant loss, like most ranchers in the storm’s path. Because of the loss on the open range, they decided that they needed more land for their operations, and they had to fence in as much as they could. The brothers were like most of the large cattle opera tions of the day; they went wherever they wanted and fenced whatever they wanted. Bartlett Richards had run more than 300 miles of barbed wire on public domain land, and DeForest was controlling another half a million acres. Eventually, their Land and Feeding Company claimed four times more acreage than the whole state of Rhode Island. Joining forces with cattleman J.J. Carnes, they established Continued on page 113

114 I MARCH 2025 WORKING RANCH audited readers run 21 million head of beef cattle.