Mason-Lovell Ranch

Check out these strange-looking mountains...

The ML Ranch is significant in the area of agriculture for its association with the growth of the open range cattle ranching industry in Big Horn Basin during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The ranch is also significant for its association with Henry Clay Lovell, important for his contributions to Wyoming's early cattle ranching industry in the Big Horn Basin.

Lovell established the ML Ranch site as a line camp in 1883. The following year it became headquarters for ranch operations. It became the largest cattle ranch in the eastern part of Big Horn Basin. The ranch typifies many similar profitable unions in which the ''know-how'' of a cattleman was combined with the assets of a financial investor from the east, in this case Anthony L. Mason. The ML Ranch remained in the Lovell family until 1909. It changed hands a number of times before it was purchased by the Bureau of Reclamation in the early 1960s.

In 1966 the ML Ranch buildings and the small parcel of land on which they are sited were acquired by the National Park Service.

In 1883, after having used two other locations in the southern part of the Bighorn Basin, Henry Clay Lovell chose Willow Creek, in the Five Springs area, for the Mason/Lovell Ranch Headquarters. He built a bunkhouse, barn and corral and moved the home ranch was moved from Nowood Creek to this site in 1884. Henry Clay Lovell and Anthony L. Mason, owners of the ML Ranch had one of the largest and most prominent ranches in the eastern Bighorn Basin and the Wyoming Territory. They grazed cattle from Thermopolis to the Crow Reservation in Montana. It was estimated that they had as many as 25,000 cattle before the harsh winter of 1886-87. The ML Ranch lost roughly half of their cattle to exposure and starvation that winter. The beginning of the end of huge cattle round ups on the open range had arrived

“Do you smoke and do you wear suspenders?” If you were applying for a job with the ML ranch, that was one of your interview questions. If you answered yes to the first and no to the second, Lovell would not hire you. He would say that you would spend most of your time rolling cigarettes and the rest of it pulling up your pants. If you were hired you would be supplied with a horse, but would have to supply your own saddle, bridle, and blanket. For several weeks you would be out on the range involved in the massive round ups and then ten days on the trail moving the cattle from the ML Ranch to Billings, Montana.

Roxie Cook told the story of being on the stage from Billings to Lovell in 1896. She remembered meeting a large herd of cattle being driven to market near Pryor Gap. There were at least 10,000 head, 25 to 30 cowboys and it took several very dusty hours to move the cattle past the stage. All of them were branded with the ML brand.