'Bill Kitt' saga spans the whole life of Oregon cattle country

The only trouble with "Bill Kitt" the book is that we learn relatively little about Bill Kitt the man. That's not necessarily a bad thing. "I really felt that I could have sat down and done a biography just on my granddad," says Donovan "Jack" Nicol, who with his niece, Amy Thompson, is the author of a 450-page Western saga masquerading as Kitt's biography. "But that would be self-serving. "He did a lot, but he had a lot of other people with him -- a lot of them worthy of a book themselves. I thought, 'These were great stories, so let's bring 'em all in.' That's why I tried to cover the whole ranching picture during that time." So, while "Bill Kitt" the book uses Kitt's life "from trail driver to Cowboy Hall of Fame" as its framework, it offers near-encyclopedic aspects of cattle country life. For openers, Kitt's full name was William Kittredge. But he was known throughout southeast Oregon's cattle country and beyond by his nickname to the point a lot of folks might have been surprised to learn he had a longer moniker. His career in the cattle business spanned 1893 to 1958. It took him from a $25-a-month buckaroo to owner of one of the West's most massive cattle operations: 68,000 acres of deeded property in in Klamath, Lake and Harney counties in Oregon; Humboldt and Washoe counties in Nevada and Tehama County in California, as well as 850,000 acres leased from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Oregon and Nevada, plus 52,000 other leased acres. It also earned him distinction as one of only three Oregonians honored in the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum's Hall of Great Westerners in Oklahoma City...read more