Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Routt County pioneer rancher Ferry Carpenter made his own Western film to sell cattle

This is the story of how a Routt County cowboy filmed his own Western during the Great Depression. The irrepressible Farrington “Ferry” Carpenter, faced with an almost impossible market for his purebred Hereford bull calves in 1929, staged his own cowboy movie to market his beeves and discovered that it’s not so easy forcing a herd of cattle to ford a river. Carpenter became a rancher for life in his teens while apprenticed to a New Mexico cattle outfit. He did not receive a high school diploma but somehow managed to earn a degree from Princeton University and graduated from Harvard Law School, Class of 1912. Improbably, he headed west to Colorado and set up his law office in a bowling alley in Hayden. As Marshall Sprague wrote in the foreword to Carpenter’s autobiography, “Confessions of a Maverick,” Carpenter was Routt County’s attorney for eight years and spent four years as the district attorney for Routt, Moffat and Grand counties, which gave him occasion to prosecute cattle rustlers and kidnappers. He also diffused a potentially violent confrontation among cattle and sheep ranchers south of Craig. Carpenter’s fame grew when he worked in the Department of the Interior under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, where he crafted a federal grazing act. However, Carpenter’s heart remained on his ranch on the Yampa River just east of Hayden...more

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Congratulations Frank DuBois! Thank you so much for taking the time to share this exciting information.

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