A small corner of Montana’s early history is for sale.
The 40,000-acre PN Ranch, located along the Missouri and Judith rivers north of Lewistown, is being offered for $18 million by Hall and Hall Real Estate.
“Some of that is almost a monument with the old fort there,” said Tim Murphy, one of the listing agents.
Murphy was referring to Camp Cooke, the first military post established in what is now Montana on May 19, 1866. The outpost was built to protect the steamboat trade from Indian raids as the boats chugged up the Missouri River in the spring. The fort was abandoned after only four years as the steamboat era sank.
Even before Camp Cooke, though, the area was a popular campsite for American Indians — especially the Blackfeet who laid claim to the territory. In 1805, explorers Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and the rest of their crew camped near the PN Ranch during their trip upriver to the Pacific Coast. Later, the area was the site of fur trading posts, Indian treaty gatherings and some of the first dinosaur fossil expeditions. It wasn’t until 1869 that James Wells and soon-to-be Montana senator and businessman T.C. Power (the P in PN) partnered to create what would become the PN Ranch.
The ranch is now surrounded by portions of the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The 375,000-acre monument surrounds the 149-mile-long Upper Missouri National Wild and Scenic River.
More than 100 years later, in the 1990s, Charles Pierson purchased the ranch, later partnering with Whitney MacMillan, an heir to the Cargill agricultural fortune who is reportedly worth about $5 billion and the richest man in Minnesota.
After Pierson’s death in 2013, his son, Matthew, decided to concentrate his efforts on the family’s other property near Livingston — the Highland Livestock Co., according to a story in the Wall Street Journal announcing the ranch’s sale...
more
No comments:
Post a Comment