The Founding Years, 1864-1910
The Ranch After 1910
The Sagebrush Rebellion, 1960-1982
Fredrick William Stock, who was born near Exten, Hessen-Kassel, Germany, in 1837, founded what is now called the Ninety-Six Ranch. His name in German was Friedrich Wilhelm; the family's records variously spell it Friedrick or Fredrick. He was apprenticed to a cobbler at fourteen but abandoned the pursuit after two years and came to America. He arrived in New York in 1853 and proceeded to Dayton, Ohio, where he worked as a cooper's helper. In 1857 he was drawn to California by the gold rush, traveling from New Orleans around Cape Horn to San Francisco, bypassing the mountain West where he would shortly make his home. He probably took the English form of his name at about the time of his arrival in the United States.1
In California, Stock worked in the gold fields on the northern reaches of the Sacramento River. He was not terribly successful and soon took a job with a stage line. In 1860 he bought two wagons and twelve oxen and formed a freight company. During this period he first met George Carrol (sometimes spelled Carroll or Carrel) from Petersburg, Virginia, who later would be a partner in Paradise Valley. The freight company hauled supplies from Red Bluff, the northernmost steamship landing on the Sacramento, to mines in southwestern Idaho. One route passed near Paradise Valley, where Stock saw promising farmland. He homesteaded in the valley in 1864 and 1865.
Early settlers in Paradise Valley faced Indian raids until about 1868, with one particularly severe outbreak in 1865. There is no clear evidence that white settlers displaced the more or less nomadic Northern Paiutes from the valley, but the period was a difficult one for Indian-white relations throughout the state. Thousands of whites entered Nevada after the discovery of silver in 1859, and the inevitable conflicts began. The first glimmering of the Ghost Dance religion occurred among the Paiutes in the 1870s; the movement became a widespread anti-white uprising a few decades later.
William Stock's relationships with Native Americans in this early period are always described as charitable and positive. A 1942 article in Pacific Stockman, based on interviews with family members, reports Stock's handling of the 1865 uprising: "He stayed on his place and when the Indians came he killed a beef, roasted it and made friends with the Indians. They never gave him any trouble after that." (Mann, Range. "Ranching in Paradise." Pacific Stockman VIII, 10; October 1942, p. 8). But others in the valley were not so sanguine and the cavalry fort Camp Winfield Scott was established in 1866. The role of Native Americans on the ranch in later years is the subject of a group of eight audio selections in this online collection.
Stock's first dwelling was a sod house and the farm's first product a crop of grain. Supplies were brought from Unionville, Nevada, a distance of 150 miles. Later, after the railroad reached Winnemucca, forty miles distant, Stock was able to obtain lumber and build a small wood house. Fort Scott provided Stock with a local market for grain and meat; the establishment of Fort McDermitt just across the mountains provided him with contracts to supply firewood and poles. Stock's grandson Leslie J. "Les" Stewart says that he has seen a mountain cabin and the remains of a sled he believes his grandfather used during his wood-gathering expeditions.
Stock and Carrol formed a partnership in 1866, adding horses to the grain and cattle already being produced. Acquisitions led to the growth of the holdings, including Stock's 1883 buyout of his partner. Other holdings, some quite distant from the present home ranch, were bought and sold through the years. The 1881 lithograph of Stock and Carrol's ranch that appeared in Myron Angel's 1881 History of Nevada with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (Oakland, California: Thompson and West) shows a diversified operation that raised and sold sheep, hogs, horses, cattle, and grain. For many westerners, such diversity and the inclusion of cash crops define a farm rather than a ranch. A ranch would sell exclusively livestock. The extent and sources of the property as of 1981 are described in the video selection Land Use Through the Seasons.
In 1879 Stock went back to Germany and married Wilhelmina Christina Wahague (or Wahagen or Wahaugen) from Strücken, a village very near Exten. They returned to Nevada early the next year. Six children were born during the 1880s, four of whom survived: William F. (1881), Minnie (1882), Elizabeth (1884), and Edith (1886). Grotsch's family history describes the extensive kitchen garden, flock of chickens, and milk cows overseen by Wilhelmina, who traded excess produce, butter, and eggs at the store. The family also raised two hundred ducks and geese, gathered the down for feather beds, and sold poultry to Chinese laborers at the nearby mines.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Stock invested in a bank in Winnemucca and a flourmill in the valley, and helped form the First Methodist Church of Paradise Valley. He was active in civic affairs and Republican politics. He aided his brother, Heinrich Edward, and three sisters, Louise Wilhelmina, Justine Carlena, and Louise Pauline Sophie, in their immigration to America. All four settled in the valley; Ed started a ranch, Wilhelmina married Henry Kirchner, Lena married Henry Knieke, and Louise married Robert Schwartz. Descendants of these unions live in Paradise Valley today.
It is interesting to speculate on the use of German in the valley. As the surnames of the men who married Stock's sisters attest, persons of German ancestry were prominent early settlers. Some, like the Stocks, came from Low-German-speaking areas. Martha Arriola, who married Wilhelmina Stock's nephew, said her first husband's family spoke Low German at home but learned High German in school. No letters from the Stocks survive, although there are letters from businessman and storekeeper Charles Kemler. Kemler immigrated from a German speaking section of Switzerland. He wrote relatives in California in 1879 in High German; some letters are signed "Carl" and others "Charles," implying that the process of Anglicization had begun. By the turn of the century or shortly thereafter, the valley also was home to speakers of Paiute, Chinese, Italian, and Basque.
Stock died in 1898. A visit to the home just before his death is the subject of the audio selection The Death of William Stock, a reminiscence by Charles Kemler's grandson, Fritz Buckingham. After her husband's death, Wilhelmina ran the operation with the help of her children and nephew, William Huck, until her death in 1910. By the time of Stock's death, the outfit no longer raised cash crops and limited its sales to livestock--cattle, sheep, and horses--and the operation could now properly be called a ranch. But Wilhelmina felt that Stock's first love had been farming and in the face of some family protests, she incorporated the operation as the William Stock Farming Company. According to Grotsch, the ranch's holdings at the time of her death included 3,000 cattle, 6,000 sheep, 1,000 horses, and 17,560 acres of land.
Three children inherited the ranch; Elizabeth had died in 1904, and the property passed to William F., Edith, and Minnie. William F. was paralyzed by a runaway horse accident in the early thirties and died in 1936, vesting ownership in his two sisters and their families. Minnie married and moved to Sacramento, leaving the actual operation in the hands of Edith and her husband, Fred Stewart.
William F. Stock helped run the ranch until his accident, but Fred Stewart was the real manager from the 1920s to the 1950s. Edith was also an important influence on the operation. Everyone in the community remembers her as energetic and tough. Although Grotsch's family history emphasizes the founding years, rancher Les Stewart has written about his parents: "I believe the thirties were much worse, required more fortitude, devotion, and hard work for no financial reimbursement than any time in the ranch's long history. Fred and Edith deserve more credit than the real early-day people."
During this era--especially between the world wars--the ranch specialized more and more in beef and became less diversified. Interest in horses continued, however, and saddle and work horses won prizes in Nevada competitions. Capital improvements included the construction of outbuildings and line camps, notably the handsome stone structures built by the Italian immigrant stonemason Tony Ramasco.
Les Stewart was born in 1920, and by the age of nineteen was fully involved in the ranch, spending spring, summer, and fall on the range and running the roundup wagon. He attended the College of Agriculture at the University of Nevada in Reno, but his disaffection with scientific experts and authority figures soon manifested itself. In a 1982 letter nominating her husband to the Nevada Cattlemen's Association 100,000 [Horseback] Mile Club, his wife, Marie, writes:
In the spring of 1940 [Leslie] decided that higher education was not for him. Near the end of the semester, while attending a class in ranch management, the professor was discussing the merits of a tidy farmstead. "When piling debris to be burned, don't stack it too close to the barn as you might burn the barn down." Leslie thought about this for awhile and decided his education was complete and school was over as far as he was concerned. He packed his saddle and other belongings and headed back to the ranch and never returned to the college.
Les Stewart, like many workers in agriculture, was exempt from the draft during World War II. He stayed home and helped run the ranch.
The war years and the postwar era brought more changes to the operation. Improved roads and greater use of trucks reduced the amount of horseback work. Ranch workers were fewer in number and less specialized. The audio selection Changes at Wartime describes the war-related disruptions of the work force. Les says he feels the era marked the demise of the true buckaroo, the man who only worked from the saddle. The transition being made in technology is evident in Les's films Haying Season (ca. 1945) and Feeding Cattle in Winter (ca. 1945). A variety of horse-drawn or formerly horse-drawn devices are shown in these films, notably the derrick used to stack the hay. But in all but one case, tractors had replaced the teams of horses while the equipment "behind the hitch" was largely unchanged. Within ten or fifteen years, the transition to motorized apparatus was complete. The haying machines of the 1980s are shown in the video selections Cutting and Windrowing Hay with a Swather, The Baler, and The Harobed.
Les Stewart's parents died within six years of each other. Fred died in 1959, the year in which Les and Marie were married and their son Fredrick William Stewart was born. During the early sixties Les and Marie built their new house while Edith continued to occupy the two-story main house. Edith died in 1965, leaving Les and Marie in operational control of the ranch. Les's cousins--Minnie Grotsch's children--still owned a share, which the Stewarts bought in 1979, using the event as the occasion to change the name of the operation from the William Stock Farming Company to the Ninety-Six Ranch, the name used throughout this online presentation.
The Sagebrush Rebellion, 1960-82
During the 1960s and 1970s, the impact of the environmental movement was felt in the West, particularly in areas with extensive public lands. In Nevada, nearly 90 percent of the state's land is overseen by a variety of federal agencies, including the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the U.S. Forest Service. Most Nevada ranchers lease public grazing lands from the latter two agencies and their land use policies have a profound impact on the livestock industry.
The BLM had reduced the number of animals permitted on the range by a third in the 1950s, even before the environment had become a political watchword, and in the 1960s grazing allotments were fenced for the first time. The 1970s brought the "Sagebrush Rebellion," a period that saw especially tense relations between cattlemen and federal land managers. The tension increased following the 1974 lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council against the secretary of the interior. The council successfully argued in court that public lands were being overgrazed and that the effects of this use must be determined by environmental impact studies.
In the mid-1970s, the Bureau of Land Management measured the carrying capacity of the rangeland, using methods that ranchers found suspect, and called for new reductions in herd size. In response, several organizations that came to the aid of the ranchers, including the University of Nevada's College of Agriculture in Reno. Researchers at the university prepared an excellent, thorough analysis of the economics of cattle ranching in Humboldt County and argued that the reductions would have an severe adverse impact on the business. (Economic Impact of BLM Grazing Allotment Reductions on Humboldt County, Division of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Max C. Fleischmann College of Agriculture, University of Nevada, Reno; Report M.S. 126, February 1980).
The Library of Congress folklife research project from 1978 through 1983 coincided with this period of tension and team members recall that many visits to ranches would begin with complaints about federal government range management policies. No one spoke more forcefully on this topic than Les Stewart. But the Ninety-Six continued to use federal land until Les's announcement that the 1981 fall cattle drive would be the ranch's final roundup from the BLM range. The following year, the Ninety-Six herd was reduced to the few hundred animals that could be maintained on the ranch's privately owned land. The smaller herd needed far less hay--three hundred tons instead of the former three thousand--and Les leased some of his hayfields to neighbors. Meanwhile, in the early 1980s, Les's son, Fred, had completed his equipment repair training and began to work on the ranch full-time. Fred established an automotive and equipment repair business in a new building at the home ranch.
Les Stewart's move to semi-retired status reflected his exasperation with federal land management rules, reinforced by his son's interest in establishing an equipment repair business, and--to a lesser degree--took account of reaching the age of sixty-two. Les's 1982 discussion of the matter may be heard in the audio selection The Ninety-Six, Diversification, and the Future made the same year that he sold his federal grazing allotments. Although prospective buyers Henry and Clay Taylor joined the roundup crew shown in our 1979 footage to look over the grazing land, they decided against buying and the permits were subsequently sold to other ranchers in the valley.
This seeming reduction of the level of activity on the Ninety-Six--echoed to some degree on neighboring ranches--left the departing folklife research team in a melancholy mood. We had grown fond of the Stewarts and their neighbors and hoped that the ranching culture we had documented would thrive. When this online collection was being assembled in 1998--fifteen years after our fieldwork ended--we were glad to hear news that lifted our melancholy. A letter from Marie Stewart reported that a number of Paradise Valley ranches have persisted in the face of a changing marketplace and unpredictable politics, although the Stewarts and other Nevada ranchers still worry about the "anti-livestock" environmental movement. The Ninety-Six continues to run a herd of about 300 head. Fred's investment in new haying equipment permits greater mechanization of winter feeding and the operation is able to succeed on the efforts of the family with a modest amount of help from hired hands and volunteers. Fred, his wife, and their infant daughter occupy a new house erected in the field shown in the movie Ninety-Six Ranch Rodeo and Barbecue. Thus, 100 years after the passing of the ranch's founder, the fourth generation--Bill Stock's great-grandson Fred Stewart--takes an ever-increasing role in the operation and a fifth generation has appeared on the scene.