The Waggoners roared into the 1920s as one of the richest and most colorful families in Texas. Rogers joked, “I see there’s an oil well for every cow.” He calmed down after the rise of the automobile. Tom Waggoner was irked that his ranch hands kept finding crude oil when they drilled for water. Watering cattle was a challenge then, as it is today. Will Rogers, the most famous American humorist of the 1920s and early ’30s, visited frequently, sometimes playing polo. Train loads of spectators came to watch President Teddy Roosevelt hunt wolves on the property. By the 20th century, the Waggoner reverse-triple-D brand was a Texas icon.
The ranch went from large to vast after the Waggoners earned $55,000 selling longhorns on a Kansas cattle drive in 1870. He was a cattle and horse man like his father, Dan Waggoner, who started buying acreage around 1850. Waggoner, whose kids called him Pappy, wasn’t even that wealthy yet. “Tom” Waggoner gave his three children land, cattle, and horses valued at $6 million-about $150 million in today’s dollars. Who is going to put the money up, keep putting the money in, keep the brand alive? I think you owe it to the families who build ranches like the Waggoner.” “The challenge is not finding the money it’s finding the steward. Uechtritz acknowledges a new owner might sell the property off in pieces, fire its 120 employees, and let the Waggoner brand fade away. That firm and Uechtritz’s employer, Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty of Dallas, each will collect a commission of $7.625 million if the ranch commands its asking price. His co-broker on the deal is Sam Middleton, of Chas. Uechtritz says the European caller is among more than 600 people who’ve expressed interest in the ranch, “ranging from the really real to the really not.” He says he’s confident a sale will close by year’s end. He wends his pickup past an old rodeo corral, a truck scale, and a cook shack where cowboys still gobble pre-dawn biscuits and gravy, as they have for more than a century. Over speakerphone, the guy says his company tried to bid for the Waggoner years ago, “but all we got was bullshit.” Uechtritz tells him, “That’s not going to happen, mate.” “What we’re doing here never happened before and will never happen again.”Īs Uechtritz drives the ranch on this warm June afternoon, he takes a call from an oilman in Europe. “It’s history,” says Uechtritz, a blue-eyed, square-jawed 50-year-old who can pass for the Marlboro Man-until he greets you with “G’day” in his Australian accent. The ruling of District Judge Dan Mike Bird ended more than 20 years of litigation between opposing branches of the Waggoner family who couldn’t agree whether to liquidate the property or split it up among themselves.
Last year, a judge in Vernon-a town of about 11,000, 13 miles north of the ranch-ordered a sale of the property and appointed Uechtritz and a co-broker to market it worldwide. It’s been owned by the same family almost as long as Texas has been a state. and is known worldwide for its quarter horses.Ī smattering of the more than 4,000 items listed on the 183-page inventory of things being sold with the Waggoner ranch:ġ998 16-foot-by-80-foot Masterpiece mobile home The Waggoner is one of the 20 largest cattle ranches in the U.S. ranch, $175 million for a Colorado spread in 2007. At almost three-quarters of a billion dollars, the asking price is more than quadruple the biggest publicly known sum fetched by a U.S. At 510,527 acres (207,000 hectares), or 800 square miles (2,072 square kilometers), the Waggoner sprawls over six counties and is bigger than Los Angeles and New York City combined.
Uechtritz (YOO-tridge) is one of two brokers entrusted with the singular task of selling the Waggoner ranch and everything attached to it, from the 29 tractors, to the cut-rock polo barn, to the emptied bottles of Old Taylor bourbon in an abandoned hunting lodge. He points straight ahead, then behind him, then left.
“Everything you can see, as far as the eye can see, is the ranch,” he says. Squinting into the sun, Uechtritz gestures to the sky on his right. Waggoner Estate Ranch 175 miles (280 kilometers) northwest of Dallas. The real estate broker is steering his black Ford F-350 pickup over one of the hundreds of miles of roads ribboning the W.T. “It takes days to see it all,” says Bernard Uechtritz. Ideal for Saudi oil sheiks, billionaire hedge funders, and dot-commers who can tell a cow from a steer. Fifteen-minute drive to rib-eyes at the Rusty Spur in Vernon. Colorful history of drinking and divorce. Favorite of Will Rogers and Teddy Roosevelt. Texas fixer-upper with more than 1,000 oil wells 6,800 head of cattle 500 quarter horses 30,000 acres of cropland tombstones for legendary cowboys, long-dead dogs, and a horse buried standing up.
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