The last grand roundup a huge joint effort to bring in excess horses

Grant County — Over 100 years ago, wild horses used to roam the area. But that all changed in 1906 when the last great horse roundup happened in Grant County.

The wild horses that used to roam Grant County are different from the wild horses we think of today. They were owned, branded and let loose to forage on the open range. By 1905, settlers had begun pouring in.

“The grassland, already depleted from decades of overgrazing, could not support cattle, sheep, homestead farms and horses very much longer,” wrote L. Wardell Larson, author of the book “Early Hoof Prints Across the Big Bend and Beyond.” “Estimates seemed to settle on around 6,000 excess range horses, many carrying brands and saddle marks, running loose in the Columbia Basin at the close of 1905.”

One of the major horseman in the area was Al Soper. At the end of 1905, he proposed a plan to do one major round up of all the horses in the area, instead of each rancher spending weeks riding the range in search of his horses. Soper wanted to have riders go west from Ephrata and head south to Crab Creek. They would then herd the horses to the mouth of Crab Creek at the Columbia River where they would be corralled. From there, they would be driven north and back to Ephrata and the railroad for shipping. William McCarty, of Dickinson, North Dakota, heard of the plans and pre-purchased 2,000 of the horses.

The ride was set for April 23, 1906. Riders were to meet in Ephrata.

“In order to get the boys in good spirits, the horse men decided to have a fews days recreation before beginning the real work,” wrote A. A. McIntyre in the 1906 book, “The Last Grand Roundup.”

A buckaroo ball was held the Friday evening before the ride at the opera house in Wilson Creek.

“Sunday was a lively day at Ephrata, over 300 buckaroos and sightseers having arrived in town,” wrote McIntyre. “An ox had been roasted in true barbecue fashion, and Harvey Hite acted in capacity of chief cook. At 2:30 in the afternoon the games started…”

While the plan had been to ride out Monday morning, the activities of the day before made it difficult for the riders to get started. There were also some riders still missing. With these factors in mind, the beginning of the ride was postponed until Tuesday.

Joining the riders were several newspaper reporters, nicknamed “war correspondents.” The newsmen were prepared to spend a week or more learning about the workings of the roundup.

The first two days of the round up were spent in getting from Ephrata down to a spot known as Bird Ranch, “about 35 miles from the junction of Crab Creek and the Columbia River,” according to McIntyre. Here, more newsmen joined the ride, bringing the number up to eight.

On Thursday morning, the search for horses began.

“(T)hey started scouring the canyons and draws on the north and south slopes of the Saddle Mountains, making a large circle encompassing a portion of the Wahluke Slope and the Figure Two Ranch south of Sentinel Butte,” Larson wrote.

The round up of horses was made easier due to the slower pace of the horses accommodating the new born colts and the mares about to give birth. Unfortunately, some of the colts were orphaned because of the roundup. Some were shot while others were brought to camp and nursed on cows milk until they could graze on their own.

Once the horses were rounded up, they were branded. A representative from the assessors office counted heads and charged $3 per horse head in taxes.

“Horses showed up in the gather from afar,” Larson wrote. “Many owned by Henry Gable from Scootney Springs, west of Connell, were included. Quite a few horses branded by Ben Rosencranz, down where the Yakima River empties in the Columbia, were spotted. (Mr. Rosencranz was the first settler where Richland is now located.)”

After the horses were allowed to rest, they were driven to Ephrata where the Great Northern had shipping pens. The first shipment of horses occurred on May 14, 1906. Eight hundred horses were sent by rail to the ranges of North Dakota. The end of the large round up was over. Over the next few months, smaller groups continued to ride the range and round up horses.

“The ride was not entirely finished until the middle of July when McCarty made his last shipment east,” McIntyre wrote.

McIntyre, whose book was originally published in 1906, added that at the time not all the horses had been rounded up. This joint effort to round up the wild horses was probably “the last big roundup eastern Washington will ever see.”

“It is a picturesque sight to see a large band of wild horses with the colts coming down to water or grazing on the prairie,” wrote McIntyre. “And, when one stops to think that this is practically the last of them in Washington, that they are doomed to give way to the tiller of the soil and that their haunts will be turned into wheat fields and fruit ranches, for the moment wished it were not so.”