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06/2000. xviii, 211 pages.
0896723976
978-0-89672-397-9

Great Plains Cattle Empire: Thatcher Brothers and Associates, 1875-1945

By Paul E. Patterson and Joy Poole
Foreword by Elmer Kelton

This work chronicles the establishment of the cattle industry in the Great Plains, spanning the years from the Civil War to World War II.

John and Mahlon Thatcher were two of the many pioneers looking to begin a new life in the great open spaces of the West. In the 1860s, the brothers began a small mercantile in the town of Pueblo, Colorado. From a small safe in the corner of their newly created mercantile, the two Thatcher brothers founded what was to become the First National Bank of Pueblo, Colorado.

Together with such legendary figures as Frank Bloom, Henry Cresswell, O. H. Perry Baxter, William Anderson, Burton Mossman, and Mahlon T. Everhart, they created a cattle empire—financing and directing the Bloom Land and Cattle Company, Diamond A Cattle Company, and the Hatchet Cattle Company. Their herds of cattle, horses and sheep ranged on some eleven million acres of land sprawling from New Mexico to Canada.