Benjamin F. Wallace: From Texas Trail Hand to Arizona Cattle Dealer

Who Was Benjamin F. Wallace?

Benjamin Franklin Wallace was born in 1860 in Greenville, Texas, and died in 1946. The documented outline of his life is short, and the most reliable summary comes from the Hall of Great Westerners entry. Because the record about the man himself is limited, this profile also explains the cattle industry that shaped his career, and it says so where it does.

A Texas Boyhood and the Cattle Trails

Wallace left his father's ranch at 14 and went to work as a cowboy on cattle trails. That was a common start for Texas boys in the years after the Civil War, when herds were moved north to railheads and distant markets. Trail work taught the skills that later made him a manager: handling herds, reading range conditions and judging cattle. Retirement in 1933 means his working life covered about four decades in Arizona, from the open-range years through the Depression's first seasons.

Moving to Arizona in 1890

In 1890 Wallace moved to Arizona to manage a cattle company's operations near Winslow. The museum summary does not name the company, so none is named here. His arrival came as the open range was becoming crowded. In 1890 the Empire Ranch drove cattle to California rather than pay higher freight rates to the Southern Pacific, a sign that transport costs mattered, as a Bureau of Land Management account describes.

Building His Own Operation

After managing for others, Wallace began buying ranches and cattle businesses. They included the Truax Ranch in Adamana, and he formed a cattle company that held 2,500 head. He kept dealing in land and cattle until he retired from the business in 1933.

The museum does not give acreage, sale prices or herd records for his later years, so the scale of his operation beyond the 2,500-head company is unknown. For a long career, a hall of fame summary like this one is the outline that is easiest to verify, and fuller detail would need local archives.

The Arizona Range He Worked In

Arizona ranching in the 1890s was hard on everyone. The drought of 1891 killed more than half the territory's cattle, and Henry Hooker's Sierra Bonita was one of the few big ranches to survive it, according to the Hooker biography. Ranches also moved toward Hereford and Durham cattle; by 1898 most of the Empire Ranch's nearly forty thousand cattle were Herefords, as the Empire Ranch article says.

Honors

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum inducted Wallace into the Hall of Great Westerners in 1963. For more on Arizona ranch history, visit farm.FM's ranching pages or read a farm.FM story about the Arizona cattle business.