Frederick Stimson and the Making of the Bar U Ranch

Who Was Frederick Stimson?

Frederick Smith Stimson was born on 27 November 1842 in Compton, in the Eastern Townships of what was then Lower Canada. He was the younger son of Arba Stimson, a merchant, farmer and moneylender. When Arba died in 1863 the estate was worth about $100,000, and Frederick took a quarter interest and ran the family farms. By 1871 he was one of the largest farmers in the district, with 1,000 acres, 124 cattle and 23 horses, according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

That is not the usual cowboy origin story. Stimson arrived in the Alberta foothills as a farmer, a land dealer and a lender who also captained the Compton volunteer cavalry troop. What he brought west was capital connections, bookkeeping habits and a willingness to learn the range business from scratch.

How the North-West Cattle Company Began

In June 1881, at age 39, Stimson began incorporating the North-West Cattle Company with Sir Hugh Allan and Andrew Allan of Montreal. Authorized capital was $150,000. The Allans held 59 per cent of the first shares, Andrew Allan became president, and Stimson held 19 per cent and took the job of resident manager. He went west that year to pick a range, and the company was chartered in March 1882.

The timing mattered. Ottawa had just opened the foothills to large grazing leases, and a company with eastern money behind it could claim a big block of grass on rent that was low compared with buying land outright.

Buying Cattle in Idaho and Driving Them North

In 1882 Stimson bought more than 3,000 cattle in Idaho and drove them to the company lease west of High River. The ranch, centered on Pekisko Creek, became known by its brand as the Bar U. The account in the Canadian Encyclopedia gives the starting herd as about 3,000 and says it grew past 10,000 within a decade. The company's own books back that up: by 1890 it held 10,382 head on 157,960 leased acres.

The Winter of 1882-83 and the Early Markets

The first hard test came in the winter of 1882-83. The neighboring Cochrane Ranche lost at least 3,000 head. The Bar U moved its cattle onto the range a month earlier and lost comparatively few, a difference the biography attributes to that timing.

By 1884 the ranch was selling beef to the Department of Indian Affairs, the North-West Mounted Police and railway contractors. After the Canadian Pacific Railway was finished, its market reached British Columbia and Manitoba. In 1887 the Bar U and the Cochrane pioneered shipping range cattle to the British market. The company raised its authorized capital to $300,000 in 1884, and in 1886 it merged with the neighboring Mount Head ranch, gaining its cattle and a 44,000-acre lease. At that point the books showed a profit of $133,204.25.

Losing the Bar U in 1902

In 1902 the ranch still had more than 3,000 cattle and 500 horses. The Allan family accepted an offer of $220,000 from George Lane and the Winnipeg meat-packing firm Gordon, Ironside and Fares. Stimson was not consulted. He went to court to stop the liquidation and lost.

Lane went on to run the ranch from 1902 to 1925 and built a well-known Percheron horse herd there, a story told in the Wikipedia article on the Bar U. Patrick Burns bought the ranch in 1927 and ran it as part of a group of ranches. Sources describe the ranch at its peak as about 160,000 acres, with roughly 30,000 cattle and 1,000 Percherons, though those figures cover later years than Stimson's.

Public Roles and Later Years

Stimson was more than a ranch manager. He served as territorial game guardian in 1884 and justice of the peace in 1885. During the North-West rebellion he raised a scout company, Stimson's Rangers, to patrol the Porcupine Hills. He was vice-president of the South-Western Stock Association from 1883 to 1886, a founding member of the Ranchmen's Club in 1891, and a backer of the Calgary Herald and Alberta Livestock Journal, organized in 1888. He was a Conservative and led the Calgary District Conservative Association in 1895 and 1896.

After the sale he traveled to Cuba in 1902 to assess investments for himself and Sir William Cornelius Van Horne, and in 1905 he moved to Mexico, where he ran a large dairy farm near Mexico City and acted as an agent for foreign investors. He returned to Canada in December 1911 in poor health and died in Montreal on 15 January 1912.

Visit the Bar U Ranch National Historic Site

Parks Canada bought the central remnant of the Bar U in 1991, the same year it was designated a National Historic Site, and opened it to the public in 1995. The site covers about 367 acres and keeps 35 historic buildings, including eight log buildings from the 1890s, with costumed interpreters in season.

For more ranch history, browse the ranching section on farm.FM or read a farm.FM story about the Bar U and Alberta ranching.