Broadus: Ranching Capital of the Powder River

Broadus takes its name from the Broaddus family, early settlers in the area, though the post office spelling dropped one of the d's. A town grew up where D.C.

George and Margaret Trautman built a log cabin store at this bend in the Powder River. When Powder River County was carved out of southern Custer County in nineteen nineteen, Mrs. Trautman donated eighty acres for a town site on the condition that Broadus be made the county seat, and that the streets be, in her words, wide enough to turn a team and a wagon around on.

The voters agreed in a nineteen twenty election. A courthouse followed. Broadus reached its peak of seven hundred ninety-nine people in nineteen seventy, when the Belle Creek oil field gave the town a boom, and it counted four hundred fifty-six at the last census.

Today Broadus is still the county seat of Powder River County, one of the least-populated counties in the United States, where most of the land is grazing range and a majority of residents are still tied to cattle ranching. The county covers about thirty-three hundred square miles but held only about sixteen hundred ninety-four residents at the last census, roughly one person for every two square miles. Part of it lies inside Custer National Forest, and the Battle of Powder River was fought in its south on the seventeenth of March, eighteen seventy-six.