Swan Land and Cattle: The Scottish Cattle Barons

In the eighteen eighties, Scottish and English investors poured capital into Wyoming cattle ranching as if it were a guaranteed fortune. The Swan Land and Cattle Company, incorporated in Edinburgh in eighteen eighty-three, was the largest and most aggressive of these ventures. At its peak the company controlled roughly five and a half million acres of Wyoming and Nebraska range and claimed over one hundred thousand cattle.

The headquarters sat in Chugwater on the Laramie plains. The winter of eighteen eighty-six to eighteen eighty-seven, which cattlemen called the Big Die-Up, killed perhaps sixty percent of the open-range herds across the northern plains. Swan's reported losses were catastrophic.

The company survived in diminished form until nineteen fifty-four, making it one of the longest-lived of the Gilded Age cattle corporations. The headquarters buildings in Chugwater are on the National Register of Historic Places.