A 30 Years Ago Special Edition. From the August 10, 1989 Examiner
By Orville Howard, of The Record Stockman
BROADUS, MT - Keep their heads pointed straight for the North Star and never stop until you hit the Yellowstone.
Those were the words voiced a hundred years ago by trail bosses as cowboys moved streams of wild longhorns northward from the muddy banks of the Rio Grande. And out in the middle of these South Texas herds was a lanky Missourian named Oscar Broaddus whose family would eventually burn brands in the beef business from Texas to Montana.
The exact trail that guided the young cowboy northward from the Mexican border has been lost in antiquity but it is known that Oscar Broaddus rode into Powder River Country of Montana in November 1885, and in less than two years become foreman of one the largest range herds on the Powder River.
Time has long since spread a cloak of dust across most of those historical cattle trails, now bedded for the ages, and the drovers are seldom remembered except for a lonely marker here and there. But over in Powder River Country, not far from where Big Powder and Little Powder merge for a final fling to the Yellowstone, there’s a little cowtown by the name of Broadus that stands as a namesake for a family of frontier cattlemen who watched a thousand miles of hide ‘n horn become the backbone of America’s billion-dollar beef business.
Though one of the “D’s” was dropped somewhere between Montana and Washington when the first “Broadus” Post Office was recorded on the National Registry, the mail station was started by Oscar and John Broaddus who came from Missouri to carve a niche in the Western Frontier. And a thousand miles or so to the south, down where the old trail herds were once formed, the Broaddus name is emblazoned on “Broaddus Avenue” in Old El Paso. West of Amarillo, about 30 minutes south of Old Tascosa, Billy Joe Broaddus and his son, Weldon, are moving into the fifth generation of cattle and wheat production in the Texas Panhandle.
There’s another small town by the name of Broaddus, located on the back-waters of Lake Sam Rayburn in East Texas but its origin has been lost with the people who built it.
Lineage of the Montana and Texas Broaddus families in America date back to colonial Virginia where a number of Broaddus family units arrived from Wales in the early 1770s and from there they migrated to Kentucky where many became sizeable landowners. Much of the history of the Broaddus family has been lost at this point in time, but it is believed that the Antebellum sparks that flared into a Civil War triggered a family move even further west into Missouri during the middle 1800s. Once again, the families developed large plantations of land and livestock and were referred to by historians as being among the more affluent property owners of Missouri.
“When the Civil War came, the Broadduses scattered to many points of the West, but the Powder River Broadduses came from around Salisbury, Missouri,” said Horace Broaddus of Weston, WY, whose ranch headquarters is pinpointed two miles south of the Montana-Wyoming line of 32 miles due south of Broadus, MT.
Ancestors of the Texas Panhandle Broadduses came from Centralia, MO, a farming community located about 30 miles southeast of Salisbury, the home of the Montana clan.
Oscar Broaddus, Horace’s father, was a native of Salisbury and the eldest of 12 children born to John and Bettie (Haston) Broaddus. They were considered as a wealthy family and holders of slaves who were freed in 1863 when Oscar was 3. He attended some of the better schools of Missouri, but at the age of 20 he headed west for Texas to join his uncle Jesse Haston, who had become a top hand for the Newman Cattle Co., headquartered in El Paso.
The vast holdings of the Newman Cattle Co. not only took in a big chunk of South Texas, but also reached south into Mexico to such points as Durango and Chihuahua. Thus, early in life Oscar Broaddus learned to ride and rope with the best and beat the odds in handling the meanest critters on earth… wild, rangy stock that became known on the trails as Texas longhorns. Oscar’s younger brother, Horace Broaddus, also joined the Newman spread in later years and then went into the cotton and cattle business on his own.
“Uncle Horace used to go up into the Durango and Chihuahua country of Mexico and there he made friends with the Mexicans and bought hundreds of cattle and shipped them to the Powder River,” recalled Horace Broaddus from his Wyoming headquarters, pointing out that he was named after his Uncle Horace. “That was in the early Nineties and one of the ranchers he sold to in the early Nineties was Walt Monnett on Little Powder River.”
“My Uncle Horace was also in the cotton exchange business in El Paso and a street was named after him in that city - Broaddus Avenue.”
Newman Cattle Co. had established a northern range on the Niobrara River not far from the present town of Valentine, NE in the late 1870s but was looking for expansion to the west in Montana Territory by the time young Broaddus came along. New Union military forts and outposts had created a new market for the South Texas beef, since the buffalo were rapidly disappearing under the relentless volleys of the Big 50s.
In 1880, about the same time that A.T. Davis trailed his big herd of Mexican cattle from the Rio Grande to the Nebraska Sandhills near Hyannis, Newman Cattle Co. sent Haston to the Powder River country in the Montana Territory to establish another northern summer range.
Haston followed orders to the letter and established a big range for the Newman cattle along the Big Powder River, a spread which was later officially registered in the Montana brand books as the V Bar R Ranch. With his Uncle Gaston as head honcho for the V Bar R, Oscar Broaddus left the cactus and mesquite of the Rio Grande behind and headed north for the tall grass of the Powder River. He arrived in November of 1885 and went to work on Newman’s V Bar R - a spread which was also known in later years as N Bar Ranch on the Powder River. Another brother, John Broaddus, joined Oscar on the Newman Ranch in 1887.
Continued next week...
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