The men who owned the Matador never saw it, and the man who ran it did not live on it either. For most of 26 years Murdo Mackenzie directed the largest ranch in Motley County from an office in Trinidad, Colorado, by letter, telegram and an annual tour of the divisions. The Dundee board got a letter a week. So did he. The arrangement worked because he was the kind of man who answered them.
The factor's clerk
He was born on April 24, 1850, near Tain in Ross-shire, to tenant farmers, and finished at the Tain Royal Academy in 1869. He clerked in a law office and the British Linen Bank, then went to work as assistant factor on Sir Charles Ross's estate at Balnagown, which is to say he learned how to run a great deal of land for an owner who lived somewhere else. He married Isabella MacBain in 1876. In 1885 an Edinburgh syndicate hired him to manage the Prairie Cattle Company out of Trinidad, Colorado, and he crossed with his family. He took American citizenship and, in 1891, was elected mayor of Trinidad.
That same year the Matador Land and Cattle Company, whose Dundee directors had been through a decade of drought, blizzard and a superintendent who wanted to run things his own way, offered him the job of general manager. He took it, and kept the office in Trinidad.
What he did with it
The herd he inherited was Longhorn stock out of the Chisum jinglebob cattle Hank Campbell had bought in 1879. Mackenzie bred it up with purebred Hereford bulls, a long and expensive program the board grumbled about and then stopped grumbling about when the steers sold. He pushed the company north: leases on the Cheyenne River reservation in South Dakota and at Fort Belknap in Montana, where young Texas steers were sent to finish on northern grass, and later land in Saskatchewan. The story of what that built is in Darden Canyon and the Matador. The company owned 861,000 acres in Texas by 1910 and leased far more. A town on the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul line in South Dakota is named Murdo for him.
He was never only the Matador's man. He fought the railroads over freight rates on cattle, testifying to Congress and the Interstate Commerce Commission in the years that produced the Hepburn Act of 1906. He was the founding president of the American Stock Growers Association in 1905, and when it became the American National Live Stock Association the next year he stayed president until 1911. In 1908 Theodore Roosevelt put him on the National Conservation Commission.
Brazil, and back
In 1912 he left the Matador to manage the Brazil Land, Cattle and Packing Company, a French backed venture out of Sao Paulo for which he bought and stocked some 10 million acres. Roosevelt, touring Brazil in 1913, was his guest. He came home to Denver in 1918 and sat out 4 years. Then in 1922 the Matador's manager, John MacBain, died suddenly, and the Dundee board asked Mackenzie, at 72, to take the company back. He ran it until he retired in 1937, and his son John succeeded him.
After
He died in Denver on May 30, 1939, at 89, and is buried there. The Matador outlived him by 12 years before the Dundee shareholders sold to Lazard Brothers and the ranch was cut into 15 corporations. The Saddle and Sirloin Club hung his portrait in 1920, and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame put him among its Great Westerners in 1981. William M. Pearce, who wrote the company's history from its own records, treats the Mackenzie years as the ones that made it. The correspondence, the weekly letters both ways across the Atlantic, is at Texas Tech, and it reads like a man who assumed every line would be checked. Most of them were.
Sources: Handbook of Texas, Murdo Mackenzie, Matador Land and Cattle Company, Prairie Cattle Company; William M. Pearce, "The Matador Land and Cattle Company" (University of Oklahoma Press, 1964); Saddle and Sirloin Portrait Foundation, Murdo Mackenzie (inducted 1920); Texas Tech University Southwest Collection, Matador Land and Cattle Company records; South Dakota Hall of Fame.