Red River Valley Co.

A cattle run in New Mexico for the Red River Valley Company. Part of Pictorial Collection, PICT 000-086 (Box 1, Album 1).

The Red River Valley Company, formerly the Bell Ranch, was a three quarters-of-a-million-acre ranch lying along the Canadian River in northeastern New Mexico. Bell Ranch was originally two Mexican land grants, the Baca Location No. 2 and the vast Pablo Montoya Grant of 1824. After the war with Mexico in 1846-1847, the Pablo Montoya heirs applied for confirmation of their grant. John S. Watts who led the confirmation process took a large part of the grant as his legal fee; he later acquired the adjoining Baca Location No. 2. Watts later sold a major part of this huge property to Wilson Waddingham. Waddingham invested in gold and silver mines in the West as well as land grants in the Southwest. He had a part in the sale of the Maxwell Land Grant to British investors. Waddingham registered the Bell brand for livestock on his property in 1875.

By 1885, Waddingham and his ranch manager, Michael Slattery were running large herds of cattle on the range with little regard to sustainability of the land. By 1893, overstocking combined with drought, and also with the presence of other men's sheep and cattle left the range severely overgrazed. At this same time, a new manager on the Bell, Arthur J. Tisdall, would become the first modern ranch manager, using legal institutions, personal diplomacy, and land awareness to meet the needs of modern cattle ranching.

In 1898, E.G. Stoddard, president of the New Haven Bank, founded the Red River Valley Company to buy the Bell Ranch. From then until 1946, this company, headed first by Stoddard and after 1923, by Julius G. Day, survived the ups and downs of the cattle markets of the 1920's and 1930's. Building on Tisdall's new awareness of modern ranching practice, Bell managers Charles M. O'Donel (1898-1933) and Albert K. Mitchell (1933-1947), viewed land very differently from the way Waddingham and Slattery had. These modern cattlemen saw land and grass as resources that must be kept in balance with the size and distribution of the herd in order to produce beef cattle successfully over the long haul. In 1947, the Bell Ranch was broken up and sold. Albert K. Mitchell, the retiring general manager, gave the ranch records to the University of New Mexico.