Burns, Robert Homer; Gillespie, Andrew Springs

The home ranch of the Swan Land and Cattle Company was sited at Chugwater, Wyoming. Its corporate headquarters were in Cheyenne. This large corporate cattle company, with between 50,000 and 80,000 livestock, at one time controlled an area of land greater than the size of the State of Connecticut. In the 1870s and 1880s, this and other very large ranches grew out of the realisation that cattle could be wintered on the northern plains of America. Speculative investors were promised a twenty per cent return from the new industry.

In November 1882, Alexander Hamilton Swan (1831-1905), the President of the firms Swan and Frank Live-Stock Co., National Cattle Co., and Swan, Frank and Anthony Cattle Co., together with James Converse, Joseph Frank, and Godfrey Syndacker, entered into an agreement with James Wilson of Edinburgh to set up the Swan Land and Cattle Company as a British limited company.

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