To the southwest of Cody, 35 miles up the South Fork of the Shoshone River and flanked by Carter Mountain and the Wapiti Range, sits the historic TE Ranch. The ranch, established by Buffalo Bill Cody, continues to play a critical role in serving as a winter range and wildlife corridor for migrating big game in the region while also continuing to act as a working cattle operation with roughly 20,000 acres of deeded land.

During a rare full tour of the ranch last Saturday, owners Mary Anne Duncan and Bill Dingus showcased the property to a group of participants ranging from neighboring ranchers to members of local conservation organizations and governing bodies.

The tour was organized by the Western Landowners Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for conservation policy and land management practices across the western United States. Its members include private landowners, conservationists and resource managers.

Watch for wildlife

Speaking to TE’s importance as a wildlife migration corridor was former Game and Fish senior biologist Tony Mong, the East Yellowstone project director for LegacyWorks Group, an organization specializing in conservation and environmental consultancy.

At a highway pull-off overlooking TE pastureland along the Ishawooa Creek drainage just before the entrance to Shoshone National Forest, Mong talked about the journey wildlife needs to take between the seasons and the role the public plays in that process.

“What I like to look at here is how we can partner with all these different people to make sure that, at the end of a very arduous journey, we’re not causing more harm than good,” Mong said. “Our partnerships with private lands and ranches go beyond just keeping the routes open, but also trying to make it so the pressures of human development aren’t so heavy.”

According to GPS collar data collected between 2015 and 2022 by Wyoming Game and Fish, 55% of all collared Cody elk that migrated along the South Fork used TE Ranch land to move. Those numbers extend further to 63% of all tagged Upper Shoshone mule deer.

The area also serves as a vital migration route for bighorn sheep, wolverines, mountain lions, bears, sage grouse and short tailed weasels. Most of these animals use Yellowstone as summer range land before moving southeast as the snow begins to lock them out of the park.

Mong also spoke about how TE has partnered with state agencies on collecting data pertaining to how wolves and other predators follow the migrations and establish a presence in the middle of the migration to catch animals coming into the valley.

“The private lands that occur out here are the most important piece to maintaining these populations,” Mong said.
“Having private land partners that are stewards of the land is important not only for us but for the millions of people that have this pull to understand the outdoors and understand the wilderness.”

This relationship between privately owned properties and the land is not uncommon. According to a survey conducted by the WLA, 59% of respondents said they deliberately passed up income generating opportunities in order to benefit conservation efforts.

Home on the range

The land that the TE sits on has been vital for migrating wildlife since time immemorial. The earliest known human inhabitants of the area, the Mountain Sheepeaters of the Shoshone people, used the ridges along South Fork to create blinds to confine wildlife before killing them for meat, hides and other resources.

As settlers moved into the area in the late 19th century, the land along South Fork was repurposed for cattle ranching and agricultural operations. While managed as a federally owned domain, an Army captain named Henry Belknap used the land as a summer range cow-camp and established an open-range cattle operation before the land was purchased and homesteaded by Robert Burns in the early 1880s.

In 1895, the TE Ranch was acquired by Bill Cody and began to be expanded from the profits generated by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. At its zenith under Cody’s ownership, the ranch extended to 8,000 acres and managed over a thousand head of cattle.

After Cody’s death in 1917, the ranch changed hands several times before landing in the hands of the Duncan family in 1972. According to Mary Anne, her family decided early on that they didn’t want to change the character of the ranch too much from Cody’s original vision.

“A lot of the buildings out here look the same today that they did probably 80 years ago. A lot of how we do our cattle business has not changed in decades,” Duncan said. “That being said, we’re always learning new things. There’s new technologies and new threats that we have to deal with but there are things that we’re always trying to adapt to here while still being true to the history of the ranch.”

One of the ways that the ranch is staying true to this history is by preserving Cody’s ranch headquarters and personal home. The low, single story log ranch house served as the home of the ranch manager until 2000 when the Duncans made the decision to restore the home to its original condition using archival reference images provided by the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

Old Problems, New Tech

The current ranch manager, Erick Monfeldt, lives in a newer home just across from the original. Although he accepted the job at the beginning of the year, he and his family have been living and working on the ranch for two decades.

As the manager of the TE herd, he oversees 733 acres of irrigated hay meadows, five other families that live and work on the ranch full-time and 678 mother cows, 158 of which are first-calf heifers. Monfeldt spoke about some of the biggest challenges the cattle operation faces.

One of the starkest threats is disease, especially in the form of brucellosis. The ranch bleeds cows every year as part of the statewide plan at combatting the spread of the disease. The riskiest time of year comes between February and April when infected elk are more likely to be in the area.

“When you have one of the cows come back positive, we can’t ship any intact females to market, so selling cattle can get very difficult during that period of time,” Monfeldt said. “A lot has changed though, Game and Fish used to eradicate the entire herd if there were any cases which would be pretty devastating, but thankfully they don’t do that anymore.”

Another major concern comes in the form of predation, as this year has seen 10 confirmed kills on livestock, four from wolves and six from bears. Most of the predation occurs on the forest allotments in the high country during the summer or down by the river bottom in the spring.

Despite the hardship, Monfeldts job also includes managing the implementation of new technology to help ease the workload, including a new virtual collar network tracking and managing 345 cows. The system was developed by Halter, a New Zealand based virtual fencing and pasture management company.

Using GIS software and satellite tracking, the ranchers are able to establish virtual perimeters that are used to represent a digital fence. If a cow wearing the solar-powered collar gets too close to the established boundary, it will give the cow a gentle shock and guide them back to approved grazing land, according to Dingus.

“If you want to move them, you put in a new line, and it buzzes her to move,” Dingus said, “It works very well, and is actually less stressful on the cattle.”

The collars are also able to be edited on a smartphone in the field as long as there is cell service available. The system is still in its early stages, with Meeteetse’s Pitchfork Ranch being the first to implement the technology last year.

Given the proprietary nature of the network, it doesn’t come cheap. Duncan mentioned that the software costs $100 a year per animal to maintain. However, by implementing the system, they’re actually able to save time and money.

“Say you have a cow missing. Instead of having to spend multiple hours trying to track her down, you can just pull up her location on your phone and you can ride out to go get her,” Monfeldt explained. “Ultimately, we can spend less time and labor doing the same thing.”

The TE Ranch is just one part of a larger, dense web of conservation partners working in the South Fork area. Local conservation districts and agencies like Wyoming Game and Fish and the Natural Resources Conservation Service continue to work with ranchers on grazing plans, forest allotments, water projects and habitat work.

For more information on landowner conservation resources, contact Shaleas Harrison and the Western Landowners Alliance at sharrison@westernlandowners.org or at westernlandowners.org.