The remarkable story of Preston Nutter, a true Western entrepreneur
Bert Entwistle
Preston Nutter, born in what is now West Virginia in 1850 was the son of a well-known horse breeder. He lost his father when he was 9 and his mother shortly after. Sent to live with relatives he disliked, he ran away from them at age 11. Working his way west, he encountered the Mississippi River and found a job as a cabin boy on a riverboat. Still restless, he joined up with a wagon train in 1863 and kept heading further west. Nutter would forever mark the trip by choosing “63” as the brand for all the horses and mules he would ever own.
Landing in San Francisco, he decided to attend a local business college. When he finished, he went looking for his next adventure. After some time prospecting in Nevada, he sold a promising claim he had located for $5,000. With his fresh windfall in his overalls he moved to Provo, Utah, eventually joining a group of gold prospectors led by a man named ‘Alferd’ Packer.
As the group prospected east into Colorado, he soon realized that Packer was a phony, knowing little about prospecting and even less about the Colorado mountains. Calling him a “whining fraud,” he and several others left the group and spent the winter with Chief Ouray and the Utes near Montrose, Colorado. Packer, and five other members of the group, pushed on into the now snow-covered Rocky Mountains.
In the spring, the apparently restless Nutter was back on the hunt for his next adventure, settling into Colorado, where he served a term in the Colorado legislature. With politics out of his system he went into the freighting business, hauling ore from local mines to the mills—a much better deal than digging it himself.
In 1874, Nutter found himself in the Lake City, Colorado courthouse as a witness against Alferd Packer for the murders of the five men he took into the mountains when the party split in Montrose. Worse, he was said to have eaten the remaining members of the party.
Packer was found guilty and legend has it that Judge M. B. Gerry pronounced his sentence with these famous words:
“. . .Stand up yah voracious man-eatin’ sonofa*** and receive yir sintince. When yah came to Hinsdale County, there was siven Dimmycrats. But you, yah et five of ‘em. I sintince yah t’ be hanged by the neck ontil yer dead, dead, dead . . .”
Nutter was to make the trip back to Colorado at least once more, after Packer escaped and was re-tried a second time.
Start of a big cow outfit
By 1886 Nutter had expanded into the cattle business, buying a herd of cattle and setting out to find suitable range to run them on. He decided to head back to Utah, where he had seen good grazing ground on the gold mining trip. He drove his herd west into their new home between Thompson Springs and Moab. Not long after he established himself, he made a deal with the Cleveland Cattle Company to trade a 1,000 head of his mixed breed cattle for the same of Cleveland’s purebred Herefords, which had not yet become popular. Nutter, with remarkable foresight for the time, had already decided that the Hereford would become the new breed of the West and staked his future on it.
He found enough ground to accommodate as many as 20,000 head in the Thompsons Spring area in the northeastern corner of Utah. Nutter did something nearly unheard of in the days of open range ranching: he introduced supplementary feeding to his herd. Before winter set in he moved his herd closer to the winter range around his ranch and nearby rail spur so he would always have access to a source of feed and shipping . This new idea saved him from the horrific cattle loss that most open range outfits experienced in the great blizzard of 1887.
A year later he formed the Grand Cattle Company with two partners. For the next few years, the ranch flourished and the herd grew rapidly. Grand Cattle bought out many smaller operations that had been devastated by years of drought and blizzards. The expansion brought him some of the best grazing land and good springs in the area.
The 1893 economic collapse, often called the Silver Panic, caused great losses in the industry, but it wasn’t as bad for the conservative Nutter. When most outfits were hurting, he was able to negotiate a deal with the government to lease the Strawberry Valley, along the west edge of the Uinta Basin. This gave him another 665,000 acres of prime range, and he began to advertise as far away as New Mexico and Arizona for cattle to stock it.
Eventually, he set up an operation near St. George, for the warmer climate. Throughout his ranching career he fought the weather, politicians, bandits and Indians. He once wrote: “I am plagued by rustlers, bootleggers and sheepmen.” He had many notable encounters with the sheepmen and tried to settle many of them in court, but it was a never-ending battle. He was among the first to openly support the Taylor Grazing Act, to promote the orderly use of public lands.
Nutter was famously a hands-on owner, spending days and weeks atop his favorite mule, “Coalie”, policing his operation. He had been too busy for a family for the first 58 years of his life, but finally got captured by a woman 21 years his junior, named Katherine Fenton.
Fenton was a telegrapher, and moved west taking a job as the manager of the Colorado Springs postal telegraph. In 1905, the Uinta Basin was formally opened to homesteaders and she entered a lottery for a chance at a claim of her own. She won a homestead in Ioka, Duchesne County, Utah Territory. Taking the stagecoach to see her property, fate took another turn of good luck when the stage driver got lost and they spent the night at Preston Nutter’s ranch. She continued to work as a telegrapher for several more years and shared her time between her Utah property and the Nutter ranch, finally marrying Preston in 1908. They had two daughters, Catherine, and Virginia.
It was often said that Nutter had a herd so large that there was no way he could possibly know how many cattle he had. Later in life, his daughter Virginia wrote:
“. . . He was much too shrewd a businessman not to have a reasonably accurate tally, but cattlemen are, by tradition, a silent lot when it comes to discussing their business.”
The history of the Nutter operation is filled with stories of Indian conflicts, rustlers like Butch Cassidy and “Gunplay” Maxwell, as well as never ending battles with the sheepmen in and out of court. By the end of WWI, the existence of the large western ranchers began a serious decline. His operation lasted through the Great Depression when beef prices became so low that the old way of life was over.
Preston Nutter died on January 28, 1936. One of the Salt Lake papers announced it like this:
“One of the last links between the old West and the new. Wednesday afternoon will be buried Utah’s last great cattle king, Preston Nutter.”
Used by permission, Utah State Historical Society
Preston Nutter, on his fast-walking mule “Coalie,” was a successful businessman and cattle rancher, owning thousands of heads of cattle roaming over vast areas of Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. Nutter rode mules because he said a “horse will go beyond his endurance. A mule knows his limitations and when to stop. He has more sense than a horse and some men.”
Used by permission, Utah State Historical Society
“. . . He was much too shrewd a businessman not to have a reasonably accurate tally, but cattlemen are, by tradition, a silent lot when it comes to discussing their business.”
Preston Nutter’s daughter, Virginia
