If in your historical memory, the open range of the northern badlands is fully stocked with lanky longhorns, then it’s time for a reset. With the opening of the Northern Pacific railroad bridge at Bismarck in 1882, Shorthorn cattle, purchased in the northern midwest, flowed in freely.
In the Medora office of the Bad Lands Cow Boy, editor A. T. Packard was thinking further ahead, envisioning herds without horns, polled animals, preferably those blocky black beasts known as Aberdeen Angus. His self-declared “crusade” for the Angus breed was inspired by Dr. J. J. Clemmer of Iowa, who with his partner, G. M. Dell, had brought a $600 Angus bull to their place in the Cave Hills in 1885. Within a few years Dr. A. C. McGillivray would attract considerable press attention to his Indian Springs Ranch, where he built a great stone barn to house the forty black heifers he had shipped in.
Along the Great Northern line, fortunate stockmen benefited from the foresight of James J. Hill, who shipped in carloads of registered bulls for free distribution. By 1885 Hill’s operatives brought Angus bulls to be unloaded at stations west of Larimore.
The first Aberdeen Angus stock in America, in fact, four fine bulls, was imported direct from Scotland to the Great Plains, in 1874, by George Grant of Victoria, Kansas. Swiftly other western stockmen arranged their own importations. Angus cattle, for all their blockiness, proved remarkably good rustlers on the range and fattened easily, producing their signature, marbled beef. Stockmen were particularly enamored with prospects for crossbreeding with Shorthorns, a practice well established in Scotland that had come to dominate the London markets.
Which brings us to the quirky little green book now in my hand, Aberdeen Angus Bloodlines, published by the Institute for Regional Studies at NDSU in 1958. Author, one Charles J. Christians, whose obituary tells me he was an Iowa boy who came west to North Dakota Agricultural College and studied animal husbandry with the legendary geneticist — a man of whom many declared, they never saw him without his signature pipe — M. L. “Buck” Buchanan.
And speaking of bloodlines, it was Buck Buchanan’s equally distinguished son, Dave Buchanan (president of the American Society of Animal Science in 2005-06), who helped me sort out the story of the green, spiral-bound Bloodlines book. Buck Buchanan served NDAC, then NDSU, from 1945 to 1976. Dave’s NDSU service was from 2007, when he arrived from Oklahoma State, to 2023.
When I sat down with Dave, he had brought his well-preserved copy of Aberdeen Angus Bloodlines, and I had my disheveled library copy. He showed me how to look up a bull in the index, then trace its lineage all the way back to Grey Breasted Jock 113, who stands where time began for the Angus breed in 1840. Christians’ card-index of all the top bulls from the six great stock shows was converted into an ingenious herd book with Grey Breasted Jock 113 and one branch of his progeny on the first page, and every page thereafter tracing another branch, the page cut short at the top to reveal the earlier generations. It’s hard to describe, but it works.
I envision this slender reference protruding from the coat pocket of every Angus lover at the Denver stock show — or the Little International at NDSU — a marker of two lineages, one bovine, the other human.
