JA Ranch - The Montie Ritchie Years

The Montie Ritchie Years

Montie Ritchie’s brother was Richard Morgan Wadsworth “Dick” Ritchie (1912–1940). Dick was like their father Jack a sportsman but also an actor. He died from inhaling carbon monoxide, which leaked from a faulty heater on a yacht while he was fishing in the Gulf of Mexico near Corpus Christi. Montie married the former Julia Elizabeth "Betty" Barrell of Boston, who died when their only daughter, Cornelia Wadsworth "Ninia" Ritchie, was a child. Montie then married the former Hildegard “Hildy” Neill (August 23, 1917 – August 1992).

By 1945, after a decade of Montie’s management, JA operations had been reduced to 335,000 acres (1,360 km2) in four counties—Armstrong, Briscoe, Donley, and Hall counties. Subsequently, a tract of 130,000 acres (530 km2) was divided into eight leaseholds. The JA obtains its water from the Prairie Dog Town Fork and its tributaries, along with natural lakes, dirt tanks, and fifty-eight wells, the JA had twelve winter camps and five farms on which to grow livestock feed. The winter range in the Palo Duro afforded maximum protection, and the summer range was singularly free from land waste, just as Charles Goodnight had first told John Adair in 1874. Nearly two-thirds of the JA properties was rolling pasture land.

In 1988, the JA comprised several ranch buildings, including a supply store and garage. The centerpiece of the ranch remained the "Big House". In 1960, the house was designated a national historic landmark. Ritchie in 1971 and 1988, respectively, donated two of the JA's historic buildings, the old milk house and an oat bin, to the National Ranching Heritage Center on the campus of Texas Tech University. A herd of longhorns, the animal once termed by the western artist Frank Reaugh as the most beautiful of animal creatures, roams in Palo Duro Canyon State Park, courtesy of the JA.

By 1990, the JA was substantially fenced and known for pure-bred Herefords and Angus bulls. Quarter horses were raised for ranch use, and a small buffalo herd was maintained; some commercial hunting of buffalo and deer was allowed. Tillable land continued to be leased. In 1998, the JA gave the state the last remaining wild herd of buffalo within Texas. The Ritchie family also owns ranch land near Larkspur in Douglas County north of Colorado Springs, where Montie's second wife, Hildy, spent most of her time.

Montie’s daughter, Cornelia "Ninia" Bivins, former wife of the late Texas State Senator Miles Teel Bivins of Amarillo, himself a rancher, carried the JA into a relatively brief fourth generation. On Montie’s retirement in 1993, she formed a partnership with Jay O’Brien of Amarillo. They changed the herd to predominantly black Angus and Charolais bulls. In 2005, a fifth generation took charge when Andrew Montgomery Bivins (born ca. 1969), son of Teel and Ninia Bivins, joined the JA management team.

Montie Ritchie attributed the success of the ranch to its employees, whom he described as “men of imagination, men of skill, men of courage, men who braved the elements day or night, men who took pride in their crafts, loved their horses and understood their cattle, and were eager to enhance the reputation of the JA and proud to be a part." Other than Montie Ritchie, the longest-serving JA employee as of 1940 was J. W. Kent, who retired that year after having worked a record fifty-seven years for the company. Ritchie was the manager for fifty-eight years until his retirement in 1993. However, in 1989, Tom Blasingame, known as the "oldest working cowboy in the West." died after seventy-three years in the saddle, most of it at the JA.

Montie Ritchie assembled an art collection which has been donated to the Dixon Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

Though the JA was not a large or as famous as the XIT Ranch to its west, which included parts of ten counties, it was the largest cattle operation solely in the Panhandle and one still in the hands of the heirs of one of the original founders, John Adair, after the passage of more than 130 years.