Volume 5: Noteworthy Collection 11.01.25 - Flipbook - Page 128
Fred Barton
Friend of Charles Russell
In the years before World War I, the Mantana cowboy Fred Barton was
employed by Czar Nicholas II to help establish a horse ranch – the largest in
the world – in Siberia to supply the Russian military. Barton later assembled a
group of American rodeo stars and drove horses across Mongolia for the warlords of northern China, creating a 250,000 acre ranch in Shanxi Province.
Along the way, Barton became part of an unofficial U.S. intelligence network
in the Far East, bred a new type of horse from Russian, Mongolian and
American stock and promoted the lifestyle of the open range cowboy.
Returning to America, he married one of the wealthiest widow in the
Southwest and hobnobbed with Western film stars at a time when
Hollywood was constructing the modern myth of the Old West, just as open
range cowboy life was disappearing.
