AUTUMN 2019 EQUUS 498 93
cattle and 500 horses plus more than
a thousand producing oil wells, were
sold in 2016 for a reported price of
$725 million to Stan Kroenke, owner
of the Los Angeles Rams football
franchise and husband of Ann Walton
Kroenke, an heiress to the Walmart
fortune. They reportedly maintain it
as a private hunting reserve.
THE FOUR SIXES
While the Waggoner ranch moved
away from cattle and horses in the
21st century, descendants of Tom
Waggoner’s buddy Samuel Burk
Burnett have continued raising both
cattle and Quarter Horses at the 6666.
In the late 1850s, Burnett came as a
boy with his parents from Missouri to
Texas. At the age of 19 in 1868, “Burk”
purchased his first herd of 100 head.
Five years later, during the financial
panic of 1873, he drove 1,100 steers
north to Wichita and sold them for
$10,000, a small fortune. Later in
the same year he repeated the feat,
driving a herd of 1,300 longhorns
north along the Chisholm Trail to a
claim near Wichita Falls, Texas. When
the 1880s brought severe drought, he
moved his livestock to the Big Pasture
in southwest Oklahoma, leasing
300,000 acres from Quanah Parker.
His son Tom Burnett assisted him in
managing the Oklahoma herd.
By 1900 Burnett had amassed the
means to buy more Texas acreage
outright, and then, in 1921, water
drillers struck oil on the 6666. This
allowed him to expand his holdings
to an empire. He first purchased
the 8 Ranch near Guthrie, Texas,
which became the 6666’s main
headquarters, then acquired the
Dixon Creek Ranch in the Texas
Panhandle. Upon the occasion of the
famous wolf hunt, it was Burnett who
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