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BellRanch: Cattle Ranching in the Southwest, 1824-1947. By David Remley. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. xvi, 393 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8263-1339-X.)
The Bell Ranch, which was located on three-quarters of a million acres along the Canadian River in northeastern New Mexico, is legendary in southwestern history. Its isolation made it an attractive target for theft, and its size, which rivaled that of the fabled King Ranch in south Texas, made it a challenging enterprise to manage.
David Remley's history of the Bell, the first scholarly study of the enterprise, is primarily the story of the three "extraordinary" managers who transformed the ranch from an open-range frontier operation to a modern cattle operation....