Mares With More
By Larry Thornton
h
h
a
ee Wee
The history of the Rancho de Cananea and the Greene Cattle Company begins in Arizona with its founder Colonel William Cornell Greene. Greene was a businessman that was born in Wisconsin and had lived in various parts of the country with a variety of business interests to his credit. One report even tells that he was the person that staked out the original site of the city Fargo, North Dakota.
Registration photo of Chowchilla Pee Wee.
Greene eventually moved to the San Pedro Valley of Arizona to become a farmer and rancher. He was also interested in mining and prospecting which drew him to Tombstone, the famous mining town whose history is imbedded in the life of the famous lawman Wyatt Earp. Greene then went to Mexico in 1896 incorporating the Cananea Copper Company in Cananea, Sonora, Mexico. The Cananea Copper Company later became the Cananea Consolidated Copper Company.
Photo Courtesy The AQHA Hall of Fame and Museum.
When the American Quarter Horse Association was formed in 1940, they needed operating capital. The new association members supplied the initial financing through the sale of stock or shares in the non-profit corporation. They raised $8,000 by selling 800 shares at $10.00 a share. Each share entitled the shareholder to one vote per share. The next source of operating capital came from the registration of horses. When you review the first 5,000 horses registered, several prominent working ranches stand out for the number of horses they registered. What we will refer to today as the Greene Cattle Company with divisions in Mexico, Arizona and California registered a significant number of horses in the early years of AQHA. I found at least 280 registered horses from the various divisions of the Greene Cattle Company in the first 5000 horses registered. That list includes one section from AQHA number 4461 to AQHA number 4675 that totals 214 head registered. The majority of these were listed as bred and owned by the Rancho de Cananea of Cananea, Sonora, Mexico. Most of the rest were listed as bred on the Greene Cattle Company of Patagonia, Arizona. In this group was a horse with AQHA # 4468 and he was a horse bred by R. L. Underwood but registered by the Rancho de Cananea. Page 16
Greene established the Cananea Cattle Company (Rancho de Cananea) in Mexico and the Greene Cattle Company on the U. S. side of the border in 1901. Greene later sold the Cananea Consolidated Copper Company to the Anaconda Company, but retained the ranch holdings on both sides of the border. When he died in 1911, his family continued operating the ranches. When Greene died in 1911 his ranch holdings were already in his wife’s name. Her name was Mary and she was his second wife. The general manager of the ranch holdings was Charles Wiswall. Mary later married Wiswall. The year 1911 was also the start of the Mexican Revolution and this marks a special point in our look at the Greene ranching enterprises as it relates to the horses. One of the key characters in the revolution was the famous bandit Pancho Villa. Charles Tedford and Doris Seibold, in THE AMERICAN QUARTER HORSE JOURNAL story “Los Ranchos De Cananea” (March 1951) explains that when the revolution started going bad for the rebels, Pancho Villa and his men were driven North and this brought them to the Mexican state of Sonora, home of the Cananea Cattle Company. With the revolution going badly, Villa was short on food and good horses for his THE WORKING HORSE • SPRING 2012