The 6666 Ranch

When Captain Samuel “Burk” Burnett got involved in the cattle business at the age of 19 a mighty force entered the ranching business. Burnett went into business for himself with the purchase of 100 head of cattle, which were wearing the 6666 brand. With the cattle came ownership of the brand.

Burnett was born the Bates County, Missouri, on January 1, 1849, but in 1857-58 his family decided to move to Texas and chose Denton County. Jerry Burnett, Burk’s father, became involved in the cattle business; since Burk was ten years old at the time, he began watching his father’s movements in the business and learned from his father.

A few years later, Burk avoided the panic of 1873 by holding over 1,100 steers he had driven to market in Wichita, Kansas. Burk held the steers through the winter, and the next year, he sold the cattle for a $10,000 profit. He was the first rancher in Texas to buy steers and graze them for market.

After that Burnett began negotiations with the Comanche Chief Quanah Parker for the lease of 300,000 acres of grassland. He not only gained the lease but also the friendship of the Chief. Quanah was the son of the white woman, Cynthia Ann Parker, who was captured in a raid of Parker’s Fort in 1836. Quanah became a great leader of his people and eventually a friend of white leaders and ranchers in the Southwest.

Burk Burnett ran 10,000 cattle on that land until the end of his lease. Burnett had strong feelings for Indians, and a genuine respect for them. He learned the Comanche ways, passing both the love of the land and his friendship for the Indians to his family.

The lease continued until the early 1900s when the federal government ordered the land turned back to the Indians. Burnett traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with President Teddy Roosevelt. He asked for an extension on the lease, which Roosevelt granted for two years. That gave Burnett and other ranchers time to find grazing land for their herds.

Around 1900 Burnett purchased the 8 Ranch near Guthrie, Texas, in King County from the Louisville Land and Cattle Company. He also purchased the Dixon Creek Ranch near Panhandle, Texas from the Cunard line. Those two ranches marked the beginning of the present day Four Sixes (6666) Ranch. That along with some later additions amounted to a third of a million acres.

In his personal life, Burk had married Ruth B. Loyd, the daughter of Martin B. Loyd, the founder of the first National Bank of Fort Worth. Of their three children, two died young. Burnett and Ruth divorced, and he married Mary Couts Barradel in 1892. They had one son, Burk Burnett, Jr. who died in 1917.

The one surviving heir of Burk Burnett was Thomas Loyd Burnett. He was born in 1871 and learned the cattle business in the 1880s and 1890s. He was educated in Fort Worth, Saint Louis and at the Virginia Military Institute. His grandfather on his mother’s side was Martin B. Loyd.

Martin Loyd was passionate about racehorses. He began amassing his own stable of fine racehorses. He branded his stock with the single letter L. With his death in 1912, his interest in horses and the land surrounding Wichita Falls passed through inheritance to his grandson, Thomas Burnett. His L brand remained on his horses and is still used today.

Thomas Burnett worked as a ranch hand on his father Burk’s land, drawing the same wages as the other cow hands. His marriage to Olive “Ollie” Lake of Fort Worth produced one daughter, Anne Valliant Burnett, born in 1900. Thomas Burnett was much admired and respected among cowmen and ranch hands.

In 1898, in bitter cold, Tom had the task of moving 5000 steers across the Red River from Indian Territory to shipping pens in Texas. He got the herd across in weather that few cattlemen would have faced.

In 1905, the Burk Burnett hosted a wolf hunt in Big Pasture, which was on land leased from the Comanche and Kiowa. Among the guests were President Teddy Roosevelt and Chief Quanah Parker.

Tom took a chuck wagon, horses and a group of cowboys to a site near present day Frederick, Oklahoma. He set up camp for the President’s ten day hunting expedition. Roosevelt, Burk Burnett and other guests had a wonderful time hunting wolves.

In a letter from Roosevelt to his son, Ted, Roosevelt is quoted as saying, “You would have loved Tom Burnett, son of the big cattleman. He is a splendid fellow, about 30 years old and just the ideal of what a young cattleman should be.” At age 30, Tom had already established himself as a respected cowboy and was on his way to becoming a cattle baron. He had his own ranch, leased the old ranch in Wichita County and established his home and headquarters eight miles east of Electra, Texas, Burk Burnett had maintained a residence in Fort Worth starting in 1900. His financial kingdom was headquartered in Fort Worth where he was a director and principal stockholder of the First Nation Bank of Fort Worth. He was also President of the Ardmore Oil and Gin Milling Co, but the ranch was his main love. He designed a custom railroad car, which carried him to Paducah to visit the Four Sixes. From there he hitched his horse and buggy for the thirty mile drive to Guthrie. He built the Four Sixes Supply House and a new headquarters in Guthrie, but in 1917 Burnett decided to build “the finest ranch house in West Texas” at Guthrie. It was built for the gigantic sum of $100,000. He employed the prestigious architectural firm of Sanguiner and Staats of Fort Worth to design the house. It was intended to be a grand home, to serve as ranch headquarters, to house the ranch manager and to entertain guests. The stone for the house was quarried right on the ranch and the other building materials were brought in by rail car to Paducah and then hauled by wagon to Guthrie.

The house had 11 bedrooms, and it was Burk Burnett’s show place. He engaged such well-known guests as President Teddy Roosevelt, Will Rogers and others. The home was filled with amazing items. In the main room, alone, visitors were treated to hunting trophies, exquisite art and other personal items given by his friend Quanah Parker and the Comanche chief’s wives.

These priceless items remained in the house long after Burk Burnett’s death and through several remodeling projects. They were given by Burnett’s great-granddaughter Anne W. Marion, to the National Ranching and Heritage Center in Lubbock, Texas, when she inherited the ranch in 1980.

Anne was the daughter of Anne Valliant Burnett Tandy, the only daughter of Tom Burnett and Olive Lake. “Big Anne,” as she was called was born on October 15, 1900, in Fort Worth. She was named for her father Tom’s little sister, who died young.

Like her father, Tom, Anne was a keen judge of both horses and cattle. Along with her second husband, James Goodwin Hall, she assisted in the formation of the American Quarter Horse Association. (AQHA). She was a founder of the AQHA Hall of Fame, and was the first woman named to be named an honorary vice-president by the Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association (TSCRA) and the AQHA.

Miss Anne was particularly interested in the Quarter Horse Breeding Operation at the ranch and was noted for her champions, Grey Badger II and Hollywood Gold.

In 1969 Miss Anne married Charles Tandy, founder of the Tandy Corporation. Known as a strong-willed woman, Miss Anne was called gregarious by many who knew her, and friends say that she did not pamper her daughter, “Little Anne.”

In 1921, oil was discovered on Burk Burnett’s land near Dixon Creek, and his wealth increased dramatically the discovery, and a later one in 1969 on the Guthrie property, would greatly benefit the Burnett family ranching business as it grew and developed throughout the 20th Century.

Burk Burnett passed away on June 27, 1922. His will provided for two trustees to manage his holdings. The bulk of his estate was given to Miss Anne in a trusteeship for her yet unborn child.

The trustees, along with their successors, ran the Four Sixes Ranch until Burk Burnett’s great Granddaughter, Anne W. Marion (Little Anne), took the reins into her capable hands.

In 1980, Anne Burnett Marion – Little Anne- inherited the ranch upon the death of her mother, Miss Anne. Burk Burnett had listed several directives stated in his will. Anne Burnett Marion sold the Triangle Ranch her grandfather Tom Burnett had developed.

A native of Fort Worth, she was the great-granddaughter of Samuel “Burk” Burnett, legendary Texas rancher, landowner and oilman. The daughter of Anne Burnett Tandy and James Goodwin Hall. Marion inherited her parents’ love of horses along with a ranch steeped in family history.

Her active involvement and management of the ranch was much appreciated by the ranch’s cowboys. The ranch was among the first in the industry to offer medical benefits and retirement plans to its staff. Marion also insisted on excellent living and working conditions and benefits for the cowboys, which inspired their deep devotion and was why so many worked the ranch for decades.

In addition to serving as chairman of Burnett Ranches, she was the chairman and founder of Burnett Oil company and president of the Burnett Foundation. In nearly four decades of the foundation’s existence, more than $600 million in charitable grants have been made supporting arts and humanities; community development; education; health and human services.

She served four decades as a director on the board of the Kimball Art Foundation in Fort Worth. As an honorary trustee of Texas Christian University, she contributed to numerous projects over the years, including the new Texas Christian University Medical School.

She was named Fort Worth’s Outstanding Citizen; she received the 2001 National Golden Spur Award from the National Ranching Heritage Center; the Bill King Award for Agriculture in 2007; she was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame and into the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

She was a woman of faith and a life-long member of St. Andrews Episcopal Church. She died in 2020 from lung cancer.

Based on instructions left in Anne Marion’s will, the ranch was put up for sale for a whopping $347.7 million across the three ranch properties that covers land outside of Lubbock, Amarillo, and the Texas Panhandle. Though we don’t know the final sale price, we know that the Hollywood writer, Taylor Sheridan, is the face of the group that purchased the historic ranch.

“Sheridan is the face of the buyer group,” broker Chas. S. Middleton told The Texas Spur, an award-winning weekly newspaper in Spur, Texas. He explained that the new owners plan to continue operating the land as a working ranch and to offer continued employment to all current employees. “It’s all one deal, 266,000 acres with all three ranches, cattle, horses, equipment, furniture, brand, name, everything.”

Taylor Sheridan is an actor. filmmaker, writer, director and co-producer of Yellowstone, the television series that has been all the rage since it first appeared four years ago.

Sheridan is a native Texan. He grew up in Cranfills Gap, Texas, another one-stoplight town in the state. His mother, Susan Drew, grew up in Waco, and her sanctuary was her grandparents’ ranch near the Bosqueville neighborhood. She wanted her children to similarly “have an opportunity to learn firsthand about the peaceful feeling of freedom in nature,” she says. The family bought the Cranfills Gap ranch in 1978, when Sheridan was 8. They would drive the 85 miles south from Fort Worth for weekends, holidays, and summers.

“Back then, the Gap had a hardware store, a grocery store, a feed store, and a fillin’ station,” Sheridan recalls. “And that’s about it. We were pretty isolated on the ranch. We’d get excited when the propane man would come to fill the tank.” He may have left Texas, but Texas never left Taylor Sheridan. “My wife’s from up in Wyoming. And my mother lives up there, so we moved there for a number of years, until I finally convinced her to come try my home state. And I moved her to Texas on August 1st, because I figured I might as well just pull the Band-Aid off quick. She didn’t understand the heat for a bit, but then she figured it out, and now she’s a Texan.

He owns two ranches outside the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. One is in Weatherford, which is west of Fort Worth. The other is in Jacksboro, a town about a 45-mile drive northwest of Weatherford.

“I left LA the second I could get out,” Sheridan told Cowboys and Indians magazine, a magazine for Western enthusiasts.

He used his Texas roots when he wrote 2016’s “Hell or High Water.” The movie earned him an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay.

In his interview with Cowboys & Indians Magazine, Sheridan discussed moving back to his home state with his wife and the importance of Texas in storytelling today.

“Being a Texan today and what it means to live in Texas--there’s a responsibility that comes with it, in that you really do represent the entire state,” he says in the piece.

“Everybody in Texas represents the state. And so, there’s a sense of class and confidence that I think every Texan seems to embody. And along with that, a respect for others, regardless of whether they agree with you or not. You respect their ability to disagree or agree.”

“And there’s a kindness in Texas that I find lacking in many other parts of the country. Anywhere you go in Texas, there is a genuine concern for another person’s well-being. I just think it creates a structure of society that is very harmonious.

I’ve got a lot of people that fly in to meet with me from California or New York or where ever, and the first thing they say to me is, ‘I can’t believe how friendly everybody is. Everybody’s friendly and everybody’s so happy. I don’t understand it.’ It’s like, ‘Well, they’re happy because they live in Texas and they’re friendly because they’re happy.’”

Last June, Sheridan made a few remarks about purchasing the 6666 Ranch, “I can’t comment on a pending transaction, but I will say this: the legacy of the 6666 Ranch and Miss Marion’s vision for the ranch are vital not only to the ranch itself, but the rich heritage of ranching in Texas.”

He added, “This legacy is so important to me I chose to highlight it in the upcoming season of ‘Yellowstone’ and will continue to further the legacy and preserve its operations in a manner consistent with that great vision.”

In the words of Anne Marion: “The most important thing that ever happened to me was growing up on that ranch,” Mrs. Marion said. “It kept my feet on the ground more than anything else.” While her civic and cultural activities extend throughout Texas and the United States, her deepest commitment was to her birthright and the continuing success of the historic Four Sixes Ranch.

We wish the new management the best of success and hope that they do carry on Ann Marion’s legacy. I am deeply indebted to a number of sources. The website for the 6666 Ranch was full of useful information and gave me a feeling of the continuity and people involved. The Spur, the weekly newspaper from Spur, Texas, as has been quoted a number of times as has Joe Layton’s article on Taylor Sheridan in January 2021of Cowboys and Indians; The Texas Monthly interview with Taylor Sheridan by Dan Solomon in June 2021 was also used.

“The most important thing that ever happened to me was growing up on that ranch,” Mrs. Marion said. “It kept my feet on the ground more than anything else.” While her civic and cultural activities extend throughout Texas and the United States, her deepest commitment was to her birthright and the continuing success of the historic Four Sixes Ranch.