The Big Drive of 1989:

How Montana Marked One Hundred Years of Statehood with Three Thousand Head of Cattle and a Nation Watching

Origins and Idea

In the summer of 1987, somewhere in the small community of Roscoe, Montana, three men stood talking across the hood of a pickup truck and decided that the most fitting way to celebrate their state’s upcoming centennial was to move several thousand head of cattle sixty miles across the open country between Roundup and Billings. The men were Stan Lynde, a cartoonist best known for the western comic strips Rick O’Shay and Latigo; Barry McWilliams, also a cartoonist; and Jim Wempner, a rancher and retired banker. Their idea was direct enough: reassemble something resembling the great cattle drives of the nineteenth century, invite the public to join it, sell the herd at the end, and go home. What none of them could have anticipated was that a conversation scratched out over a truck hood would eventually require environmental impact studies, animal rights negotiations, catering contracts, and coverage from hundreds of journalists representing outlets across the globe.

Montana was preparing to mark its centennial as a state in 1989, one hundred years after Congress admitted it to the Union on November 8, 1889. Scores of events had been sanctioned by the Montana Centennial Commission, but none approached the scale or ambition of what would come to be called the Great Montana Centennial Cattle Drive, referred to widely in contemporary press accounts as simply the Big Drive. To understand what the organizers were attempting to evoke, it is worth understanding what the cattle industry had actually meant to this state in the decades before statehood. Nelson Story, a miner who had struck gold at Alder Gulch, used his profits to purchase roughly six hundred longhorns in Texas in 1866 and drove them north through Wyoming and along the Bozeman Trail into Montana. The drive was dangerous. Skirmishes occurred repeatedly along the way, and at least one drover was killed. Story arrived in the Gallatin Valley and sold his beef at a price roughly ten times what he had paid in Texas. His enterprise, well documented today, marked the beginning of Montana’s organized cattle industry. Over the following two decades, the open range era transformed the territory’s economy, as ranchers pushed cattle onto the grasslands of the Yellowstone drainage, the Musselshell valley, and the high plains east of the mountains. By the late 1880s, the same years that produced Montana statehood, that era was already collapsing, crushed by overgrazing, drought, and the catastrophic winter of 1886 to 1887.

Planning and Near-Collapse

The organization that Lynde, McWilliams, and Wempner formed took its name from Lynde’s comic strip: Latigo Corporation, incorporated as a nonprofit for the purpose of planning and executing the drive. Their initial ambitions were staggering. The original plan called for ten thousand cattle and five thousand riders, numbers that would have required logistical preparations on a military scale. As planning progressed, those figures proved unworkable, and the target numbers were scaled back considerably. Even so, Latigo accumulated significant debt and attracted persistent negative publicity during the planning phase. Disputes over organization led to firings and resignations within the group. As late as the end of July 1989, a senior Latigo official stated publicly that the organization would cancel the drive and cut its losses if the financial and logistical requirements could not be met.

What saved the event was the installation of a more structured management board and the arrival of people with concrete organizational experience. Kim Kuzara, who brought a managerial analysis background developed during his Air Force service, took charge of logistics. Kuzara and his team flew over the entire sixty-mile route and assembled detailed topographical maps. They produced a comprehensive operations manual that specified the square footage required at each campsite, the quantity of hay and water needed to sustain the livestock, and the precise timing of each phase of the drive from start to finish. Two hundred water troughs were deployed at each camp and moved forward each night after the day’s drive concluded. The engineering of a moving camp of this scale was genuinely complex. As Latigo board member Cal Winslow noted to reporters at the time, organizing a cattle drive in 1989 bore little resemblance to organizing one in 1889: modern requirements included portable toilet facilities, environmental impact statements, and traffic studies that cowboys of the open range era never contemplated.

Financing the drive required creativity. Latigo estimated total costs at somewhere between four hundred thousand and one million dollars, depending largely on the fees paid to country and western performers who would entertain the participants each evening. Participants who wished to ride were charged between one hundred thirty and one hundred fifty dollars for meal tickets, plus an additional twenty-five dollars to feed their horses. Each participant was also required to contribute one head of cattle to the herd. Riders who did not own cattle could rent one from Latigo, along with a horse if needed. The professional drovers, by contrast, were paid for their work, a structural parallel to the original drives: Nelson Story had paid the men who worked his herd north from Texas, just as Latigo paid its one hundred five professional cowboys. The budget also supported two catering companies, entertainment, water infrastructure, and the coordination of what would become hundreds of media representatives.

The Drive Itself

On the morning of September 4, 1989, the Great Montana Centennial Cattle Drive departed Roundup, a town of approximately two thousand people on the Musselshell River whose very name made it a natural symbolic starting point. The town sits in a natural basin that had historically served as a gathering place for cattle before shipment by rail to markets in Miles City and points east. The herd moved south through the Bull Mountains, a broken range of pine-covered hills and eroded sandstone formations that separate the Musselshell country from the Yellowstone plain. From the mountains the route crossed onto the high plains, roughly paralleling state Route 87, before descending toward the Yellowstone River and the livestock auction yards at Billings.

The final numbers as recorded by observers and participants were 2,812 cattle, 208 covered wagons, 3,337 horses, and approximately 2,581 riders and drovers, supported by 79 horse wranglers. The drive covered roughly sixty miles in six days, advancing approximately ten miles per day, a pace consistent with authentic nineteenth-century drives. Participants came not only from Montana but from across the United States and from as far away as Europe and Japan. Governor Stan Stephens, speaking before the drive began, described it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to revisit a central tradition of Montana’s past.

The evenings along the trail were a study in the contradiction between the event’s historical pretense and its thoroughly modern execution. While organizers stated an intention to conform the drive itself to the technology of the 1880s, each night a large Budweiser tent was dismantled and moved forward to the next camp. Water troughs were relocated. Catering operations fed thousands of people. Country and western performers played to crowds gathered around campfires. Four hundred journalists tracked the procession and broadcast reports to audiences worldwide. At the staging area near Roundup, a row of portable telephones had been made available for participants, a detail that the Billings Gazette photographed with visible irony.

Controversy and Context

Not everyone greeted the drive with enthusiasm. Malcolm Story, the eighty-seven-year-old grandson of Nelson Story, offered a pointed assessment to reporters in the days before the drive began. The event, he said, resembled a minstrel show more than it did the grinding, dangerous work his grandfather had performed. He was not hostile toward it, but his observation cut through the pageantry with precision. During the original 1866 drive, at least one man had been killed; the centennial drive featured catering companies.

Animal welfare organizations raised objections before and during the drive. The American Humane Association, through spokeswoman Susan Halberstadt, questioned the ethics of marching cattle sixty miles through September heat for the purposes of entertainment, arguing that modern trucks and trains represented a more humane method of moving livestock. Friends of the Earth had separately petitioned to cancel the event over concerns about the animals involved. Governor Stephens and Latigo officials denied both requests. The debate surfaced a tension embedded in the event’s design: it was simultaneously a celebration of the cattle industry’s importance to Montana and a spectacle that stripped that industry of the hardship and violence that had actually characterized it.

The Washington Post, covering the event just before its launch, described it plainly as a nostalgic event that bore little resemblance to historical reality. That assessment was not inaccurate. The open range drives of the 1870s and 1880s were hard economic labor performed by workers who had limited options and fewer protections. The centennial drive was an elective experience for which participants paid a daily fee and which concluded each night with live music. The cattle industry the drive memorialized had largely been replaced, in any case, by trucking cattle to auction, a fact that the Washington Post itself noted at the time.

And yet the event’s divergence from authentic history did not diminish its reach or its meaning for those who participated. It drew international media coverage and tens of thousands of spectators. It was, as Raised in the West magazine later characterized it, an apex in Montana’s history and the largest birthday celebration ever organized around a state.

Arrival and Legacy

On September 9, 1989, 2,812 cattle, 208 wagons, and thousands of horses and riders moved down Main Street in the Heights section of Billings. As many as thirty thousand people lined the sidewalks to watch the procession before the herd was directed to the livestock auction yards near the Yellowstone River. The cattle were sold at auction, as planned, and Latigo settled its accounts.

After the bills were paid, approximately one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars remained. The organizers chose not to distribute those funds or dissolve the account but instead established it as a permanent legacy fund to benefit rural Montana communities, channeling support toward students and community organizations in the years that followed. Jim Wempner, reflecting on the event years later from his ranch bunkhouse, described the fund’s persistence as the thing that satisfied him most about the entire enterprise. What had begun as an improvised idea over a truck hood had produced not only a notable public spectacle but a modest, durable contribution to the rural economy its pageantry had been designed to honor.

The Great Montana Centennial Cattle Drive was, in the end, neither an authentic recreation of the open range era nor a simple exercise in nostalgia. It was a complex public event that carried within it the tensions of a state trying to reconcile a difficult history with an economically uncertain present. The Montana of 1989 was contending with drought, declining oil revenues, and a stagnant economy. The drive offered a moment of collective identity that the state’s condition did not otherwise provide. That it required portable toilets, catering companies, and environmental impact statements was not a failure of imagination but an honest reflection of what Montana had become in the century since Nelson Story drove his longhorns north out of Texas and into the cold Gallatin wind.

Works Cited

Hoefle, Cyd. “The Drive Behind the Drive.” Raised in the West Magazine, 20 Aug. 2024, www.raisedinthewest.com/archives/thedrivebehindthedrive. Accessed 10 June 2026.

“Montana’s ‘Big Drive’ into Nostalgia.” The Washington Post, 3 Sept. 1989, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/09/03/montanas-big-drive-into-nostalgia/408e84d8-a2cc-4771-9ee1-092d63c20926/. Accessed 10 June 2026.

“Old West Cattle Drive Celebrating 100th Birthday of Montana Becomes a Corporate Extravaganza.” Deseret News, 27 Aug. 1989, www.deseret.com/1989/8/27/18821394/old-west-cattle-drive-celebrating-100th-birthday-of-montana-becomes-a-corporate-extravaganza/. Accessed 10 June 2026.

“And by the Way: Modern Day Cattle Drive Survives Turmoil.” United Press International, 4 Sept. 1989, www.upi.com/Archives/1989/09/04/And-By-The-Way-Modern-day-cattle-drive-survives-turmoil/5835620884800/. Accessed 10 June 2026.

“30 Years Ago the Montana Centennial Cattle Drive Put Ranching in the Spotlight.” Billings Gazette, 6 Sept. 2019, billingsgazette.com/news/local/30-years-ago-the-montana-centennial-cattle-drive-put-ranching-in-the-spotlight/article_91cefaf4-2cf0-590c-bbb5-8616fef72fdf.html. Accessed 10 June 2026.

“Centennial Cattle Drive of ’89 Keeps on Giving.” Billings Gazette, billingsgazette.com/news/local/centennial-cattle-drive-of-keeps-on-giving/article_a8493363-764c-588b-b57a-f5ba8fded451.html. Accessed 10 June 2026.

“Ranching in Montana: History Collections.” Montana History Portal, Montana Memory Project, www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/94734. Accessed 10 June 2026.

Montana Historical Society. Montana: Stories of the Land, Chapter 8: Livestock and the Open Range, 1850-1887. Montana Office of Public Instruction, 2009, mhs.mt.gov/education/textbook/chapter8/Chapter8.pdf. Accessed 10 June 2026.