Earlier this year, former Santa Rosa Island rancher Walter Lennox Vail was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. The award is reserved for exceptional individuals who have made an indelible impact on the history of the American West.
Born in 1850 in Nova Scotia, Canada, Vail and two partners founded the Empire Ranch on 160 acres near Sonoita, Ariz., in 1876. Silver was discovered on the ranch three years later, leading to the creation of the “Total Wreck Mine,” which enabled Vail to grow the ranch’s holdings to more than 100,000 acres.
He dissolved the partnership and formed the Empire Land & Cattle Co., which maintained interests in cattle, mining, oil, real estate, land development and horse racing as Vail became one of the most prominent cattlemen in Arizona and, later, California.
Vail’s civic contributions included serving in the 10th Arizona Territorial Legislature (1878) and on the Pima County Board of Supervisors (1884), where he was instrumental in modernizing the Arizona cattle industry.
Among his initiatives were measures that called for the repeal and replacement of a Pima County fencing ordinance; levied fines on outfits that brought diseased cattle into the territory; established a system of recording brands and earmarks; helped create a livestock sanitary commission to oversee quarantines on infectious diseases; and implemented tighter trespassing laws. He also proposed the creation of Apache County in the northeastern corner of the Arizona Territory.
In the late 1800s, Vail expanded his interests to California, leasing Santa Catalina Island and the Warner Ranch in what is now Calabassas to ease overgrazing in Arizona. He then acquired four Mexican land grants near Temecula in Riverside County to form the Pauba Ranch on the Santa Rosa Plateau, as well as the land grants for Santa Rosa Island, about 25 miles off Santa Barbara County’s South Coast.
Vail died in a Los Angeles streetcar accident in 1906 at age 56, but the ranching operation on 83-square-mile Santa Rosa Island prospered as the Vail & Vickers Co. until the island became part of Channel Islands National Park in the 1980s.
On behalf of the Vail family, Vail’s great-grandson, Dr. Tim Vail of Santa Barbara, accepted the Hall of Great Westerners induction at the April 13 ceremony in Oklahoma City.
Tim Vail is a long-time board member at the private nonprofit Empire Ranch Foundation, which was established to work with the Bureau of Land Management to develop private support to preserve the ranch’s historical buildings and land and to enhance public educational and recreational opportunities there. Much of the Empire Ranch, which remains a working cattle ranch, was acquired by the BLM in 1988 and is now within Las Cienegas National Conservation Area.
The younger Vail was joined at the ceremony by Empire Ranch Foundation president Faith Boice and vice president Jay Partone, as well as many family members, including ERF board member Susan Hughes.
The awards banquet and presentation was hosted by actor Sam Elliott and his wife, actress and author Katharine Ross.
Click here for more information about the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.