Mission Ranch

Mission Ranch
Livingston, Montana
Owner/Manager: Doug Ensign

Located in the heart of the nomadic Crow Tribe’s Summer homeland, this was the site of the first Crow Agency and the original Fort Parker, which served as a stopping-point for a virtual “Who’s Who” of frontier-era explorers. The delegation sent to take the photographs and record the information that led Congress to create nearby Yellowstone National Park rested here during its travels.

In 1806, Captain Clark and his crew camped directly across the Yellowstone River during their return-trip to the East. They moved quickly on horseback, looking for cottonwood trees large enough for building boats that would allow them to hasten their pace downstream, to their planned rendezvous with Meriwether Lewis and others at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. At the time, cottonwoods of sufficient stature didn’t exist here on the floodplains that today feature no shortage of the giant trees.

The areas along the river today boast many more trees than they did 200 years ago, but in other respects the landscapes look largely as they did even before members of the Corps of Discovery journeyed here. The lands of the present-day Mission Ranch have been used for natural agricultural production -- livestock grazing -- ever since the days in the mid-1800s when the creek here was named for a mission that itself was never built.

Ancestors of its present-day owners purchased the Mission Ranch in 1946, and the ranch has been home to black Angus cattle ever since. With the help of Undaunted Stewardship®, the ranch manages cattle grazing so as to sustain the land’s natural productivity. Also with the help of Undaunted Stewardship®, the Mission Ranch has been working to restore a spring creek that feeds the Yellowstone, once decimated by flooding in the mid-1990s. Today, the ranch offers a fee-fishing program here that takes advantage of the superior fishery that has resulted from this ongoing restoration project. The Mission Ranch also operates an upscale Bed & Breakfast that provides revenue to help ensure its natural landscapes will remain in agricultural production.

Directions to this ranch:
Take the Mission Creek exit off Interstate 90, roughly 10 miles east of Livingston. The display area is about 150 yards south of the Interstate, on a county road that connects to the exit and runs perpendicular to I-90.

Undaunted Stewardship® is a cooperative and multi-faceted program led by federal, state and private sector agencies, seeking to ensure the long-term maintenance of the environmental quality and economic productivity of privately-owned agricultural landscapes, especially in areas rich in history along the Lewis & Clark Trail in Montana.