Wortman Ranch

Wortman Ranch
Judith Landing on the Missouri River, south of Big Sandy, Montana
Owners/Managers: Amy & Lacy Wortman

Here is where the Lewis and Clark Expedition slept on May 28, 1805 -- where a bull bison charged through camp in the middle of the night and only the barking of Lewis’s dog awakened them in time to avoid disaster. Here, also, within the following 50 years, some 15,000 native Americans twice gathered to negotiate pivotal treaties with each other and with the U.S. government.

Long before the passage of Lewis and Clark, the lands here at the confluence of the Missouri and Judith rivers served as a well-known crossroads -- one of the easiest places within miles both for finding firewood and for forging the Missouri. For the same reasons, throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, nearly every steamboat carrying settlers and supplies stopped here, and several frontier-era forts were sited on surrounding lands.

The Hartwig Lohse family first homesteaded on these lands soon after their arrival in Big Sandy in 1891, and the present-day ranch has been home to agricultural production ever since. Amy Wortman’s grandparents bought the ranch in the late 1950s, and she and her husband, Lacy, now own and manage it. Some lands along the river are used for irrigated hay production, but the vast majority of the rangelands serve only for grazing by livestock and wildlife. These natural rangelands still look largely as they did when Lewis and Clark saw them.

Directions to this ranch:
Either float through the Missouri River Breaks National Monument – or take county road #233 South from Big Sandy. The display area is about 25 yards from the river; follow the path that begins directly across the road from Judith Landing General Store.

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.