6666 Part 2 | How He Built the 6666 Empire

POST 2 of 4 | HOW HE BUILT THE 6666 EMPIRE

So how do you go from 100 cows to one of the biggest ranches in America?

Burk Burnett did it with two things: nerve, and friends in very high places.

The nerve came first. During the Panic of 1873, the cattle market collapsed. Everybody panic-sold. Burnett did the opposite. He held about 1,100 steers through the winter near Wichita, Kansas, then sold them the next year for roughly a $10,000 profit. In 1874 dollars, that was a fortune.

He bought more cattle, more land, and set up headquarters near present-day Wichita Falls.

Then came the grass he did not even own.

A brutal drought in 1881 sent him across the Red River, where he leased hundreds of thousands of acres of Kiowa and Comanche reservation land for around six and a half cents an acre. His point man on that deal? Quanah Parker, the last principal chief of the free Comanches.

The two became genuine friends. Parker reportedly taught Burnett the Comanche language, and the Comanches are said to have called him “Big Boss.”

We will be straight with you, Gazette-style: this friendship was real AND it played out while reservation land was being commercialized and then handed to homesteaders, to the tribes’ long-term loss. Both things are true at once.

When Washington moved to end those leases, Burnett called another friend: President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt extended the leases, and to say thanks, Burnett and other ranchers threw the president a 10-day wolf hunt in 1905, with Quanah Parker as a fellow guest.

(Roosevelt also talked one north Texas town into renaming itself Burkburnett. It later struck oil and boomed.)

Seeing the open range close, Burnett bought the land that is still the heart of the ranch today: the old “8” Ranch near Guthrie, roughly 141,000 acres, plus big Panhandle holdings. In 1917 he capped it with a three-story stone mansion that cost about $100,000.

Oil hit the Dixon Creek Ranch in 1921. One year later, on June 27, 1922, Burk Burnett died, leaving behind a tangled will and an empire.

Next in Part 3: the women who ran it for the next century, and the racehorse that made the 6666 famous all over again.

Sources: Texas State Historical Association; 6666 Ranch official history; True West Magazine; Fort Worth Magazine; Chas. S. Middleton and Son.