Lifetime Leaders of Rodeo & Ranching Rodeo Ranching Great Westerner Western Entertaiment & Arts Rodeo Producers & Livestock Special Achievement Cowboy Long Rider Legacy Award

Ranching

The Cannonball Ranch
1999 Hall of Fame Ranching Inductee

 The historic Cannonball Ranch, 35 miles south of Mandan at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri rivers, has served as a gathering point and social center since 1865.

 In addition to being the headquarters of a major ranching operation, the site at one time also included a river ferry crossing, steamboat landing, hotel and general store. The general store was also the area post office, polling place and, eventually, the site of a telephone switchboard between Fort Yates and Mandan. R.M. Johnson, one of the first white settlers in the area, started the ranch in the 1860s. Henry S. Parkin purchased it and several thousand neighboring acres in 1883.

 Eventually, the ranch site included two houses, barn, blacksmith shop, bunkhouse, icehouse, laundry and tennis court. A herd of 700 cattle, mules, sheep and horses grazed the rolling hills.

 Henry was a member of the Territorial Legislature and later a state senator. He married Alma Galpin, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. He died in 1895, and Alma operated the ranch until her death in 1913. More than 2,000 people attended her funeral.

 Later owners included Alma’s stepsister, Louise Van Solen, and her daughter, Lucille, and John F. Sullivan Sr., whose family owned the ranch for 65 years. Monte and Nancy Allan bought it in the 1990s and raise buffalo on the 7,500 acres of prairie grasslands.