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

Ranching

Jay N. Grantier
2001 Hall of Fame Ranching Inductee

  Jay Newman Grantier was born near Mount Pleasant, Iowa, on January 6, 1869, the first son of Lewis and Sylvia (Randall) Grantier. The family migrated to Dickinson in 1882. As a young man, Jay found work as a printer’s devil and as a buffalo hunter’s camp tender.

 By 1885, Jay and his father had settled on a ranch in the Killdeer Mountains and began running cattle west of Oakdale. By 1886, he hired on as a night wrangler with Webb Arnett’s AHA outfit near Grassy Butte. The next year he joined the Reynolds Brothers’ Long X operation near Alexander. He twice accompanied herds from Texas to Dakota Territory.

 According to “Memories of Old Western Trails in Texas Longhorn Days” by Joseph G. Stroud, in March 1887, the 18-year-old cowboy was dispatched with 50 head of fresh saddle horses to meet a Reynolds’ herd headed north. He single-handedly trailed his remuda some 400 miles before meeting a Reynolds herd near Devils Tower, Wyoming. However, he was to have met a second drive which, unbeknownst, had been quarantined at the Texas border. Jay rated his solo mission–successfully completed at the Texas border–as “quite an experience.”

 He started his own ranching operation in the Tobacco Garden and Clear Creek area of McKenzie County in 1890, running mostly Hereford cattle and Percheron horses. He built a steam engine irrigation system on his ranch in 1917, updating it to flood irrigation in 1937. Jay was an outstanding horseman who, later in life, credited his good health to having spent many years horseback.
Jay married Sophie Gamache in 1895, and they had six sons. After Sophie’s death, he married Clara Winter Roesner in 1928, and they had three children.

 He helped found the Western North Dakota Stock Association and served as McKenzie County Grazing Association president. Though he had few opportunities for formal education, he was well read, well respected and well known for his razor-sharp wit.

 Jay died in 1939 at age 70. At that time, he was running several hundred Hereford cattle and about 100 purebred Percheron and saddle horses and operating about 1,000 acres of farmland.