Located about 175 miles northwest of Dallas, the Waggoner sprawls over six counties. The asking price was more than four times the biggest publicly known sum fetched by a U.S. ranch, $175 million for a Colorado spread in 2007.

With 6,800 head of cattle, the Waggoner is also one of the 20 largest cattle ranches in the United States and is known worldwide for its quarter horses, which number 500. The ranch also has 1,000 oil wells, 30,000 acres of cropland, and an abundance of deer, quail, feral hogs, waterfowl and other wildlife.

The Waggoner has been owned by the same family almost as long as Texas has been a state. A judge ordered a sale of the ranch in 2014. The order ended more than 20 years of litigation between opposing branches of the Waggoner family who couldn’t agree on what to do with the property.

The ranch was developed by W.T. Waggoner, son of Dan Waggoner, who started buying Texas acreage around 1850. By the 20th century, oil had been discovered on the ranch and the Waggoner reverse-triple-D brand was a Texas icon. Trainloads of spectators came to watch President Teddy Roosevelt hunt wolves on the property. Will Rogers, the famous American humorist of the 1920s and early 1930s, visited frequently, sometimes playing polo.The brokers on the sale were Bernard Uechtritz of Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty of Dallas, and Sam Middleton, of Chas. S. Middleton & Son of Lubbock, Texas.

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