Born in 1886 in Phoenix, Ore., Ross Dollarhide spent his early years on a ranch at the Siskiyou Mountains summit. As a young man, he rode alone on horseback and eventually ended up in Harney County.
World War I found him in Montana breaking horses for the U.S. Cavalry. At the 1914 Pendleton Roundup he stayed on a previously unridden horse and was featured in National Geographic Magazine. Ross was ranch foreman for some of the largest cattle ranches in America. In Lake County in the 1930s, Ross took a job at the MC Ranch owned by author William Kittredge’s family. The MC ranch was as big as the State of Delaware. Kittredge remembers Dollarhide as a bigger-than-life character.
One day Dollarhide took the Kittredge boys with him on a roundup over terrain made up of sharp lava rock when a rattlesnake spooked Dollarhide’s horse. To the amazement of the kids, he stayed on the twisting, turning, bucking horse and eventually calmed him down. True to his character, Dollarhide said, “It just wasn’t a good day to die.”
Dollarhide was inducted into the Buckaroo Hall of Fame in 1994.
Sources: Kittredge, William. “Jesse Dollarhide Descendancy. “ http://www.dollarhide.com/family/histjesse.htm; Ed. William W. Dollarhide. July 1999. Web.24 Sept. 2004; “Ross Dollarhide Sr.”http://buckaroohalloffame.com./1994dollarhide.html Buckaroo Hall of Fame, Sept. 1994. Web. 24 Sept. 2004.
