| Two hundred years ago, Indians camped along the streambeds, hunted for buffalo, deer and antelope, and fished the many streams that traverse the Clear Creek valley on their way to the Powder River. One hundred years ago, the buildings known as the Big Red complex served as headquarters for a ranch owned by Pratt & Ferris Cattle Company stretching from Ucross into Nebraska. | Big Red, a former Pony Express stop, was an imposing visual landmark on the prairie. The Ranch House is one of the oldest standing houses in the area. The village that grew up around Big Red went through several name changes, eventually settling on Ucross, named after the original Pratt & Ferris brand. |
| Ucross, Wyoming, is a special place, a crossroads where divergent perspectives meet and creative thinking and action take root. Located at the westernmost edge of the Great Plains in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains, Ucross brings the past, present and future together as one. The setting is a 22,000-acre working cattle ranch with a rich legacy that reaches back more than 100 years. | In recent years, the Ucross Foundation has broadened its mission beyond the successful Artists in Residency Program to focus as well on preservation and enhancement of the area's unique heritage and natural resources. Entering the 215` century, the Ucross Foundation has set a dynamic goal for its historic rural landscape - to transform it into a living laboratory for conservation and the responsible stewardship of water resources, land and wildlife in the American West |
| Since its renovation in 1981, the Foundation's Big Red Barn has served as a regional consensus-building resource and educational facility. In 1999, the Foundation established a conservation easement on the majority of the Ucross Ranch with the Wyoming Chapter of the Nature Conservancy. The Conservation Program was established to restore, improve and sustain the components of the historic open space at Ucross and to promote the idea that commerce, aesthetic beauty and the environment are mutually compatible | The water resource management program is the first phase in a series of conservation initiatives designed to benefit not just the environment of Ucross, Wyoming, but the American West as a whole |