By Linda Ludington

The country is not a gentle land. Huge boulders strewn about like a naughty child's toys appear to have catapulted one another to balance themselves capriciously on sheer ledges. Rocks trap and concentrate precious moisture in clefts to nourish Saguaro and desert grasses. Above the Santa Maria River, steep ridges reveal still higher crests to the north. The elevation climbs from 2,000 to over 5,000 feet. The desert gives way to vast mesas covered with pinon, oak, and mountain grasses.

Place names like SH Mesa, Big Shipp Mountain, Bozarth Mesa, Burro Creek, Bagdad Copper Mine, Conteras Mesa, and Wild Horse Basin conjure images of natural geography, as well as human history in this far western Yavapai County mining and ranching country.  This is the location of the Kellis Ranch of Bagdad, Arizona. 

Seven-year-old Ed Kellis dreamed of one day owning a cattle ranch. That was hardly extraordinary; ranching was in Ed's Texas genes. His father, Gilbert, as a teenager had chosen to remain in Texas working on a ranch when the rest of his family followed Ed's grandfather Augustus Kellis to Wickenburg, Arizona in 1900. Ed's mother's family had been Texas farmers and stock growers for generations. When Ed was just a toddler, he received a heifer calf from his parents. He built up a small herd, which he kept until he was eighteen. By that age, he had graduated from high school and had studied for two years at San Angelo College.

The Great Depression wrought hardship on most Americans, and Ed's family was no exception. For decades, people of ability, ambition, optimism, and adventurous spirit had joined the Westward movement. Most had sought better economic opportunity. In "America's Frontier Heritage," author Ray Allen Billington wrote, "The possibility of progress helped accentuate traits among frontiersmen. They worked hard, scorned indolence, and branded time wasting as immoral." Without a doubt, Gilbert and Mamie Kellis exemplified that frontier spirit when they sold their Blackwell, Texas, windmill contract business and blacksmith shop and moved to Arizona.

Within months, Ed sold his cattle, followed his parents and transferred to the University of Arizona – the year was 1942. A ranch deal fell through, causing significant financial loss for Ed's parents. Gilbert and Mamie asked Ed to leave college to join them in running Angora goats on a lease-and-share basis with Gilbert's uncle in Mayer, Arizona. World War II brought severe labor shortages; hiring goat herders was almost impossible. For two years the family struggled to increase the herd.

During that period Ed purchased a dairy heifer from Mr. Connie Savoini in Prescott. He named her June. Ed had been out of the cattle business only a few months, a situation never repeated again in his eighty years. In 1944, the Mayer lease was relinquished. Ed and his parents moved their 500 young goats, twenty head of cattle and a few horses to Wild Horse Basin above Bagdad. They rented the Timberlake Ranch from Cecil James. Kellis optimism ran high.

However, financial disaster lurked behind the winter clouds over the horizon. "An unusually snowy and cold winter with no feed were our downfall," explains Ed. The 500 goats froze to death. Out of the entire stock, only two horses and a dozen cows survived, including June. The Kellis bank savings was destroyed as well, but Ed adds with obvious admiration, "We moved to Bagdad, and on May 21 1945, Dad, at age sixty-two, began working as a carpenter for Bagdad Copper Corporation. This was not the first time Dad and Mother had put their shoulders to the grindstone and started over. No crying, no complaining. We had a sack of flour and a sack of beans to eat until Dad got his first paycheck. Now, almost sixty years later, I can say that moving to Bagdad was the best move of their lives."Three weeks later, Ed began working at the mine. He started on the "bull gang, the lowest peon on the job."

He progressed from building a store and corrals to working underground, until the elevator cage lodged crosswise in the shaft stranding him underground. The scare prompted him to seek work above ground. Ed worked in the mine's mill, assisted in the experimental laboratory, and performed bookkeeping, and later becoming the chief purchasing agent. "I worked a lot of sixteen-hour shifts, quite a few thirty-two hour shifts and a number of twenty-four hour shifts. In fact, I worked all the overtime they'd let me have. They hired me mainly not for what I did, but because they thought I'd work."

Ed mirrored his parents' frontier work ethic. When Ed Kellis reviews his life, he concludes that he has performed many jobs, including serving as Bagdad's Justice of the Peace for twenty-three years, but all have been undertaken with the goal of owning a ranch - that dream became reality in 1961..

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Courtesy
This photograph from 2002 shows the Kellis Ranch headquarters.