The Largest Landowner in America in 1900

Missourian John Sliker Bilby was the Land King

John Sliker Bilby, the Land Baron

John Sliker Bilby was the real-life version of the John Dutton from the show Yellowstone – only bigger. Bilby was reportedly the largest landowner in America around 1900 with an estimated 1,000,000 acres spread across 15 states in the late 1800s and nearly 1900s. (For perspective, the city of Kansas City is about 200-thousand acres.) Even though he had vast holdings across the United States, he made his home in the small town of Quitman in Nodaway County, Missouri. He death shocked everyone when he was struck by a train near Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Bilby was born in New Jersey in 1832 and moved to Missouri, which was where he established his empire. By the turn of the century, Bilby owned hundreds of thousands of acres of land, including an estimated 26,000 in the far northwest corner of the state near Maryville. He used it for farming and ranching, even though it was hard to keep tabs of all of his holdings in the early 1900s with a lack of communications. There are reports that he owned several other businesses, including a bank at one time. But his money was in land and everything that land produced for him.

The First Land Purchase:

His first land purchase was moderate, but he has made many since and now owns twenty-two thousand acres in Nodaway, Atchison and Holt counties, including blue-grass pastures that rival those of Kentucky, timothy and clover land that surpasses the Illinois meadows, and cornfields that yield vast crops. He has, also, fifteen thousand acres in Staunton county, Nebraska, and large tracts in other states and territories. On these large possessions he feeds from two to ten thousand head of cattle each year and about an equal number of hogs. Throughout all the great stock-raising territory of the west, Mr. Bilby is regarded as one of the very best judges of cattle and cattle values, and in his management of landed and stock-raising interests he is probably without a peer.

A Biographical history of Nodaway and Atchison counties, Missouri …published 1901 

Bilby’s Legacy:

Bilby married Margaret Applegate when he was in his 20s in New Jersey and the couple had five children, according to genealogical records. He remarried in 1909 when he was 75 years old. John was living at a home in Tulsa in 1919 when he was checking on his cattle in a railyard. He stepped around a train boxcar and right into the path of a Frisco passenger train. Reports say that he never heard it coming.

The death was a shock because of who he was and that he was still working at the age of 87. The news was covered by newspapers around the country due to his immense influence.

The Empire Collapses:

His sons continued the family operation dealing in land and oil after his death. But family and legal disputes began chipping away at the business. Parcels of land were purchased by farmers and ranchers while other large tracts were bought by state and federal agencies. The great depression ultimately brought the rest of the empire crumbling down.

Bilby Ranch Today:

5,100 of acres the original Bilby Ranch in northwestern Missouri are now a Wildlife Refuge controlled by the Missouri Department of Conservation. It’s now called the Bilby Ranch Lake Conservation Area west of Maryville.

The man who was once the largest landowner in America is buried at the International Order of Odd Fellows Cemetery in Quitman, only miles away from the base of his former empire.