In 1863, when Arizona Territory was created by President Abraham Lincoln, there was a need for military posts, such as Fort Whipple and Fort Verde, to be established for the protection of citizens, both Native American and the incoming settlers. As soldiers attempted to force the Native Americans of the area onto newly-created reservations, the wild rugged canyons and associated mesas of the Agua Fria River were considered to be dangerous terrain. It is possible that this is when this area came to be known as "Bloody Basin," as historian Will C. Barnes notes in his original 1935 Arizona Place Names :

Large, very rough so-called "basin," In extreme southeast corner of Yavapai county, on west side Verde river, east of Turrett [sic] Peak. In Ts. 9, 10, 11 N., Rs. 5, 6 E. "Said to have been so called because of the many battles with Indians that took place in this region."

Cattle are known to have been in Bloody Basin in the early 1880s, running as all cattle did at that time on "open range." A story is told that sometime prior to 1880, in order to satisfy a bad debt, an Eastern financial institution hired Burt "Cap" Mossman, an experienced cattleman, and later first captain of the Arizona Rangers, to gather the Bloody Basin herds and get them to market. Mossman checked out the area and reported that he believed there were several thousand head of wild unbranded cattle in the Basin.   His first gather was 1000 head; he attempted to drive them south to Phoenix for shipping, but lost the entire herd when they stampeded after passing through a section of cholla. On the next try, Mossman succeeded in getting the cattle over the Mogollon Rim to Flagstaff--a most difficult trip, with wild events, and the cattle arrived in terrible shape. But after 30 days on the excellent pastures south of Flagstaff, it is said that the cattle were in good shape, a buyer was found, and the cattle were shipped to market.  This is when a man named Mitchell reportedly acquired the remnants of the Bloody Basin cattle and started branding them with the Horse Shoe ( U ) brand, giving rise to the name, "Horse Shoe Outfit."

In this era of the open range, cattle wearing the U brand ranged from the foot of the Bradshaws on the west to the Verde River on the east, an area of approximately 30 miles square. The ranch owner was considered whoever owned the cattle grazing the ranch because the range automatically went with the cattle that carried the brand.   Over the years, the Horse Shoe Outfit changed hands often as discouragement would set in because of the difficulty of moving cattle to market.

The first owner of the Horseshoe, William N. Mitchell, was a bachelor, and ran the Horse Shoe brand from ca. 1882 to 1895. Born near Philadelphia in 1824, at an early age, Mitchell had gone to Australia where it seems he accumulated a fortune in placer mining. After some years there, he returned to the United States, resided a short time in New York, then went to San Francisco. In ca. 1870, Mitchell moved to Boise Basin, Idaho, where he had an extensive dairy business. Then in 1877, he had come to Arizona and settled on the Lower Agua Fria, near Antelope station (Cordes) where he had a "large and well-stocked cattle ranch." His obituary notes that he had a reputation as a "very quiet, unobtrusive disposition but possessed very positive opinions and made many warm friendships." The notice, also, details that he "left a very large amount of property--real estate, cash, and cattle."

The actual deed to the patented land where the ranch headquarters is located today, was held by William Mitchell's younger sister, Catherine Scott. She received a homestead patent, cash entry, on December 16, 1889, for:

the north half of the SE quarter and the east half of the southwest quarter of Section 8, Township 10 North, Range 3 East, Gila & Salt River Meridan in Arizona Territory containing one hundred and sixty acres.

From Mrs. Scott's obituaries in the March 19, 1897, editions of the Arizona Daily Gazette and the Arizona Republican, it seems that when she died in 1897, she had been living a number of years with her brother, William, in Prescott and on his Agua Fria ranch. As her health had worsened, in ca.1895, her brother decided to leave the ranch and take her to Phoenix where they lived at 321 West Madison Street. Mrs. Scott was 63 when she died. A Prescott newspaper obituary reveals that "Mitchell was devoted to his sister and did every thing possible for her."

Mitchell survived his sister three years, dying in Phoenix on October 31, 1900. Both are buried in Loosley Cemetery, now a part of the historic Pioneer and Military Memorial Park, owned by the City of Phoenix.

The complete chain of title for the Horseshoe Ranch has not been yet documented, but it passed through a number of owners, sometimes only for a short time; some of them are names that are well known in Arizona history. For example, nothing more is known of Ralph and Clark Fisher except the fact that they were from Missouri. A bit more is known about Lon Harmon who acquired the property in ca. 1910. Harmon was president of the Arizona Cattle Growers Association in 1915 and, also, served in many positions in the national organization. From 1904 to 1933, Harmon, also, owned the Yolo Ranch north of Prescott.

Before World War I, the noted sheriff (1895-98) of Yavapai County, George Ruffner, was a partner in the Horseshoe Ranch operations with Charlie Hooker for about two years. After selling the ranch in ca.1913 to Al Kellog, Ruffner again served as sheriff, 1923-24, and from 1927 until his death in 1933. An interesting sidebar:   Ruffner is, perhaps, even better known as the owner of a mortuary, Ruffner's Funeral Home, which he reportedly won in a poker game at The Palace Saloon on Whiskey Row in Prescott. Ownership has changed, but the mortuary still carries the Ruffner name.

Hooker and Kellog did not keep the ranch long, but sold it in ca. 1915 to the Coburn Brothers, Bob and Will, and their half-brother, Walt, who became a noted western story writer. Their father was a pioneer cattleman in Montana where he had settled in 1863, founding the Circle C Ranch, one of the largest in the Northwest at the time. Walt Coburn said it was as a "$40 a month cowhand," that he gained the cowboy experience that he used in his long voluminous career as a writer of fiction and non-fiction stories. From his first accepted story in 1922, he produced more than 1,000 stories and 40 books. At one point, he was turning out 600,000 words a year, and kept up that pace for two decades.

The Coburns had come to Arizona in 1916 and were ranching near Globe when they purchased the Horseshoe Ranch. Over their tenure, the Coburns added several smaller spreads on the Prescott and Tonto national forests until ". . . they had all of Bloody Basin, part of Houston Basin, and almost to the top of the Matazels. Several of the ranches were east of the Verde River and "forest permits alone were for 8000 head." It was estimated that the actual count of cows was three times that number. Bill Coburn, also, owned the XL Bar Ranches near Prescott.   Henry Cordes, whose ranch near the Agua Fria abutted the Coburns', commented that 90% of the Horseshoe range was inaccessible for wagons and that the Coburns' had strictly a pack outfit operation. He stated that drought, a bad market, and logistical problems from such a large remote operation caused the Coburns to be forced into receivership in the mid to late-1920s.  The bank holding their note gave a contract to William A. Ryan and his brother, Neil, longtime Gila County ranchers, to gather the cattle from the Horseshoe and the XL Bar. After the bank received its share of the cattle sales, the Ryan Brothers bid on the remnant of the stock.

Henry Cordes noted that it took two years to gather and ship the cattle to market. He said there were herds of 1000 to 3000 being driven to the railroad at Cordes. Other reports vary from 5,000 to 10,000, apparently, "according to whatever old cowpuncher [was] . . . telling the story."

The ranch was broken up in order to find buyers; several units were purchased by an Association of ten or so sheepmen and were used by them for twenty-plus years. At least two well-known Arizona sheep growers were associated during this time with the Horseshoe: Lou Charleboise, in the early 1940s, and Tony Manterola.

Tony Manterola who had ranched in Arizona since his arrival   in 1910, was the owner in 1945 of the Flagstaff Sheep Company. One of the permits held was the Chalk Mt. Allotment in Bloody Basin. Pete's Cabin Allotment was added in 1950, and by 1951, there were permits for 6,387 sheep which Manterola handled as a "split operation." Some ewes wintered near Casa Grande, were rucked to Mayer after lambing season, then driven to summer pastures on the Beaverhead-Grief Hill Driveway. Other ewes lambed at Bloody Basin, were driven in the spring via the Tangle Creek Driveway to Cordes Junction, and then up Beaverhead-Grief Hill Driveway to graze for the summer in the Coconino National Forest. This basic pattern was repeated for more than 30 years.

At some point, John Henessey acquired the Horseshoe Ranch, possibly in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Little is known of his ownership period except he ran both sheep and cattle, the small adobe house dates to his time (or before), and he is believed to be the person who made the ranch headquarters accessible by building what is now known as Bloody Basin Road. He sold his holdings in ca. 1956 to a wealthy industrialist from Pennsylvania, Bernard "Bernie" Erskine.

Erskine at that time was president of Cameron Manufacturing Company of Emporium, Pennsylvania, as well as an owner of Sylvania Electric. He had been one of the early founders of what had become Sylvania Electric, which later merged with GTE, and is now part of an international conglomerate known as OSRAM Sylvania. During Erskine's tenure, several of the extant ranch buildings were added: the large barn and other outbuildings, a manufactured home, and a small one-room/bath and sleeping porch house that he built for himself to use when he came to the ranch. In 1958, Erskine married Carolyn Goldwater Sexson, sister of Arizona's well-known Senator, Barry Goldwater, and gave up ranch ownership. But he always loved the Horseshoe Ranch. Even after Erskine sold the property to Louis Wingfield, he continued to come out to the ranch, brought a small trailer to stay in, and would often ride along with Wingfield as he did his daily chores.

There may have been an earlier ranch headquarters on the mesa to the east and possibly a building at some point nearer the river. But the first known building is the one that was there when Erskine acquired the ranch from Hennessey in the mid-1950s. That building, or later multiple buildings, were occupied only by paid employees, or used as seasonal or temporary housing. From the 1880s, when the Horse Shoe brand and name became attached to the cattle and the ranch, to January 1960, no title-holder ever lived on the property. The first non-absentee owners were Billie and Louis Wingfield who purchased the Horseshoe Ranch in January 1960. The Wingfields lived on the ranch until they sold it in ca. 1992 to Dick Wilcox, thus making them, also, the owners with the longest occupancy.

Louis Wingfield is from the large Wingfield clan that started in Arizona when two brothers, William G. Wingfield and John Henry Wingfield, arrived in the spring of 1875 in the Verde Valley. J. H. Wingfield was Louis' grandfather. Louis, like his father before him, grew up in the Verde Valley. He served in the military during World War II, and in 1947, married Billie Osborn, the daughter of another early Arizona cattleman, John Osborn, who had been the general manager of the famous Chiricahua Cattle Company. For a number of years, Billie and Louis were associated with Osborn in a large feedlot operation at Arlington, Arizona, west of Phoenix; later they expanded to Wellton in Yuma County. They developed the first "automatic batch system" feed mill in Arizona; it could produce feed for 30,000 head or more cattle at a time. The business prospered and grew, but in the mid-1950s, Osborn retired to take care of his wife who was in ill health. Louis continued the operation as the managing partner after it was sold to Chuck Sherrill and Bill Lafollette, but he and Billie were ready for a different life style. He said he "found myself in love with the Horseshoe Ranch southeast of Cordes Junction which was owned by Bernie Erskine." Erskine wanted to sell the ranch to Wingfield, but insisted that Wingfield, also, had to take on the AY Ranch between Cleater and Crown King. During the years of owning and trading property, Wingfield had acquired, also in Bloody Basin, the Cavnes Ranch and the Rincon Ranch, both of which consisted mostly of permitted land from the U. S. Forest Service. Those properties and the AY were sold after a few years.

The Wingfield owned, "and loved," the Horseshoe Ranch for more than thirty years. Their daughter, Shawn, married Dean Cameron there in 1970, and the three Cameron grandchildren were born on the ranch, Dee Ann, Brooks, and Kacie. The Wingfields made many changes for the better--improving the water supply, constructing a large swimming pool and a new comfortable modern home; adding fencing and grazing acreage. Existing buildings were remodeled for better use. A major benefit for the family's getting a good night's sleep was the realignment of the Bloody Basin Road. Since its inception, the road had crossed the Agua Fria River at the entrance to the ranch headquarters, then passed right next to the barn and corrals as it wound around the plowed fields and up onto the mesa to the east. Wingfield and his family were often awakened during the night, or the wee hours of the morning, to bring aid to a stuck, stalled, or out-of-gas vehicle. The Agua Fria could become a raging torrent, and did so on many occasions. Often it had to be forded by horseback. In the early 1990s, Louis built a suspension bridge over the stream. It was utilized as needed by his successor at the ranch, Dick Wilcox, and his family who operated the Horseshoe as a guest ranch.

Louis Wingfield has been a successful cattleman since he started in the business. He served as president of the Arizona Cattlegrowers Association, worked closely with the Arizona State Land Department, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U. S. Forest Service to insured the ranch's potential. His rangeland management and rotation program has been complimented many times for its helping the improvement of the forage conditions throughout the ranch.