The LS was a prominent early ranch founded in the 1870s by former Indian Territory trader W. M. D. Lee and New York financier Lucien Scott. Through Lee's efforts, it had water and grass for more than 100,000 cattle and at times sent six or seven herds a year up the trail. Billy the Kid and other well-known western figures knew the ranch, and when thefts followed his visits, LS men rode west and recovered their cattle. The ranch also avoided disaster during the gunfights at Tascosa that sent men to Boot Hill. Drought brought heavy losses in 1886, and the grant of 3,000,000 acres of Panhandle land to the XIT as Texas's payment for construction of the Capitol in Austin cut the old LS range in half. Lee left in 1890 to promote a ship canal in Houston, and Scott died in 1893. In 1905, W. H. Gray and E. F. Swift of Chicago bought the ranch. Among its notable men were foreman J. E. McAlister, later a merchant in Channing, and cowboy E. L. Doheny, who later became a multimillionaire oilman involved in the 1920s Teapot Dome scandal. Ownership of the brand and 96,000 acres of LS range later passed to Col. C. T. Herring, a rancher and civic leader of Amarillo, and his estate still operates it.