In the eighteen eighties, Anthony L. Mason and Henry Clay Lovell owned one of the largest cattle operations in the Wyoming Territory, and in 1883 the Mason-Lovell Ranch moved its headquarters here. At its peak, the ranch grazed cattle from Thermopolis, Wyoming, to the Crow Reservation in Montana and supported as many as 25,000 cattle. The South, or Orchard, Cabin served as a comfortable single-room residence for married ranch employees, surrounded by apple trees and built of hewn logs with whitewashed interior walls. A horse barn and corrals, built of logs and facing south against the fierce wind, had a roof made of slabs of hay. The oldest structure on the ranch, the blacksmith shop, was later used as a granary, then a chicken house, and finally a garage. Ranch hands lived in a stark bunkhouse, sleeping in double bunks above a dirt floor, while Henry Clay Lovell stayed in the same building with a brass bed and cushioned rocking chair. Ice cut from the river in winter was stored in an icehouse for summer refrigeration, and the North Cabin, built before the main house, was used mostly for storage. The Lovell House, built between 1895 and 1900, was elegantly furnished and lit by carbide lamps, which may have led to the fire that destroyed it in the 1930s. Work on the ranch was demanding: applicants were asked, "Do you smoke and do you wear suspenders?" and Lovell would not hire men who answered yes to the first and no to the second because he believed they would spend most of their time rolling cigarettes and the rest pulling up their pants. Those who were hired were given a horse and hard work, including massive roundups that lasted weeks and took up to 10 days to move herds the 90 miles to Billings, Montana. The harsh winter of 1886-87 decimated the herd as the era of huge cattle roundups on the open range was drawing to an end.