Historic 6666 Ranch almost twice the size of Chicago gets the perfect steward

Midway through the last decade, filmmaker Taylor Sheridan emerged out of nowhere (well, almost: he grew up on a ranch in Cranfills Gap, a town of fewer than a thousand located an hour or so west of Waco) to become one of Hollywood’s preeminent Western storytellers. The first feature film for which he was a credited writer, the 2015 cartel thriller Sicario, was a commercial and critical success. It spawned a sequel and put Sheridan on track for an Oscar nomination (for writing 2016’s Hell or High Water), his directorial debut, Wind River, and the Kevin Costner–led Paramount television series Yellowstone. Last week, the feature Without Remorse, starring honorary Texan Michael B. Jordan and co-written by Sheridan, was released on Amazon; next week, he’s got yet another film in theaters and on HBO Max, the Angelina Jolie thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead. On top of all of that, he’s also involved in the Paramount+ adaptation of the Texas Monthly podcast Boomtown. Busy guy!

This week, according to unofficial-but-reported-everywhere sources, Sheridan found time to add another title to his already extremely hyphenated list of roles: he’ll be the new owner—or, at least, the face of the new ownership group—of Texas’s legendary 6666 Ranch, a property that has accumulated a mythic status since Samuel “Burk” Burnett first purchased a hundred head of cattle branded with four sixes back in 1870. It was put up for sale in accordance with the will of Anne Windfohr Marion—Burnett’s great-granddaughter—after her February 2020 death. It’ll be the first time in the ranch’s history that a member of the Burnett family doesn’t own the property. The 6666 Ranch was first listed in December, and it is an unusual property. First and foremost, it’s enormous—with three divisions totaling over 266,000 acres, it’s larger than San Antonio, nearly twice the size of Chicago, and about six times the size of Brooklyn. (Yet, it’s still only the ninth-largest ranch in the state, a fact that speaks to the sheer immensity of Texas’s historic ranches.) It’s a thriving brand in ranching, and the new owner gets 100 percent of solar and wind generation rights, as well as 25 percent of the mineral rights on the property. The sale price hasn’t been disclosed, but when the ranch was put on the market in December, the three divisions were listed at a combined $341.7 million.