Bismarck Tribune

By LAUREN DONOVBy LAUREN DONOVAN

The Eberts Ranch in western North Dakota will soon become public property.

The ranch is historically associated with Theodore Roosevelt, and the U.S. Forest Service has closed a deal to pay roughly $925 an acre for the 5,200-acre spread that fronts the Little Missouri River and includes prairie uplands about 20 miles north of Medora.

The Eberts family - three brothers - has been trying to sell the ranch for preservation for more than three years. They signed a purchase option last week.

The ranch will become part of the Little Missouri National Grasslands. Grasslands supervisor David Piper said he's thrilled to finish negotiations and be able to put the land in public trust for public use.

The Boone and Crockett Club, a national conservation group with 200 select private and public members, helped broker the deal.

Piper said the purchase option is for 1,900 uplands acres to be turned over to the Forest Service in mid-September. A second phase for the remaining 3,300 acres, plus ranch buildings, should be concluded by April.

The purchase had to be split to straddle two fiscal and funding years.

Lowell Baier is executive vice president of the Boone and Crockett Club, which was chaired by Roosevelt at its 1887 founding and functioned as a brain trust for Roosevelt's conservation agenda.

Baier said the Eberts Ranch, with its across-the-river proximity to Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch, is considered the cradle of conservation.

He said it was Roosevelt's horseback view of the west that caused him to conserve land before it could be logged, timbered and mined to destruction.

Baier said his group - along with another 50 wildlife, natural resource, historic and ecological groups - worked to foster the purchase and have pledged to raise funds if the federal appropriation falls short for the second phase purchase.

"I just hope the people there understand the national significance of this land," Baier said.

Ken and Nora Eberts have been the family spokesmen on the purchase and were not available for comment.

The Eberts Ranch is directly across from Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch. In the 1880s, he ran cattle up and down the Little Missouri River Valley and both rode out on and admired the Eberts property from his cabin porch.

The Ebertses have said they believe their ranch should remain intact and wanted it preserved so it isn't broken up into ranchettes.

The Ebertses tried to first sell the land to the National Park Service as an adjunct to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and then to North Dakota as the state's first preserve.

Neither of those deals came to fruition, though the state plan had a fairly long life and Gov. John Hoeven's support until it died for lack of Legislative funding in 2005.

The purchase price has increased from about $3.5 million to closer to $4.8 million since then.

Piper said the increase is based on rising land values for Badlands property and was substantiated in an appraisal completed by the regional Forest Service agency.

"Land values are definitely going up," Piper said.

The Forest Service plans to manage the land like other grasslands, for livestock grazing and recreation.

He said the Forest Service will quickly move to post the land so that the public knows which part of the ranch is open for use and which is still owned by the Ebertses until the second phase of the purchase is done.

He said the Forest Service plans to involve the public in deciding how to use the house and outbuildings, possibly for rentals, or for educational retreats.

The Forest Service will sell 5,200 acres of other grasslands to stay even with its public holdings.

Those offset acres will be offered first to the 15 or so ranches that already use them for livestock grazing along with their own base property, he said.

"We don't want to sell those acres out from under the people making a living on them. All that would do is create economic chaos," Piper said.

The offset acres will be sold at an appraised value - likely not as high as the Ebertses', which was upwardly affected by the river frontage, he said. He expects the offset acres will be sold before April.

He said the negotiations were lengthy and complicated.

"This is a great thing for everyone," he said.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)