Conservation Easements, A Guide for Texas Landowners

4 PROFILE
Ca n a d i a n Ri v e r Cat t l e Ra n c h
Attorney, cattle rancher, avid hunter and philanthropist David Nutt has donated one of
the largest conservation easements in Texas history to the Parks and Wildlife Foundation
of Texas, Inc. to protect the Canadian River Cattle Ranch. The conservation easement,
located in Oldham County on the Texas/New Mexico border, contains 29 miles of
Canadian River frontage and tens of thousands of acres of native prairie. The 70,000-acre
ranch is over a tenth of the size of Rhode Island! The native plant communities on the
property, particularly grasslands, are only marginally represented in existing public parks
and wildlife areas in the Panhandle region.
The region where the property lies, known as the Canadian River Breaks because of the
rough terrain along the river, is sparsely populated and thus remains largely the same as
the first European settlers found it centuries ago. The region was identified as an area of
unique natural and cultural significance in a series of natural area surveys done in 1973
by the LBJ School of Public Affairs in Austin.
The property also contains prehistoric and historic artifacts that tell the stories of
successive waves of human cultures. A Texas Parks and Wildlife Department report says
the region’s earliest human inhabitants hunted bison, camels and mammoths about 12,000
years ago. Later came mesa-dwelling American Indians, followed by Spanish explorers in
the 1600s who found nomadic Apache, Comanche and Kiowa living symbiotically with
20 Conservation Easements: