The OTO Guest Ranch

The famed OTO Guest Ranch began to take shape when the Randalls built the first small sleeping cabins in a meadow up the creek from their homestead. This was soon followed by an expansive log lodge. Clyde Erskine, a young architect trained at the University of Ohio and fiancé to their daughter Bess, made sure that electricity and running water were included. Completed in fall of 1920, the Lodge opened just in time for Bess and Clyde’s wedding. 

The OTO Main Lodge was the heart of the ranch, which came to include 35 buildings in all, “if you counted the outhouses.” With a living room warmed by a large fireplace, a trophy den, reading nooks, and a kitchen that served up family-style meals on long dining tables, the lodge rolled out a welcome to visitors and made them feel at home. Navajo rugs, leather-bound chairs, wagon wheel chandeliers, and brand marks on doorways gave a Western flair to the décor.

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After hours, dudes and wranglers gathered around a fine piano, a Victrola phonograph, a lobby floor polished for dancing, and a men’s club room featuring a rustic pool table. Bess often played the piano and Dick spun his cowboy yarns by the fireside while Dora, known to all as “Baba” made sure everyone was well fed and happy. Eleven guest rooms in the lodge, and ten overnight cabins lining the grassy lawn out front, offered a welcome bed for many a tired dude at day’s end.

From 1912 until 1934, the Randalls promised "western-style" lodgings, pack trips that gave a person "the feel of the mountains," pure water "springing from a mountain source seen by few men," lakes full of fish, and a chance to hear the "old-timer guide and hunter" weave stories of grizzly bears, mountain men, Indians, and the code of the West.

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Guests saddled up and rode out into the wild Absaroka Mountains and on into Yellowstone National Park. OTO crews built a network of pack trails to nearby mountain peaks, lakes and a back country hunting lodge.

Dick Randall kept things primitive at the OTO, believing that “people came to rough it" and were happy to bathe in washtubs and use the outhouse. Apparently he was right, and the OTO guest book soon overflowed with the names of many illustrious guests, including Teddy Roosevelt, western writer Owen Wister, railroad magnate Henry Villard, and General Paul Von Hindenburg. Life was full and the Randalls made many friends, some of whom returned again and again.