Posted December 3, 2025
By George Murdock, RAAA Area 1 Director
One of the things I’ve appreciated most about our involvement with Red Angus Cattle is the fact it is a generational thing.
As usual, this year we had three generations present at the Western National Red Angus Show in Reno. It is the second largest single-breed show of Red Angus cattle in America so the competition is stiff. We are humble participants without illusions of grandeur.
However, the 2025 show was an exception.
The most notable accomplishment was that Murdock Cattle Company was named the outstanding consignor and we were honored at the Sale on Saturday. When I say we, Ian, my son, and Mason, my grandson, were there for the presentation and the picture. My daughter-in-law Lindsay and I had come home on Friday for my other grandson’s last football game in Elgin.
Unfortunately, Echo lost 52-14 and Mack got a concussion and sat out the second half, but we were there no matter what.
Ian was as humbled with the award as I have ever seen him and for good reason since the show and sale attracts the most powerful Red Angus breeders in the Western United States. It is most likely a once-in-a-lifetime reward but also one which he richly deserves. I hope that when he is trudging around the barnyard on cold, dark winter nights after he gets home from his day job, that he might get a measure of warmth and inspiration from the memory of what happened to him in Reno.
It is also an award to share with Lindsay, Mack and Mason since everyone has a chance to be impacted by the demands of the cattle enterprise 365 days a year and certainly during long hours every day. Mason had taken a week off from work to go to Reno to help and although he is now twenty, he’s made lots of friends he gets to renew acquaintances with every year.
We were reminded that the kids are getting older since a young lady Mason had shown with since before they were teenagers, Kambrie Murray, became engaged in the middle of the open class show (not to him, however).
Ian is actually a third-generation cattle producer and Mack and Mason are the fourth. If there is a fifth, the way the boys are moving on the social scene, I don’t anticipate still being around to witness it.
However, I am the second generation having gotten my first cattle in 1955 and my father was the first. He got his cattle at the same time.
We got those cattle when we moved from a fifty-foot lot in Castle Rock, Washington, to an 80-acre farm in Toledo, Washington, when I was finishing the seventh grade. My father had an old friend from his tenure in nearby Winlock earlier in his career and he called on Colonel Nelson, a long-time cattle trader, to find us some animals. As the cattle were being unloaded, it was immediately clear to me that we weren’t going to launch our cattle enterprise with select purebred specimens.
We started with five cows, none of which remotely resembled one another. I was only thirteen at the time, but I was worldly enough to wonder if we might also need a bull. I was advised that all five of the cows had been visited upon by a bull and that the purchase of one for our fledgling herd could be postponed.
I knew enough from my membership in the Olequa Ranchers 4-H Club to know that it was a good practice to use a purebred bull and hoped we might move in that direction. Colonel Nelson advised us that he didn’t deal in papered cattle but suggested several nearby outlets. Fortunately, we visited one of those and obtained Jupiter Domino, a purebred Hereford bull who lived on our farm well into his teens.
My father never purchased a second bull but we somehow miraculously avoided the potential problem of inbreeding. The bull was always with the cows and subsequent generations of females so calving could occur anytime during the year. There was certainly never a “calving season.”
The bull became a favorite of my Swedish grandfather who always paid a visit to “Yupiter” when he came down from Seattle.
I mention that my father was the first generation. If I were to stretch that title, it would go back to his roots in Scotland where his family had Ballindalloch Angus Ranch, which was world famous. It was, however, operated by somewhat distant relatives and there was no true line of succession from that ranch to my father. However, the connection was close enough that I have a large, framed photo of Lavia of Glamish, the 1902 champion of champions at Birmingham and Smithfield which was handed down to me by the Grant Family in 1967 during a visit to the ranch.
Mason Murdock, left and Ian Murdock, right, were honored as Consignor of the Year at the 2025 Bet on Red Sale in Reno, Nevada.
