Pete French Round Barn

Peter French came into the Blitzen valley in 1872 with cattle for a California rancher, Hugh Glenn, and over the next quarter century built the French-Glenn Livestock Company into one of the great cattle operations of the West, centered on the P Ranch near what is now Frenchglen. The land had been Northern Paiute country until the government forced them off it. French put his holdings together, often on doubtful claims, until he controlled nearly all the water and meadow in the southern Harney Basin, and the homesteaders who followed found the good ground taken.

The round barn, built in the 1880s, was one of his outposts, a covered ring where his hands could break and train horses and draft animals out of the weather. It is the best-known building of the empire, and it stands on a small state heritage site in the sagebrush.

The empire did not outlast French. He spent years in court with a homesteader named Ed Oliver over access across his land, and on December 26, 1897, after French struck him with a whip and turned away, Oliver shot him in the back of the head. A jury acquitted Oliver. The French-Glenn holdings were sold off over the next decades, and in 1935 the federal government bought the P Ranch for the Malheur refuge, where its long barn still stands near Frenchglen.