LIVING INDUCTEE
RICK POTTS
DISTRICT 2 - YEAR 2025
Rick Potts was born in March 1948 to parents Glen and Edith Potts. At that time there were three older siblings (Dorothy, Cliff, and Earl); later Cathy and Rod would join the family. They didn’t have much in the way of worldly wealth; as a family of six they lived in a three-room house near Custer, Montana. The year 1956 was an especially rough year for the family. In June of that year Rick’s older brother Cliff was stricken with polio, paralyzed from the neck down and then placed in an iron lung for two years. Rick’s father and younger sister were hospitalized with polio that same day but were caught early enough that neither of them suffered lasting effects. The doctors told Rick’s mother that Cliff wouldn’t live to be 18, but in fact Cliff went on to be a renowned artist and lived to the age of 78.
As most young children of the early ‘50s did, the Potts children made do with homemade toys and their imaginations. Usually, their game for the day had something to do with whatever was happening on the ranch at the time: planting, harvest, working horses, branding or weaning. Rick knew from a very young age that he wanted to work with horses and cows. He started riding when he was 4 or 5 years old and received his first colt to start when he was 13 years old (it was a two-year-old stud colt his father had won in a poker game). Rick went on from there, starting young horses and eventually competing in team roping and calf roping, riding only horses that he himself had started and trained.
Rick got a start in the cattle business through 4-H and FFA projects, then stayed at home to work with his folks after high school, as his older brother Earl was in Vietnam. The family farmed and ran about a hundred cows. Rick knew that cattle were more his thing than the farming was, so when Earl returned home, Rick went across the fence to work for neighbor Bill Steele. Bill had one of the largest ranches in the area and, Rick says, “He was one of the best stockmen that I have ever worked with.” Rick says he was later lucky enough to receive Bill’s 7-Z brand, which Rick then gave to son Clint to keep it in use.
In 1975 Rick married Terry Noyes. Terry was raising three young children (Tami, 6; Bob, 5; and Claudette, 3) on her own, as her husband had been killed in an equipment accident. To Rick and Terry’s union a son, Clint, was born. At that time Rick was 27 years old and managing the 7W Ranch. It was here at the 7W that Rick met Bill Brown Jr. for the first time. From there, it grew into a great friendship and eventually a partnership for the two of them.
After managing the 7W Ranch, Rick moved his family to the Bighorn Valley, where he went to work with cousin Royal Noyes. Within a year Rick acquired a beginning farmer loan and leased a ranch on the Bighorn River for about 100 head of cows. Two years later the Kemph Ranch at Custer was looking for a manager. Rick then went to work there and stayed for the next eight years. While at the Kemph Ranch, Rick leased grass from them and was able to continue building his own cow herd.
In 1986 Rick and his family moved on to lease the Boyd Ranch from the bank on the Crow Indian Reservation. Times were very tough for anyone in agriculture in the 1980s and although Rick was only there for just one summer, he says it was a great experience. He was able to ride with Ray Krone and learned a lot about the old days including where the Bozeman Trail crossed Soap Creek and where the Cavalry had a fight with the natives in the red rocks above the Boyd place.
From there Rick was able to lease the Bill Steele Ranch beginning in 1987. He spent the next twelve years there, not far from where he grew up. Bill sold the ranch to Dave Parker, and Rick was able to continue leasing it until Dave sold it in 1999. Rick says the Steele Ranch is one of the best ranches he’s ever been on. The house was right in the middle of the ranch, and he could ride five miles in any direction to the outside fences. There was no farming, and all the work could be done from the back of a horse.
In January of 1999 Rick’s friend Bill Brown, with whom he had been partnering on different pasture leases and other business deals over the years asked him to come manage his ranch at Sand Springs. Rick moved to the Brown Ranch in February 1999 and remained there for the next 25 years, working with three different generations of Bill’s family.
Rick married Lisa Solheim in October 2017 and as of 2024 they are temporarily headquartered in Billings— but that doesn’t mean Rick intends to slow down! He remains on the lookout for good places to lease and hay to buy. He is still continuing to be involved in raising and caring for his herd of cattle and his horses.
Rick believes that the very best place to be is on the back of a horse working cattle. He says, “You don’t have to have a corral to sort in, you don’t have to have ear tags to tell if they’re mothered up, because cows know their babies and babies know their mothers. We just must be smart enough to believe them.”
Rick prides himself in the fact that he has ridden a horse all the way from the UL Bend (where the Musselshell River goes into Fort Peck Reservoir) to Bear Lodge in Wyoming. Not at one sitting of course, but on all the different ranches he has worked on and leased through the years.
He says some of his fondest memories are of raising the four children and watching them compete in their sports as they grew up—from basketball to volleyball, track , football, wrestling and most of all high school rodeo. Rick is proud that his son Clint, who continues to be involved in the sport of rodeo and has worked at the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo for 28 years. He now has two high school kids of his own involved in rodeo. Rick is grandpa to nine, great-grandpa to three, and step dad and granddad to Lisa’s three children and five grandchildren.