A.S. Hill

Alexander Staveley Hill (1825–1905) was the founder of Alberta’s famous Oxley Ranch. A British Conservative MP from 1868 to 1900, he travelled to North America annually between 1881 and 1884, exploring the land and buying cattle and horses from the ranch. From Home to Home, first published in 1885, is an account of those travels. Hill founded the Oxley in 1882, persuading veteran livestock breeder John R. Craig—later the manager of Oxley and who wrote his own memoir, Ranching with Lords and Commons—to drop his Canadian investors in favour of some English gentlemen whom Hill claimed had much more to invest. Ironically, a bitter feud later developed between Craig and Hill when the latter could not (or would not) supply enough money to run the enterprise properly.

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