Archives West Finding Aid

Isaac Schultz was born in 1851 in Pennsylvania. He attended Dartmouth College and taught school in the east before poor health forced him to Florida around 1875. Isaac Schultz was a pioneer in Florida, where he obtained a homestead and later planted and cultivated an orange grove near Crooked Lake with his brothers Henry H. and John. In 1881, Isaac and his brother, Alfred, sold their interest in the groves and invested in a sheep ranch, the Custer Creek Ranch, near Miles City, Montana, in 1883. The sheep business prospered until the severe winter of 1886-87 when Isaac Schultz lost much of his flock and was forced to sell the remainder and find new work. He moved to San Francisco, California, and bought an employment agency in the fall of 1887. From then until 1931 his brother Alfred heard nothing from him.

Isaac Schultz lived in Wyoming for thirty years, where he was a small time oil man. In 1931, during the last months of his life, his wife, an artist and writer, began corresponding with family members in letters that partially accounted for the intervening years. Isaac Schultz died on February 26,1931 in Thermopolis, Wyoming.