Editor’s note: These stories were based on interviews by Robert Waggener with Western Farmer-Stockman and Leslie Waggener with the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center. And don't miss Part 2 of the series.

Wyoming native Tyler “Toby” Kimzey is proof you don’t have to be born rich to buy a large cattle ranch. But along the way it does take out-of-the box thinking, lots of hard work, a can-do attitude, perseverance, some calculated risk-taking and, perhaps, Lady Luck.

SELF-MADE: Toby Kimzey and his wife, Trisha, at left, are proof that you can buy a large ranch if you’re willing to take the necessary steps. Joining them on their recently acquired Y Cross Ranch in southeast Wyoming are their sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren, from left, Braizy (on Toby’s shoulders), Kallen, Kaden, Sharayah, Shelby, Kash, Tyler and Koby.

The self-made millionaire and his family recently purchased the 50,333-acre Y Cross Ranch in southeast Wyoming from the University of Wyoming Foundation and Colorado State University Research Foundation. They paid close to the asking price of $25 million.

“Ranches like this are purchased for a variety of reasons, including agricultural production, investment, recreation, the lifestyle and preserving open spaces,” says Ranch Marketing Associates LLC broker Ron Morris, the listing agent who represents ranch buyers and sellers across the West.

Related: Ranch sales are windfall for two universities

“Most of these big ranches are in good, strong hands, with some owners placing them into family trusts to be operated and maintained for generations,” Morris adds.

The 54-year-old Kimzey and his wife, Trisha, will oversee Y Cross Ranch operations in Albany and Laramie counties, along with other assets they’ve acquired over the years, including three smaller ranches and a farm that are also in southeast Wyoming.

But how did Kimzey and his wife make enough money on their own to acquire one of Wyoming’s largest, contiguous ranches? The story might inspire young folks with few means to fulfill their own dreams, whether owning a ranch, farm or some other business, just like the Kimzeys have done.

Time to roughneck

Toby Kimzey grew up in the agricultural community of Torrington, Wyo., where his parents, Ralph and Mary, operated a small farm.

“They were having a tough time making a living, a tough time making it work, so they decided to sell out in 1974,” says Kimzey, who notes that he enjoyed the farm duties he was given, but saw how his parents struggled to make ends meet despite their devotion to the homestead.

The family moved across the border to Kimball, Neb., another town with deep roots in agriculture. They bought a hog operation, once again determined to make a living off the land.

Throughout his teens, Kimzey helped family members feed about 200 pigs, and he also started banking what money he could by gaining employment on other area farms. He says those experiences taught him about teamwork and a strong work ethic, and they also helped him earn a livestock judging scholarship to Sterling College just down the road in Colorado.

Though his passion for the farming and ranching lifestyle grew, one thing became clear.

“For most folks, there is not a lot of money in agriculture,” he says. “But I soon found out you could make $12 or $14 an hour working the board on a drilling rig, which was a dang lot of money back then. In fact, it was quite a little more money than what I was going to make going to college, and, quite frankly, I never really cared about school a whole lot anyway.”

After graduating from high school in 1979, Kimzey headed straight to an oil derrick where he spent the summer making big bucks in exchange for long, treacherous hours on the deck.

He then entered college, but within weeks knew “it just wasn’t for me.” He gave up his scholarship and immediately went back to roughnecking on area rigs, where his reputation as a fast-learning, hard-working, team-playing, no-nonsense crew member quickly grew.

He was soon hired by a company that cased oil wells, a part of the completion process in which pipe and cement are inserted into a drilled borehole to stabilize the hole and to help prevent fluids from either leaving or entering the pipe. The work was fascinating, but dangers constantly loomed, which inspired Kimzey to head to Houston for, as he downplayed it, a “little schooling.”

Kimzey took classes seriously this go-round knowing that he wanted to start his own drilling inspection service, and success or failure depended on the knowledge he would gain about oil rig accidents and how to prevent them, in part, by using a very specialized technique called “non-destructive testing.”

With new knowledge in tow, Kimzey headed back to his home state of Wyoming where he launched his business and began building a solid reputation, only to have things come crashing down with the 1980s oil bust.

“The oilfield started falling apart so I went to work farming for a potato company,” says Kimzey, who was now starting a family with Trisha. “I farmed for a while and tried to continue to run casing whenever the rigs were going. We would try and capitalize on anything we could, but farming was the main venue for us at the time.”

Hitting paydirt

Oil activity began picking up in eastern Colorado and Wyoming, and one day Kimzey received a call from the man who owned the casing company he previously worked for.

The former employer had gotten beat up pretty bad during the slow time, didn’t have much left, and sought the help of Kimzey, who recalls his surprise when asked: “Gosh, would you run this for me?”

Kimzey and his wife pooled their savings and then convinced a bank to loan them around $20,000 to buy into the company, a move that launched their lucrative career in the oil industry, a career that took Kimzey and a growing number of employees to booms across the country—Louisiana, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and beyond.

In short order, the couple had enough money to purchase their first farm near Hawk Springs, Wyo.

“I think I was only 25 at the time,” Kimzey recalls. “From then on, whenever we’d get ahead, Trisha and I would buy some more farmland, a grain elevator, a construction company, a fuel station or some other entity.”

But, he emphasizes, the oil business meant weeks away from his family and his home in the small agricultural community of Pine Bluffs, Wyo. Success also meant building a reputation, which, in part, hinged on incredibly hard work in perilous conditions.

“A lot of times our crews would work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. When that drilling rig comes in and he’s ready to run pipe, you go run pipe, period. Don’t matter if it’s bad weather or good.”

Sky’s the limit

Kimzey says there are certainly a “few bad apples” who work in the oil field, just like any other industry—whether blue collar or white—but he emphasizes that he worked hard to surround himself with good employees, and, in turn, he treated them with respect and compensated them fairly.

 “Many of these people are your next door neighbor. They rodeo. They hunt. They work out in the country and love the land. A lot of them have little farms and run cows. You know, they got a great work ethic.”

And some of them, like Kimzey, dreamed of owning bigger farms and bigger ranches.

“It’s a little tough, but it’s…honestly, the sky’s the limit,” he says. “You can build your company as large as you want. There’s opportunity in Wyoming and across our country that’s just unreal.”

And for Kimzey, that opportunity led him and his family to the Y Cross Ranch, a journey that took nearly four decades since taking that chance in the oil patch.

“If you’re diligent and you keep pounding the pavement, or the gravel, you’ll find somebody you can work for. And when you get a chance to work for them, you have to…bottom line, you just have to do a good job for a decent price no matter what that takes.”

In Part 2, Kimzey shares how sacrifice led to success; and a look at the debate that surrounds the Y Cross Ranch sale.