The northwest Nebraska business owned by the same family the longest will be observing its 150th anniversary on Saturday, July 29.
The Coffee Ranches were initially established in eastern Wyoming in 1873. Six years later Charles F. Coffee and 35 cowboys drove about 3,000 of his longhorned doggies across the state line into the Hat Creek Valley of northern Sioux County.
The original ranch has always been known as the Hat Creek. It’s located about 16 miles northeast of Harrison. The Warbonnet Ranch headquarters are about 10 miles straight north of Harrison. That ranch was purchased in the early 1940s. Both contain lots of acres, plenty of grass, water and protection. Their locations are as good as those of any ranch in America.
They belong to the four Coffee “girls.” Their great-grandparents included Charles and Virginia Coffee, the founders of the ranch. They are the daughters of Bill and Virginia Coffee, who after their marriage in 1942, operated the ranches for more than 60 years.
The four are Claire “Twink” Brown of Arizona, Ann Wackman of Texas and Sara Radil and Sue Rusie of Omaha. All plan to be in Sioux County for the anniversary. The ranches are leased to cattle producers.
The anniversary activities will include a talk by Mike Grauer, curator of cowboy culture at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. He will speak at the Harrison Fire Hall at 1 p.m. Saturday the 29th on cattle drives from Texas to Wyoming in the 1870s.
Charles Coffee is sure to be mentioned. He participated in several of those drives and in 1966 was the 11th Nebraskan inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners, also known as the Cowboy Hall of Fame, where Grauer works.
Coffee had a long and remarkable life. At age 14, he carried ammunition for his father as part of a Confederate regiment that won a major battle near Kansas City. However, the Union won the Civil War and the Coffee family fled to Texas.
For nearly a century now Charles Coffee has been described as one of western Nebraska’s most influential citizens. When he died in 1935 at age 88, Chadron State College history professor E.P. Wilson said 50 or 100 years later it would not be possible to write a history of western Nebraska without recognizing Coffee’s far-reaching influence.
The fact that Coffee’s sister, Catherine, married J.W. Snyder, whose family was driving longhorns north, helped him get into the cattle business. He was among the cowboys who in 1871 drove a herd to central Nebraska to be shipped by train to market. He later reported they had to fight Indians and scare away buffalo enroute.
Coffee was the trail boss for another drive organized by the Snyders in 1872, but the next year Coffee and a partner borrowed money to buy 1,500 head and drove them into Wyoming to Box Elder Creek north of Cheyenne. They found a market for some of the beef by signing a contract with the U.S. government to provide 60 head a month to nearby Fort Laramie.
Before long, Coffee moved his herds farther north into Wyoming to the Goshen Hole area and in 1879, punched about 3,000 head across the state line into the Hat Creek Valley north of Harrison was later located and where no cattle had previously grazed.
Because there were almost no other ranches in the vicinity, there was no reason to own land initially, and Coffee’s cattle reportedly roamed from Keeline, Wyo., to Gordon and from the Black Hills to the Platte River.
When the land became available for homesteading, Coffee staked his own claim, had his cowboys file on other tracts, sometimes hired nearby homesteaders to help with his herds and, in many instances, eventually purchased the claims when the pioneers left. He also went to Illinois and acquired Hereford bulls to improve the quality of his cattle.
Charles and his brother Buff shipped the first cattle out of Chadron to the Chicago Stockyards in 1885 soon after the tracks were laid by the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad.
Coffee entered the banking business in 1888 in Harrison when he put a safe in a store belonging to his friend Dwight Griswold, later a Nebraska governor. It developed into the First National Bank of Harrison. The next year when Griswold moved to Gordon, he and Coffee bought the Sheridan County Bank.
After Coffee sold the original bank in Harrison and it was forced to close during hard times, he obtained a charter for a new bank there, the Sioux National Bank, that he and his family operated until 1945.
In 1900, Coffee traded 2,000 cows with calves at side to Bartlett Richards for the nicest home in Chadron and controlling interest in the First National Bank of Chadron. Coffee’s hands trailed the cows and calves along the Niobrara River to Richards’ Spade Ranch in the Sandhills between Gordon and Ellsworth.
Coffee also owned a bank in Hay Springs and by 1910 had interests in two banks in Omaha and one in Douglas, Wyo. During the 1930s when dozens of banks across the country were forced to close and the depositors often lost their money, all of the banks that Charles Coffee was associated with remained open, a tribute to his business acumen and the confidence the public had in him.
Both of his sons, John and Charles Franklin Jr. (Frank), became prominent bankers—John in Harrison and Frank in Chadron. John, in particular, also spent many years as a cowboy/rancher. His father put him in charge of both the Hat Creek Ranch and Buff’s operation in the middle of Sioux County when he was just 18.
While still overseeing the Nebraska ranches, but spending most of his time as a banker, John asked his son, Bill, who was entering adulthood, if he wanted to go into banking or ranching? Bill emphatically said ranching.
It’s not known whether Charles traded the cows and calves to Richards primarily because he wanted the bank or the house so his sons and daughter Blanche could attend Chadron Schools. About that same time, he also became the guardian of his brother Buff’s four children, after Buff died of pneumonia in 1900. A home for Buff’s widow and her children was soon built at the south end of the same block of Egan Street (later Chadron Avenue) where the Richards’ mansion stood.
Before too many years after the Richards’ mansion had changed owners, it had to be demolished and replaced because the original beams had been too green and were cracking.
The Coffee family’s move benefited Chadron. It’s often been written that Coffee’s influence was instrumental in helping Chadron land the fourth of the Nebraska State Normal Schools, which became Chadron State College.
In 1909, Coffee spent three weeks in Lincoln seeking support for a bill that would place the school in the Sixth Congressional District represented by Moses Kincaid and encompassing the northern tier of counties stretching from the Wyoming state line through Holt County.
The Lincoln Daily News reported in its Aug. 13, 1909 edition that without Coffee’s assistance, the bill would not have passed. After that, he was named chairman of the Chadron Commercial Club’s committee to raise $10,000 to provide the site for the new school. He also was among the hosts when the seven members of the Nebraska Board of Education came to town to check out the possibilities.
The visits to Chadron and the other five towns that were bidding for the school were made during the first week of January 1910. While meeting in Lincoln that Saturday, the board selected Chadron as the site on the 15th ballot. The cornerstone for the center section of what is now called Old Admin was laid on Nov. 15, 1910, and the first classes began in June 1911.
In later years, Chadron State definitely benefited from the generosity of the Coffee family. In the late 1990s, Bill and Virginia, who was a native of Alliance, gave a sizable gift in C.F. Coffee’s memory to help renovate and expand Don Beebe Stadium. Charles was among the Chadron State football fans who in 1925 made the trip to Boulder and watched the Eagles defeat the University of Colorado 3-0.
Bill and Virginia, along with Charles and Barbara Marcy and the First National Bank of Chadron, also established the C.F. Coffee Cattlemen’s Gallery that opened in 2007 on the lower level of the Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center at Chadron State. It is dedicated to the history of the cattle industry.
In addition, the Coffees provided a $500,000 gift to launch the fund drive for the Coffee Agricultural Pavilion that opened in 2014 to support the rangeland, livestock, equine and wildlife management courses that Chadron State College offers and provides for live animal demonstrations, workshops and expositions. The CSC rodeo team also practices in it.
During the groundbreaking ceremony for the facility, Virginia said her family was proud to support the project because of its importance to agriculture, the lifeblood of the region. She said her husband believed the region had given him much and he wanted to reciprocate.
Upon Bill’s death in 2005, an editorial in the Omaha World-Herald said, “Life in Nebraska cattle country will be a little less colorful without Bill Coffee, one of those larger-than-life figures who personified the spirit of the cowman.”
He also was an outstanding horseman. He was named the state’s Outstanding Quarter Horse Breeder by the Nebraska Stock Growers Association in 1963 and his horses won at least 100 championships at various shows in the 1950s and early ‘60s.
Virginia Coffee was a member of the Chadron State Foundation’s Board of Directors for 12 years and was presented the college’s Distinguished Service Award in 1999.
She also was named an Honorary Nebraska Centennial Governor for her part in the state’s 100th anniversary observance in 1967, was appointed by Gov. James Exon to the Fort Robinson Centennial Commission and was a member of the board of directors of the Nebraska Historical Society and Foundation. She was the first woman to serve as mayor of Harrison.
Virginia passed away on July 31, 2013 at age 92. Since then the family has continued to provide several endowed scholarships and support practitioner-in-residence programs, undergraduate research, rangeland management programs and recent building projects at the college.
Note: Some information in this article was obtained from papers/stories written by Jon Olsen, Jamie Bell and Moni Hourt.