Charles F. Coffee: Trail Boss, Hat Creek Rancher and Panhandle Banker

Who was Charles Franklin Coffee?

Charles Franklin Coffee was one of the men who carried the Texas cattle trade into the northern plains and then stayed to build something permanent. He started as a trail hand, became a rancher in the Hat Creek country of northwestern Nebraska, and finished his career as a banker and legislator in Chadron. The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum inducted him into its Hall of Great Westerners in 1966, as the museum's biography of Coffee records.

Early life in Missouri and Texas

Coffee was born March 22, 1847, in Dade County, Missouri, the son of John T. Coffee, a lawyer who later became a Confederate colonel. Accounts of the boy's war service differ. The museum says he served under his father, while a county biography says he went along at 13 but was too young to enlist. The family settled in Georgetown, Texas, where Coffee farmed corn and cotton before turning to cattle.

Trail drives to Wyoming

Around 1871 Coffee became a trail foreman. The museum says he took 1,500 Texas cattle to Cheyenne, Wyoming, for a third of the profits, and returned in 1872 as foreman. A local newspaper account of the family ranches gives a slightly different picture, with a drive to central Nebraska in 1871 and a stint as trail boss on a Snyder family herd in 1872, so the details of those first drives vary by source.

In spring 1873 he formed Webb & Coffee with A. H. Webb, his brother-in-law according to the museum. The county biography says the firm repaid its first loan within a year, borrowed $27,000 more in 1876 and repaid that within a year as well. That history of paying debts promptly shows up again in his later banking. The museum also credits him as one of five men who met in a Cheyenne livery stable in 1872 to discuss cattle theft, a meeting seen as the seed of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association.

Hat Creek Ranch and the Nebraska Panhandle

The partnership dissolved in 1879, and Coffee moved about 3,000 head onto government land at Hat Creek in what is now Sioux County, Nebraska. A newspaper history of the ranches adds that he came with 35 cowboys. He built up land through homestead claims, sometimes buying out settlers who left, and brought Hereford bulls from Illinois. By 1886 he had fenced a large tract.

When the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad crossed northwestern Nebraska in 1886, he built loading pens just inside the state line. Cattlemen used Coffee Siding into the late 1940s. A 1911 county history put his holdings at about 6,000 acres in Nebraska and nearly 4,000 acres of range in Wyoming, with roughly 7,000 cattle on the Wyoming ranch, according to a family-history transcription of that biography.

From ranching to banking

Coffee organized the Bank of Harrison in 1888, and the family later ran the Sioux National Bank until 1945. In 1900 he traded 2,000 cows with calves to fellow cattleman Bartlett Richards for a Chadron home and a controlling interest in the First National Bank of Chadron. By about 1915 the museum lists his banks in Gordon, Hay Springs, Omaha and Douglas, Wyoming, though the county biography describes some of those as directorships or stock holdings. The family history says his banks stayed open through the bank failures of the 1930s.

Legislator and the Chadron normal school

In 1900 Coffee won the Democratic nomination and was elected to the Nebraska legislature from the 53rd district by a margin of 387 votes, according to the county biography. The Alliance Times says he lobbied in Lincoln in 1909 for the bill that put a state normal school in Chadron and chaired the local committee that raised $10,000 for the site. The school, now Chadron State College, held its first classes in June 1911.

Coffee Ranches today

In 1902 Coffee and his eldest son, John T., began operating as Coffee & Son, Inc. John inherited Hat Creek Ranch and the Sioux National Bank, while Charles Jr. received the Red Cloud Cattle Company near Lusk, Wyoming, and the Chadron bank. The ranches marked their 150th anniversary in 2023, as the Alliance Times reported, and they remain in family hands and are leased to cattle producers. For more on ranching families of the northern plains, visit the ranching section of farm.FM or read a farm.FM story on Nebraska Panhandle ranching.