Charles E. Collins and the 100,000-Acre C-Bar-C Ranch of Eastern Colorado

Who was Charles E. Collins?

Charles E. Collins (1869-1944) took part in the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run, moved soon afterward to eastern Colorado and built the C-Bar-C Ranch into one of the largest Hereford operations in the West. The Hall of Great Westerners biography lists him as a cowboy and cattleman associated with Colorado, and he went into the hall in 1960.

The museum biography is the main source we could open. It is short but full of specifics, so this profile builds on those facts and adds only sourced context.

From the Oklahoma Land Run to eastern Colorado

Collins was about twenty when he joined the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run, the rush for free homestead land in the Unassigned Lands. Soon after he moved to eastern Colorado, where he founded the C-Bar-C Ranch and expanded it over his lifetime.

The sources do not say how he financed the early land or where the ranch was headquartered, so we leave out those details. What they do give is the end result: when he died in 1944 the ranch covered 100,000 acres.

The C-Bar-C herd

According to the museum, the C-Bar-C held one of the largest commercial Hereford herds in the West at the time of Collins's death. The word commercial points to a herd raised mainly for beef production.

Colorado's livestock world had its own showcase in this period. The Western Live Stock Show, now the National Western, began in 1906 at the Denver Union Stock Yards in a borrowed circus tent, as a Colorado Politics article on the state's cattle industry recounts. The sources do not say whether Collins showed cattle there.

Backing the blackleg vaccine

Blackleg is a deadly disease of young cattle, and Collins was among the first in the industry to see the value of the Franklin serum for preventing it. He backed Franklin financially and later became president of the O.M. Franklin Serum Company.

Franklin's own story gives the context. According to the museum's page on Dr. O.M. Franklin, his team developed the first effective blackleg vaccine, Aggressin, in 1916 at the Kansas Experiment Station, moved to Wichita and founded the Blackleg Serum Company of Kansas in 1917 before relocating to Amarillo. The company became the O.M. Franklin Serum Company in 1927. By the 1960s it was reportedly the largest cattle vaccine and supply company in the world, producing 250 million blackleg doses, and American Home Products bought it in 1963. The page does not mention Collins, so his exact role is known only from his own biography, via the museum's Franklin page.

National livestock leadership and the Colorado Senate

In 1934 Collins was elected president of the American National Livestock Association and served four consecutive terms. In 1942 he was elected to the Colorado State Senate and served until his unexpected death in 1944.

Those two roles put a Colorado rancher at the table when national and state policy touched cattle, although the sources do not describe particular bills or positions.

Learn more

For more on Western ranch history, visit the ranching section of farm.FM and read a farm.FM story about Colorado Hereford ranching.