The O'Keefe Ranch is a historic ranch in the Okanagan region of British Columbia, Canada on the Canadian National Railway, just northwest of Vernon. The ranch was founded in 1867 by Cornelius O'Keefe.
Cornelius O'Keefe
Cornelius O’Keefe was born on July 26, 1838, near Fallowfield, Ontario. His father, Michael O’Keefe ( – 1864) was an Irish immigrant from Kilworth, County Cork, and his mother, Esther Demers, was French Canadian. Cornelius was the seventh child of Michael and Esther, who ran a farm in Nepean Township, Upper Canada.
In 1862, having heard of the discovery of gold in British Columbia, he travelled west via the Isthmus of Panama. After an unsuccessful attempt at gold-mining in the Cariboo, he worked in 1862 on the construction of the Cariboo Road between Clinton and Bridge Creek under Gustavus Blinn Wright. Later he helped to build 115 Mile House at Lac la Hache.
In 1866 O’Keefe met Thomas Wood, a native of Newfoundland, in the vicinity of Kamloops, where Wood had wintered a herd of cattle. The two men went into partnership, first driving the cattle to the Big Bend gold area of the Columbia River and then going overland to the Willamette valley in Oregon, where they purchased a herd of about 180 head. Subsequently, they met Thomas Greenhow, an Englishman, who also became a partner, and returned with him through Washington Territory and the Okanagan valley. Arriving at the head of Okanagan Lake in June 1867, the three men each pre-empted 160 acres of bottom land.
O’Keefe liked to tell his children that on the first rainy day on his new ranch, he built himself a chair.
By 1871 Wood had relocated his ranch. O’Keefe and Greenhow remained in partnership, establishing a small general store to serve the native people and the few settlers in the north Okanagan. In 1872 this store became the home of the valley’s first post office; O’Keefe served as postmaster until 1912. Located at the end of the wagon road into the Okanagan, the post office also became the terminus of the British Columbia Stage Line.
Sometime after his arrival O’Keefe became involved in a relationship with an Okanagan woman, Alapetsa Stalekaya, from the nearby Head of the Lake band. Together they had two children, a boy and a girl. This relationship not only improved O’Keefe’s domestic circumstances, but also established an alliance with the Okanagan. The alliance was to be strained in 1873 when O’Keefe filed an additional pre-emption on land claimed by the Okanagan but exempted from the reserve boundaries established in 1865. The disputed land was granted to the natives after a lengthy negotiation.
The 1870s were a time of dwindling markets for the cattlemen of the British Columbia interior. O’Keefe and Greenhow were content to build up their herds and use the income from their store and post office, and from a newly constructed grist mill, to purchase additional lands. By 1876 O’Keefe owned 960 acres of prime Okanagan bottom land with good access to water.
O’Keefe returned to Nepean Township in 1877 and married Mary Ann McKenna in Fallowfield on 20 November. They were to have five sons and four daughters over the next 16 years. During that time O’Keefe’s fortunes improved dramatically. The depression that had followed the gold-rush was lifted by the economic activity resulting from the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the early 1880s. For ranchers like O’Keefe, living near the line of construction, there was a ready market for beef and other goods. With the completion of the CPR, interior ranches gained access to new markets in coastal British Columbia and in southern Alberta, where livestock were in demand for foundation herds.
The O’Keefe Ranch, which by the mid-1890s had reached about 12,000 acres, raised cattle and sheep and had large acreages in wheat. But the successful growing of fruit in the Okanagan valley placed increasing pressure on the large cattle ranchers to sell their lands for settlement. This, coupled with a falling-off of the beef market in the late 1890s and the overgrazing of pasture lands, brought about the end of large-scale ranching in the Okanagan. O’Keefe was one of the last to sell. Having previously subdivided and sold about 3,000 acres, he disposed of most of his remaining holdings in 1907 to the Land and Agricultural Company of Canada.