Born in Dade County, Missouri, Charles Franklin Coffee served under his father in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Moving with his family to Georgetown, Texas, he farmed corn and cotton for his father. In 1871, brothers John W. and Dudley Snyder hired Coffee to drive 1,500 cattle from Texas to Cheyenne, Wyoming, for one-third the profits. He made a second trip as foreman in 1872. Coffee was one of five men who met in a livery stable in Cheyenne in 1872 to discuss control of cattle rustlers. This meeting is considered the nucleus of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association.
In 1873 Coffee and his brother-in-law, A. H. “Hi” Webb drove their own herd of 1,500 cattle from Texas to Box Elder Creek, north of Cheyenne. Moving to the south bank of the North Platte River they established the first Coffee ranches. Coffee’s two brothers, Arthur and Samuel, joined him in Wyoming. Arthur, was accidentally killed while on his way to Texas in 1879. That year they moved their 3,000 head of cattle to today’s Sioux County, Nebraska, in the Hat Creek Basin. Coffee’s cattle ranged on 80,000 square miles in Wyoming, Nebraska, and South Dakota.
When the Fremont, Elkhorn, and Missouri Valley Railroad built across northwestern Nebraska, in 1886 Coffee constructed loading pens and chutes just inside the Nebraska border. Nebraska and Wyoming cattlemen used Coffee Siding from 1886 into the late 1940s.
The Coffee family moved from Cheyenne to Hat Creek Ranch in 1888 and Coffee went into banking in Harrison, Nebraska. In 1900 Coffee traded 2,000 cows with calves at side to Bartlett Richards for Bartlett’s home in Chadron, Nebraska, and the First National Bank of Chadron. Coffee ran successfully for the Nebraska state legislature in 1900 and helped secure a state normal school for Chadron, today Chadron State University. By 1915 he also had banks in Gordon, Hay Springs, and Omaha, Nebraska, and Douglas, Wyoming.
In 1902, Charles and his eldest son, John T. Coffee, began operating as Coffee & Son, Inc. The Coffees acquired more land for their summer ranch south of Harrison at the head of White River. After Charles F. Coffee’s death, John inherited the Hat Creek Ranch and Sioux National Bank at Harrison and.his younger son, C. F. Coffee Jr., inherited the Red Cloud Cattle Company near Lusk, Wyoming and the First National Bank of Chadron.
