John Wesley Iliff was born in Ohio in 1831 to a family of cattle farmers.  He went to Ohio Wesleyan in the 1850s but did not graduate.  He decided to move west at the time of the gold rush.

He became a cattle baron on the northeast corner of Denver and named his company Iliff Cattle Company.  In 1869 Iliff opened the first bank in Cheyenne, WY.  In 1871 Iliff was made one of the directors of The National Bank in Cheyenne.

In 1878 Iliff became ill and died from a gallbladder ailment caused by drinking alkali water on the Colorado plains.  After his death his wife and her husband, Bishop Warren, founded Iliff seminary to train Methodist ministers in his honor.

More Information about John Wesley Iliff was found at the links below.

In 1861, John Wesley Iliff started his first cow camp on Crow Creek above Gerry's place.  In 1866, the Union Pacific Railroad announced it would soon be laying rails across southwestern Nebraska. 

Buffalo were killed by the thousands to feed the railroad construction crews and for their hides, which were in great demand in the East.  The buffalo soon became scarce.

The next year, Iliff established a cow camp approximately five miles down Crow Creek from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to provide beef to the railroad crews and also establish a shipping point to the East.  In 1868, he bought $40,000 worth of cattle from Charles Goodnight, who trailed them north from Texas.  This established the Goodnight-Loving trail through this area.

Goodnight continued trailing herds for Iliff through 1876.  By 1877, Iliff's domain stretched from the South Platte River north to the Chalk Bluffs by the Colorado-Wyoming border, and from the mountains east to the present Kansas border.  He was the biggest cattleman in Colorado.

Barbed wire was invented in 1874 and cattlemen were soon using it to enclose public lands for their free and exclusive use.  By manipulating the Homestead Act of 1862, Iliff had his cowhands homestead and fence 160 acres at key locations surrounding water.  He then purchased the established "homestead" from the cowhands.  For example, the earliest record of homestead entry in the Pawnee Buttes area was by Peter Welch in 1887.  However, he sold his tract to Iliff two years earlier.

In 1885, President Grover Cleveland ordered all fences removed from public land.  Although it took several years for this to be accomplished, it was the beginning of the end for the big ranchers like Iliff.

By 1905 to approximately 1910, the rains returned to the grasslands and settlers migrated to the area in even greater numbers.  Keota boomed, as did Grover and Briggsdale.  Homesteading continued to increase over the next few years and reached its peak between 1914 and 1918.  Over 35 percent of the land was plowed, forcing most of the large stockmen out of the area.  By this time Iliff had moved on to Texas.

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External Links

Iliff School of Theology
2201 S. University Blvd. Denver, CO 80210-4798
303-744-1287 email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it