Charles Francis Colcord - Cattle Rancher

Cattle Rancher

In 1876 W. R. teamed up with Hines Clark to trail 1200 mares north to pens in the Cherokee Outlet; Charley was among the half-dozen riders. They decided to stay in Kansas and lived near Medicine Lodge in Comanche County.

In the fall of 1877, father moved the rest of the family up from Texas and we built three or four fine big dugouts for them... near the mouth of Red Fork, about five miles from the head of Jug Mott Creek, three miles from Evansville, and about twenty-five miles southeast of ... where Coldwater, Kansas was afterward built.

The senior Colcord teamed up with neighbors R. C. Campbell, Bob Campbell, Billy Carter and Frank Thornton to form the Jug Cattle Company, with Charley employed as range boss. The Jug livestock brand (pictured here), became famous throughout Kansas and Oklahoma.

Colcord's father joined about fourteen of his neighbors to form the Comanche Pool, one of the first corporate ranches in the southwest. Starting with about 26,000 head of cattle around Evansville, Kansas, the pool grew to control nearly 11,000 acres (4,500 ha) shipping over 20,000 cattle to market each year.

This Comanche Pool was the biggest outfit anywhere. It had from sixty to eighty thousand head of cattle belonging to the various pool members, which ran all over the country; in our annual roundup we used to come as far south as Sacred Heart Mission on the Little River, sometimes even to the Red River, ... west as far as the west end of the Panhandle."

In 1879, outlaws John Middleton and Henry Brown left Billy the Kid's gang and stayed at Colcord's camp in the Cherokee Outlet for several weeks. On December 18, 1879, Middleton married Colcord's 15 year old sister, Maria "Birdie" Colcord, but the marriage only lasted about a year.

During the 1880s, cattle prices remained high and the members of the Comanche Pool continued building their herd. In 1882 a lease was negotiated for over 3,000,000 acres (1,200,000 ha)of land for ten years at an annual rent of two cents an acre, payable semi-annually in advance. By the fall of 1885, the Pool cattle numbered nearly 84,000 head. But by then, reacting to allegations of bribery and fraud, President Cleveland voided the leases that were never approved by the federal government, and ordered all cattle removed from the reservation within forty days. 210,000 head of cattle were moved to the already overstocked ranges of the adjoining states.

An unusually dry summer in 1885 was followed by a bad winter; nearly 85 percent of the cattle died during an 18 month span, reducing Pool assets to a mere 13,000 head. Most of the ranchers were wiped out and moved elsewhere. The Colcord family continued with the Pool until its final collapse. Charley, now married (see below) and his brother William moved to Arizona to manage a ranch, followed by their mother, younger brother and now-divorced sister Birdie.