Established in 1867, the O’Keefe Ranch marks the earliest European settlement in the Okanagan Valley. At that time, during the peak of the Cariboo Gold Rush, ambitious young men saw an opportunity in the miners’ demand for food. They purchased beef cattle from Oregon in the south and drove them north to the goldfields. Between 1858 and 1868, more than 22,000 head of cattle crossed the border near present-day Osoyoos, traveled along the former fur trade Brigade Trail through the Okanagan Valley, past Fort Kamloops, and onward to the Cariboo. These cattle formed the foundation of herds that eventually shaped the British Columbia cattle industry.

In June 1867, Cornelius O’Keefe and his partners, Thomas Greenhow and Thomas Wood, arrived at the head of Okanagan Lake while driving cattle north. They encountered vast stretches of bunchgrass covering the hills and valleys, nourished by creeks and small lakes. Each of the men claimed 160 acres, the maximum allowed by the Colonial government, and started their own ranches. From this humble beginning, the O’Keefe Ranch expanded as Cornelius acquired unoccupied crown land at prices as low as 1 dollar per acre. The late 1800s marked the era of open range cattle ranching, where countless cattle freely roamed the vast, unfenced ranges of the Okanagan, Thompson, and Cariboo regions. The idealized image of the “cowboy” emerged around the young men who worked with the cattle, although the reality of their rugged, low-paying lives sometimes contrasted with the romanticized perception.

By the turn of the century, the O’Keefe Ranch had grown to encompass more than 12,000 acres. As much of this land consisted of prime Okanagan bottomland highly sought after by the emerging orchard industry, there was immense pressure on O’Keefe to sell. In 1907, he eventually succumbed to the pressure, but the O’Keefe family continued ranching on a smaller scale. They resided in the splendid Victorian house that Cornelius had built during the ranch’s heyday.

The O’Keefe family persevered in ranching and lived in their beautiful house until modern times. Following Cornelius’s passing in 1919, his wife Elizabeth and later his son Tierney managed the ranch, diligently preserving the original buildings and grounds of the ranch’s “homesite.” It was Tierney O’Keefe and his wife Betty who made the decision to open the ranch as a heritage site in the mid-1960s. They restored the remaining buildings, relocated the blacksmith shop to its current location, and reconstructed the General Store, which had once housed the first Post Office in the Okanagan Valley. In June 1967, exactly a century after the establishment of the O’Keefe Ranch, Premier W.A.C. Bennett inaugurated its public opening, heralding a new era for this historic locale.

After a decade of operating the O’Keefe Ranch as a heritage site and tourist attraction, the O’Keefe family sold the buildings, artifacts, and land to the Devonian Foundation from Calgary, which subsequently gifted the ranch to the City of Vernon. Today, the ranch is managed by a non-profit society called the O’Keefe Ranch & Interior Heritage Society and is open to the public from Mother’s Day to Thanksgiving every year.