Ben Snipes
In 1854 19 year old Ben Snipes traveled through the grassland of the Yakima Valley and Kittitas County and vowed he would one day be cattle king of the region. Here's Susan with the story. Jeff, the teenager realized that British Columbia was full of hungry gold miners, so with an Indian boy as his only hand, Ben drove 102 head of cattle into Canada. Meat starved miners paid as much as a hundred times the herd's original price netting young Ben $12,000. Snipes became the first white man to settle in the Yakima Valley and in his 20's it is estimated Ben ran one hundred and twenty five thousand head of cattle and twenty thousand horses. Forecasting the end of the drives, Snipes diversified and invested in a flour mill at the Dalles and banks in Ellensburg and Roslyn Washington while building his mansion on over 100 acres of what would become downtown Seattle. Ben Snipes was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame's Hall of Great Westerners. His intuition regarding the fortune to be made supplying meat to hungry miners, and his skill at moving herds of cattle through raw wilderness made Ben Snipes a Northwest Cattle King. I'm Jeff Keane.
