Lamar, Colorado

Colorado Beef, a 56,000-head feedyard completed in 1969, is located on Highway 50 near Lamar, Colorado, a town of 8,000, that offers rural living at its best. Five Rivers Colorado Beef is a proud member of the Lamar and Prowers County Colorado community.

The history of Lamar is replete with stories of frontiersmen seeking new horizons, Native Americans faced with change, pioneer struggles, the dust bowl era, and the influences of modern transportation. During the time of outlaws and bandits, Lamar benefitted from the westward population movement and township development was extremely profitable along the Santa Fe line. William Bent, a famous trader and rancher in the American West in the mid-1800s, abandoned the original Bent’s Fort and relocated his trading business to his log trading post at Big Timbers, adjacent to where Colorado Beef sits today. Later, in the fall of 1853, Bent began building a stone fort, Bent’s New Fort, on the bluff above Big Timbers. Bent conducted his trading business there until 1860, when the building was leased to the United States government and renamed Fort Wise. On Feb. 18, 1861, six chiefs of the Southern Cheyenne and four of the Arapaho signed the Treaty of Fort Wise with the United States, which ceded to the United States an area that included present-day southeastern Wyoming, southwestern Nebraska, most of eastern Colorado, and the westernmost portions of Kansas.

Colorado Beef was built by local investors and has carried the names of Continental Grain or ContiBeef and Five Rivers Ranch Cattle Feeding.