Patrick Burns

Patrick Burns was a Canadian rancher, meat packer and businessman who built one of the world's largest integrated meat-packing empires, P. Burns and Co., after starting his career with a single cow bought on credit. He is honored as one of the Big Four western cattle kings who founded the Calgary Stampede in 1912, and his ranching operations in southern Alberta extended across roughly seven hundred thousand acres from Cochrane to the United States border. He built his first slaughterhouse on Calgary's Elbow River in 1890 and grew the business into a national meat-packing operation supplying beef across Canada, becoming one of the wealthiest Canadians of his time before his appointment to the Canadian Senate in 1931.