John Wesley Iliff
John Wesley Iliff Sr. (December 18, 1831 – February 9, 1878) was a Colorado cattle rancher who is the namesake of the Iliff School of Theology in Denver. Biography. Iliff was born on December 18, 1831 in McLuney, Ohio to Salome Reed and Thomas Iliff. He attended Ohio Wesleyan in Delaware, Ohio but did not graduate. In 1857, at the age of twenty-six, his father gave him $500 in cash and moved to Ohio City, Kansas where he opened a retail store. In 1859 gold was discovered in Colorado and he moved to Denver, Colorado to  open a new retail store on Blake Street, trading supplies for livestock from new immigrants, then fattening them on the open range and using the profits to buy land in northeast Colorado, creating the largest ranch in Colorado history, where he raised as many as 35,000 head a year to sell to Union Pacific construction crews, becoming a millionaire known as "the Cattle King of the Plains", leaving his fortune to found Iliff School of Theology. He died on February 9, 1878. Legacy. The town of Iliff, Colorado was named for him. Iliff Avenue in Denver and Aurora, Colorado, which  goes past the Iliff School of Theology, was named for him. In 1960, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.