Patrick Burns (July 6, 1856 – February 24, 1937) was a Canadian politician, rancher, meat packer, businessman, and philanthropist. A self-made man of wealth, he built one of the world's largest integrated meat-packing empires, P. Burns & Co., becoming one of the wealthiest Canadians of his time. He is honoured as one of the Big Four western cattle kings who started the Calgary Stampede in Alberta in 1912. He worked in the meat industry and owned cattle ranches. Burns's 700,000 acres (2,800 km2) of land in Southern Alberta extended from Cochrane to the US border. In 1931, he was appointed to the Canadian Senate as a representative for Alberta. On October 16, 2008, the Calgary Herald named Burns as Alberta's Greatest Citizen.
Early life Patrick O'Byrne was born in Oshawa, Ontario, on July 6, 1856, the fourth of eleven children of Michael and Bridget O'Byrne. His parents had immigrated from County Mayo, Ireland in 1848 due to the Great Famine, and as part of the naturalization process, the family name was shortened to Byrne and then later to Burns. The family moved from the Oshawa area northward in the spring of 1864 to the small community of Kirkfield, Ontario, where Burns spent a majority of his childhood. Patrick had very little formal schooling but learned a great deal about hard work and thriftiness from his parents. He spent his last summer in Kirkfield chopping wood for a neighbour. He had intended to save enough money to travel out west, but when it came time for him to collect his pay, he discovered that his employer did not have enough cash to cover the $100 he was owed for his labour and so was instead given two oxen as payment. They had a resale value of $70, but he saw an alternative. He made $140 by slaughtering the animals and reselling their meat and byproducts. That experience was one that he would remember when he was as an entrepreneur. With his brothers John and Dominic in 1878 he head out west at the age of 22. They started out by steamer, but when they reached Rat Portage, he feared that if he paid for transportation the rest of the way, he might lack funds on his arrival. Undaunted, he bought some bread and cheese, and with his gun for protection, walked the rest of the way to Winnipeg. He and John, impressed by reports of good lands to the west, decided to take advantage of the Canadian Dominion Lands Act of 1872. The brothers set out on foot to locate their homesteads and walked 160 miles (260 km) until they found land to their liking just east of Minnedosa, Manitoba. Burns continued to homestead in Manitoba until after the Louis Riel rebellion but gradually became involved in buying cattle and selling meat. He began his meat packing career with a cow bought on credit and sold for $4. He began freighting goods from Winnipeg and driving his neighbours' cattle to the Winnipeg market. By 1885, he was buying and selling his own cattle. As a contractor from railway construction, that Burns transitioned from being a small-time broker to a successful entrepreneur. In 1887, William Mackenzie and his partners Donald Mann, James Ross, and Herbert Holt secured a railway construction contract to drive a line from Quebec through Maine to the Eastern Seaboard. Mackenzie had grown up in Kirkfield and remembered Burns from their briefly-shared school days and time spent working in their fields. Aware of Burns's experience in the livestock business, Mackenzie gave him the opportunity to provision the labourers who were to construct the line. Burns learned to establish a mobile slaughtering facility, which could move easily as the railhead was extended. The success of the contract in Maine led to whole succession of other contracts with Mackenzie and Mann.
Alberta
Burns moved to Calgary in 1890 and established his first substantial slaughterhouse. In 1898, he built a packing house in Calgary followed by others in Vancouver, Edmonton, Prince Albert, and Regina. He then turned to ranching on a large scale and acquired large tracts of land. His company, P. Burns & Co. (later Burns Foods) became western Canada's largest meatpacking company. At the grand opening of his second abattoir in 1899 (the first had burned down), the Calgary Herald described the event as "the passing of yet another milestone on the road to Calgary's full measure of prosperity." In 1901 he married Eileen Ellis of Penticton in a small ceremony in London, England. Back in Calgary, Burns was building a house for himself and his new bride. Burns Manor, on the corner of 4th Street and 13th Avenue SW, designed by Pat's friend, the famed architect Francis Rattenbury, was a grand, 18-room sandstone mansion, visited by the likes of Prime Ministers and Royalty. Construction took two years, and the couple meanwhile lived at the Alberta Hotel, on Stephen Avenue. The Burnses had one son, Patrick Michael Burns, born in Calgary in 1906.
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