[1][2] The HOP Ranch was named for the three original partners – H for William T. Hurd, Superintendent of the Michigan Central Railroad stockyards in Detroit; O for William HOlmes of Wayland, Massachusetts, a six-year veteran merchant seaman and mate who had sailed aboard clipper ships throughout the world; and P for Samuel A. Plumer – a successful real estate investor and financier also of Detroit.

[1][2][3][4] Hurd, Holmes, and Plumer formed a partnership in Detroit to establish a livestock enterprise in cattle and ventured to Denver, Colorado in 1871.

William Holmes remained in Colorado to become the on-site ranch manager while Hurd and Plumer returned to their home base in Detroit.

[4][5] In its early days of operation, the HOP Ranch shipped cattle to market from the nearest railhead in Hugo, Colorado for delivery to Kansas City and Chicago.

In November 1864, 100 miles due east of the Chico Basin, Colonel John Chivington led roughly 675 US volunteer soldiers in an attack on a Cheyenne and Arapaho village of about 700 people.

[8] Then a few years later, in September 1868, members of the US Army and of several tribes of Plains Indians became involved in the Battle of Beecher Island near Wray, Colorado, about 200 miles northeast of the Chico Basin.

The battle turned into a nine-day siege and by its end, a few dozen Army soldiers and Plains Indian warriors were killed and many others wounded.

In one incident at Chico Basin in October 1876, William Wilson, an innocent teenage boy, unknowingly walked into a boundary dispute between neighbors and was murdered.

In December 1880, after a visit to the HOP Ranch, Samuel A. Plumer told of an account where William Holmes had gone to the post office in Pueblo and upon his return stopped to repair a fence.

Despite the tensions on the Colorado plains, the Holmes family befriended Southern Ute Native Americans who passed by on their way to hunting grounds.

[5] The Holmes family also befriended up-and-coming artist and potter, Artus Van Briggle, who came to Colorado in March 1899 to recover from symptoms of tuberculosis.

[A] In August he invited friends to visit his studio at HOP Ranch where he personalized some of the newly modeled pieces by impressing their initials in them.