His father, Michael O’Keefe (c. 1783 – 1864) was an Irish immigrant from Kilworth, County Cork, and his mother, Esther Demers, was French Canadian.
The two men went into partnership, first driving the cattle to the Big Bend gold area of the Columbia River and then going overland to the Willamette valley in Oregon, where they purchased a herd of about 180 head.
O’Keefe and Greenhow remained in partnership, establishing a small general store to serve the native people and the few settlers in the north Okanagan.
Located at the end of the wagon road into the Okanagan, the post office also became the terminus of the British Columbia Stage Line.
Sometime after his arrival O’Keefe became involved in a relationship with an Okanagan woman, Alapetsa Stalekaya, from the nearby Head of the Lake band.
The alliance was to be strained in 1873 when O’Keefe filed an additional pre-emption on land claimed by the Okanagan but exempted from the reserve boundaries established in 1865.
O’Keefe and Greenhow were content to build up their herds and use the income from their store and post office, and from a newly constructed grist mill, to purchase additional lands.
The depression that had followed the gold-rush was lifted by the economic activity resulting from the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the early 1880s.
With the completion of the CPR, interior ranches gained access to new markets in coastal British Columbia and in southern Alberta, where livestock were in demand for foundation herds.
But the successful growing of fruit in the Okanagan valley placed increasing pressure on the large cattle ranchers to sell their lands for settlement.
This, coupled with a falling-off of the beef market in the late 1890s and the overgrazing of pasture lands, brought about[7] the end of large-scale ranching in the Okanagan.
He lived until his death in his lovely ranch house, which remained in the family’s hands until 1977 and is preserved today as an historic site.
Each year, between 2,000 and 3,000 elementary school children visit the ranch for educational programs, including tours of the O'Keefe Mansion, Balmoral Schoolhouse and general store.
The O'Keefe family's original textual documents, books and photographs are housed in an on-site museum and archives and are available to the public for viewing.
The current building was reconstructed in the 1960s from found materials, and houses the family's original Peter Wright anvil and other early tools.
In 1882, Canada's Governor General, the Marquis of Lorne visited the Okanagan for a hunting trip and was put up in this log home.
It houses numerous pieces of original 19th-century furniture purchased by the O'Keefe family, as well as a Mermod Freres music box, a Steck baby grand piano, and a 115-piece set of Meissen Porcelain.