Coming to Colorado when he was thirteen or fourteen years of age, and during the first four years of his residence in the state occupied in herding cattle on the range, thus learning the stock industry by beginning at the bottom of it, George Corcoran, of Mesa county, pleasantly located on an excellent ranch four miles northeast of Grand Junction, is well qualified for his business and is making a gratifying success of it. He was born in Sullivan county, Pennsylvania, in 1870, and is the son of Michael and Katie (Beregan) Corcoran, the former a native of Lockhaven, Pennsylvania, and the mother of another part of that state. They were prosperous farmers in their native state, and there the mother died in 1874, leaving two children, George and William. In 1883 the father brought his sons to Colorado and settled in Grand valley, where he followed ranching until his death, in 1897, at the age of sixty-four years. George began his education in the public schools of Pennsylvania and completed it in those of this state. He started out in life for himself at the age of twenty, taking charge of his father’s ranch, which he still lives on and operates. He has pursued the policy of careful and systematic industry which his father began here, and has made it tell impressively in the improvement of the place and its increased productiveness. He was married in 1903 to Miss Maggie Purcell, a native of Wisconsin, but living at the time at Grand Junction, where the marriage occurred. Mr. Corcoran has bravely and cheerfully accepted all the conditions of frontier life as he has found them. During the first four years of his residence here he rode the range with the most daring, boy as he was, and found the life exhilarating and full of wild enjoyment, even though it was dangerous and often very exhausting. He was repaid for all it cost him in hardship and hazard by the vigor of body and clearness of mind it gave him and the independence and self-reliance it engendered and developed in him.
Source: Bowen, A. W. Progressive Men of Western Colorado. Chicago: A. W. Bowen & Co., Publishers. 1905.