Artist: Richard Stewart Halstead (born 1947)
Sarah Paine “Sal” Forbes
FORBES, SARAH PAINE (1919–2011), inducted 2008
In 2008, Sarah “Sal” Forbes was honored as the first female inductee into the Saddle & Sirloin Portrait Collection in its one-hundred-plus years of history. Born in Weston, Massachusetts, she moved to Sheridan, Wyoming, in 1940, after marrying Waldo Forbes. They established a Red Angus herd on their Beckton Stock Farms ranch. Seeing tremendous potential in the breed, they helped found the Red Angus Association of America (RAAA) in 1954, with Waldo as president and Sal as executive secretary. After her husband’s death in 1955, Sal Forbes continued her work with the breed and the cattle industry. Beckton Stock Farms registered six Certified Meat Sires under her leadership. She initiated annual field days at Beckton, events that helped popularize performance testing. Forbes took an active role in organizing the Beef Improvement Federation, earning its Pioneer Breeder Award in 1976. She served on the board of the National Western Stock Show and launched the Red Angus Junior Stock Growers Program. Significantly, Sal Forbes’s four decades of service on the board of RAAA helped create an environment where women could have a much larger role in a male-dominated industry.
Source: Saddle & Sirloin Guidebook 2026, p. 89