/1898

1898

In 1898 a sixteen-year-old boy lost his father’s horses in a river.

His name was David Emory McCann. He was my great grandfather.

Wisconsin, high water, a crossing that had been fine a hundred times before.

He came up on the bank and they didn’t.

He was frightened enough of what came next that he left that night with nothing, and what he was running toward turned out to matter a great deal more than what he was running from.

He went West.

He was a boy alone on a continent, and the continent was still open, and he kept going until the grass ran out at the edge of the Montana badlands and there was no further to go.

He fled to Wibaux, Montana, a place he’d never heard of when his journey began.

Then he stopped, and he filed, and he proved up.

That last part is the part I care about.

Anyone can run.

He built.

He put a claim on hard ground that had killed better-provisioned men, and he stayed on it, and he made a place where there had been nothing but weather.

He never went back to Wisconsin. He never had to.

Four generations later we are still going West. This time we brought the horse.

John O'Connor, Founder