/the-mark

The Mark

The Cross-S is my family’s Montana cattle brand.

A cross and an S.

My great grandfather, David Emory McCann, homesteaded land in Wibaux County, Montana in the early 1900s.

At just 16, fearing for his life, he fled his father’s Wisconsin farm after losing the family horses in the river.

He came back to the river bank, but the horses didn’t.

His mother told him to leave home.

When his father found out, he might kill him.

After a long journey, Wibaux, Montana was where he put down roots, built his ranch, and created the Cross-S.

He left home with nothing, flung open the doors to the future, and didn’t look back, ultimately finding his fortune in the West.

The pattern held for generations: his descendants did well in the West and poorly in the East.

His son, my grandfather, was raised in Montana and then sent to war in New Guinea.

He dreamt of nine miles on the Gallatin river, but never made it back West. He died young, in Michigan. I never met him. While he was fighting in the Pacific, my grandmother Eileen was living in Carmel, on the Central Coast of California.

In 1999, when Jack died — my grandmother’s second husband, a New York judge, and the grandfather I knew and loved dearly as a boy — Eileen gave me two things: the crystal horse’s head that sat on his desk and his gavel.

He and Eileen had retired to Aiken, South Carolina, which is horse country.

It took more than 25 years before I understood what those symbols meant.

My uncle spent years in the Midwest. He started a fly fishing business, a Western business run from the wrong side of the country. He got to California in the end.

My mother, aunt, and uncle sold the ranch in Wibaux a few years ago now, but the Cross-S is still very much alive.

You could say it saved my life.

During my own dark time living in the Midwest as an adult, a place I have never belonged, the Cross-S called me back home, to the West.

I started drawing it on notebooks, and even walls.

Our family Mandala.

While in Michigan, seemingly “out of nowhere,” I bought a horse tack brand, called Andrea Equine, that was started by a local trainer in San Luis Obispo.

The products were of the highest quality and named after California’s Central Coast, where my grandmother had lived during the war.

The business spoke to me.

Although I had no experience with horses, I bought it.

Not long after, I moved my family West and renamed the business Wibaux.

We came West seeking our fortune, just as David Emory McCann did all those years ago.

Wibaux is a brand of the West.

We stand for hard work, quality, and perseverance, and the drive that puts people on the road West.

A brand is not a logo.

It is burned into hide and it means this one is ours, and we are answerable for it. It goes on stock you raised and ground you proved up on.

We no longer have the family ranch, but we have reclaimed the horse.

John O'Connor, Founder