/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.

He left with nothing. Wibaux was where he stopped, built his ranch, and created the Cross-S.

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 sent to war in New Guinea. He dreamt of nine miles on the Gallatin, but never made it back West. He died young, in Michigan. I never met him. While he fought in the Pacific, my grandmother Eileen was in Carmel, on California’s Central Coast.

In 1999, when Jack died — my grandmother’s second husband, a New York judge, and the grandfather I knew — Eileen gave me the crystal horse’s head from his desk, and his gavel. They had retired to Aiken, South Carolina, which is horse country.

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

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

You could say it saved my life.

During my own dark time in the Midwest, a place I have never belonged, the Cross-S called me home.

I started drawing it on notebooks, and even walls. Our family Mandala.

While in Michigan I bought a horse tack brand, Andrea Equine, started by a trainer in San Luis Obispo. Its products were named for California’s Central Coast, where my grandmother had lived during the war.

Although I had no experience with horses, I bought it. Not long after, I moved my family West and renamed the business Wibaux.

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