The Name

Wibaux, Montana sits on Beaver Creek near the North Dakota line. Four hundred people. Shortgrass, wind, and a long way to the next thing.

It’s named for Pierre Wibaux, born in Roubaix, France, to a family of textile manufacturers. He served a year with the Dragoons. He was expected to inherit the mill. He declined, took ten thousand dollars from his father, and went to Montana instead.

The Hard Winter of 1886 killed most of the cattle in the territory and most of the men’s nerve with it. Wibaux came through, borrowed hard against his family’s name, and bought out the ranchers who hadn’t. By the 1890s he ran sixty-five thousand cattle and three hundred horses across country nobody had wanted twenty years earlier.

Our great-grandfather arrived on the same ground about a decade later with no money, no name, and no father’s blessing — running instead of choosing.

They ended up in the same empty place for opposite reasons, and the place didn’t care which. It only asked whether you could stay. Both of them could.

We took the name because it was already the name for this.