Pierre Wibaux

The board's round-up ends with a surrender seventy miles north of here. On July 19, 1881, Sitting Bull came in to Fort Buford, at the mouth of the Yellowstone, with 187 people, 44 men and 143 women and children, the last of his following, in Canada since 1877. The next day, in the commanding officer's quarters, he gave his Winchester to his young son Crow Foot to hand to Major David Brotherton and asked that it be remembered he was the last man of his tribe to surrender his rifle. Fort Randall held them nearly two years.

What the plaque says

Pierre Wibaux In 1876, this was strictly buffalo and Indian country. From 1876 to 1881, the U.S. Army rounded up the Indians and forced them onto reservations while buffalo hunters cleared the range for the cattle boom of the Eighties. Pierre Wibaux ran one of the biggest cattle spreads around here in the early days. A native of France, he arrived in Montana in 1883 after studying the cattle industry from calf to packing house. Within a decade of his arrival, he had amassed a herd of 65,000 cattle and prospered from business investments throughout the region. Wibaux had boundless optimism for his adopted state and once said that "If a man is intelligent, has courage, and can see things clearly, he can make money." Through his guidance, the wide-open cow town of Mingusville was renamed Wibaux and became a significant cattle and sheep shipping point on the Northern Pacific Railway. When Wibaux died in 1913, his will provided a fund to erect a statue of himself in the town named for him. From this end of Montana to the west end is just about the same distance as from New York to Chicago. You have to push a lot of ground behind you to get places in this state.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pierre Wibaux House — 0.4 mi
  The town office of a French cattle baron who came through the Hard Winter and bought up the range, in the town renamed for him.

More markers nearby

• Welcome to Dinosaur Country — steps away