Pierre Wibaux House

Pierre Wibaux was a son of a French textile family who served a year in the French cavalry, heard from British acquaintances about the money in American cattle, and talked his reluctant father into staking him. He reached the Northern Pacific siding at Mingusville in 1883, a place named for Minnie and Gus Grisy, who kept its post office, and built his ranch on Beaver Creek about twelve miles north under the brand W Bar. The Hard Winter of 1886-87 killed most of the range cattle on the northern plains. His herds came through better than most, and with family money he bought out the ruined outfits around him; by the mid-1890s the W Bar ran some 65,000 head from the Little Missouri west to the Yellowstone, one of the largest cattle operations in the country.

The ranch was a long ride from town, so in 1892 he and Henry Boice of the Berry-Boice Cattle Company built this four-room office in Mingusville, an office and living quarters for each of them, and Wibaux soon had the whole of it to himself. He set it in a park: lawns and arbored vines tended by a French gardener, two ponds and a grotto, all watered from a tank a windmill kept full. He pressed the Northern Pacific to enlarge its stockyards and campaigned to have the town platted and renamed, and in 1894 Mingusville became Wibaux.

He died in 1913 and had asked to be brought back here. His tomb carries a nine-foot bronze of the cattleman, and the office is the town museum. The county carries his name too.