The stars glistened above him, only slightly overshadowed by the glare of the moon.
In the distance, he could hear the coyotes howl but the sound was drowned out by thousands of cattle wandering north.
His plan was to return to the United States once this job was done.
But life is what happens when you’re making other plans.
This would be the last time he would set foot in the land he was born and was enslaved.
Because at sunrise, he would cross into a new land called Canada and he would never turn back.
I’m Craig Baird and this is Canadian History Ehx.
This month, I’m focusing on the history of my home province, Alberta.
In this episode, I share the tale a man who was born into slavery but found freedom and a new life in the foothills of the Rockies.
This is the story of cowboy legend. John Ware!
There are no biographies, for John Ware and first-hand accounts of his life are nearly non-existent.
To make research for this episode even more difficult, his life prior to arriving in Canada with his family is barely talked about.
So, with that in mind I can tell you that most believe he was born sometime between 1845 and 1850, likely in Tennessee because that’s what’s on his marriage certificate.
At the time of John’s birth, Tennessee was one of the worst places in the United States for Black people.
About 25 percent of the state’s population, 275,000 people, were enslaved at the time, among them?
John Ware’s parents.
Which meant he was born enslaved and because of it
, it is nearly impossible to know anything about his early life.
Cheryl Foggo is the director of the National Film Board documentary titled, John Ware Reclaimed.
She says that the lives of enslaved people are too often lost to history.
CHERYL CLIP [18:31 – 19:08] 37 seconds
Considering what we know of him now, we can deduce that John worked as a farmhand or with livestock on his enslaver’s property before he arrived in Canada.
In 1861, the American Civil War began following the election of Abraham Lincoln.
After he took office as President of the United States and because of opposition to the expansion of slavery, seven southern states, among them Tennessee, seceded,
This would’ve been when John was between 11 or 15, What followed was four years of bloodshed that left between 600,000 and one million dead.
Amid the fighting, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, which freed 3.5 million enslaved men, women and children.
On paper, it meant that anyone who escaped from the southern states to the north were permanently free.
After the Civil War ended in 1865 with the collapse of the Confederacy, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified to abolish slavery across the nation for good.
We don’t know if John Ware and his family escaped to freedom during the war or gained their freedom after it, but after the Civil War, John Ware was free.
He journeyed west and eventually arrived in Texas in the late 1860s or early 1870s.
This was the start of America’s Wild West as millions of heads of cattle migrated with settlers towards the Rocky Mountains and in the process replaced the bison that had been wiped out of the Great Plains.
With Western expansion came the arrival of railroads and an increase in demand for beef, cattle to be driven from ranches to railheads that were often days or weeks away.
This brought about the rise of the cowboy because it was their job to keep the cattle moving.
Despite what John Wayne and Hollywood westerns may have shown you, cowboys weren’t all white.
About 25 percent of them were Black, and John Ware was one of them.
Formerly enslaved men worked as ranch hands, trail drivers and horse breakers.
Many Black cowboys had a high degree of responsibility and earned respect from their white counterparts.
Racial discrimination still existed though, and Black cowboys were expected to work harder for longer hours.
After living the first years of his life in slavery, John Ware much preferred the wide-open spaces that the life of a range cowboy offered.
He had experience and knowledge which made it easy for him to find work and through the 1870s he slowly worked his way north from Texas towards Montana, often driving cattle up the Great West Cattle Trail. This trail ran up from Texas to Montana and was used for decades by for cattle drives heading north.
Meanwhile, across the Montana border was Canada, and events were taking place there that were about to have a big impact onJohn Ware’s life.
In 1875, when John Ware was still herding cattle in Texas, a detachment of North-West Mounted Police established a fort along the Bow River at a spot the Blackfoot called Moh-kins-tsis.
This new fort became an important base of operations against American whisky traders.
Initially, NWMP Inspector Ephrem A. Brisebois, chose to name this new settlement Fort Brisebois but his attempts at stamping his legacy wasn’t appreciated by his superiors.
Colonel James MacLeod and Major Acheson Irvine immediately rejected the name.
MacLeod suggested to name it after a place he often visited in Scotland and Fort Calgary was born.
At the time, the area around Fort Calgary was a wide-open prairie and the home of the Blackfoot.
But soon the Canadian government pushed Chief Crowfoot to sign Treaty 7 with the British Crown.
Once the treaty was signed, the federal government built the transcontinental railroad through western Canada to connect British Columbia with Ontario.
To make this new railroad viable and profitable, they needed a settlement onTreaty 7 land sothe federal government offered leases for cattle ranching of up to 400 square-kilometres for one cent per acre per year under the Dominion Lands Act.
This gave wealthy men the perfect opportunity to play cowboy without ever leaving their Montreal mansions.
Men like Sir Hugh Allan, a short and stocky man who compensated for his baldness with a large beard.
He was one of the richest men in the country, thanks to owning Allan ship Line that brought thousands of new settlers to Canada from Europe every year.
Many of those settlers would soon find homes in the Canadian West.
By 1882, Allan was 72 years old but still looking for new investments and by then the federal government had begun its cheap land campaign.
Frederick Stimson was a rancher who sensed there was an incredible opportunity if he partnered with Allan.
WithAllan’s investment, Stimson would establish a 400 square kilometre ranch that could provide cattle for new settlers and asthe Canadian Pacific Railway was fast approaching Calgary, it was the perfect time to get the idea off the ground.
Allan loved the opportunity and authorized $150,000, to control 59 percent of the venture.
With rich backers on his side, Stimson immediately purchased land south of Calgary in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies.
It became the Northwest Cattle Company, but was better known as the Bar U because its cattle brand featured a line over a U.
Allan made only one visit to his ranch in 1882, and then a few months later he died but his legacy lives on because The Bar U Ranch continues to exist to this day.
But before it got going over 140 years ago, the Bar U needed cattle.
And lots of it
For that, Fred Stimson headed south and on a collision course with John Ware.
In a cattle drive, the top man was the trail boss, who oversaw the entire venture.
Below him was the cook, since to keep the cowboy army fed.
Then there were the wranglers who managed the horses, followed by the cattle drivers.
The lowest in this hierarchy were the nighthawks.
And as you guessed it… John Ware was a nighthawk.
Which meant that after an all-day drive herding cattle, he had to stay up all night to circle the herd and keep it safe and in place.
Ware typically worked in rotating two-to-three-hour shifts, making for long days and long nights.
To stay awake, nighthawks often sang.
I don’t know if John Ware was singing Home on the Range in the dead of night, but by 1882 he was working in Montana when he heard about Frederick Stimson and his ranch in Canada.
The Bar U was looking for 3,000 head of cattle.
He had hired Tom Lynch, the boss of the cattle drive, to assemble a team of cowboys to drive a herd north and into Canada.
Lynch arrived at John Ware’s crew looking for experienced men to take the herd to Stimson’s ranch.
John Ware was very experienced but overlooked because of his race. He was skipped over in favor of his friend, a man named Bill Moodie.
Moodie knew taking this was a great opportunity, so he accepted but only one condition.
They had to hire John Ware as well.
The drive north wouldn’t be easy, Ware would be tested, as he often was.
First the other cowboys y gave him one of the worst horses to ride.
In response, he asked them to give him one that was even worse.
The men brought out a with such a bad temper that anyone who had tried to ride it before quickly ate dirt.
Ware wasn’t gonna have any of that.
He got on the horse and for 20 whole minutes he held on as it tried to buck him off.
He never faltered. He was a gifted horseman, and his display earned him the respect of every other cowboy on the drive.
Cheryl Foggo says this type of testing was common for men like John Ware
CHERYL CLIP [3:55 – 4:04] 9 seconds
The rest of the cattle drive north was relatively without problem. The men respected him and were happy to have him on the ride.
But along the way John had no idea that he was on a one-way trip to his new home.
When John Ware crossed the 49th parallel, he entered the North-West Territories.
That’s right, Alberta didn’t exist yet and wouldn’t for another twenty years.
Instead, he entered a region that stretched from the tip of Ellesmere Island in the far north, all the way down to the US border.
It covered present-day Yukon, Alberta, Saskatchewan and even the western edge of Manitoba.
The area was once home to vast herds of bison that had reshaped the land over millennia after the ice age.
Trees were few and far between, typically clustered around lakes and rivers.
This was the western edge of Palliser’s Triangle, a dry region that stretched from the Manitoba border to the Rockies and up to Edmonton.
It would take twenty years of the vast irrigation projects to turn it into productive farmland.
But at the time John Ware rode with his cattle the region was perfect for raising livestock and so vast ranches had popped up across present-day southern Alberta and Saskatchewan withnames like the 76 and the A7, but none were as famous as the Bar U.
That would be John Ware’s destination.
The ranch was brand new at the time, and now that it had cattle, Fred Stimson needed ranch hands.
John didn’t even have time to dust himself off from the long ride up from Montana beforeStimson had offered him a job.
The men he came with couldn’t stop praising him and that was enough to convince Stimson that John Ware was the right man for him.
For John, this was a perfect turn of events.
Cheryl Foggo says, there was nothing for him in Montana or Texas, and the Bar U looked like a good place to start a new life.
CHERYL CLIP [8:01 – 8:41] 40 seconds
John worked at the Bar U, for two years but it wasn’t easy.
The summers were hot and long, while winters were bitterly cold with winds that howled off the Rockies.
Remember he had grown up in the south and although he had lived in Texas and Montana, nothing prepares you for an Albertan winter.
His first one included surviving a terrible blizzard that killed a large portion of the cattle.
By the time the snow thawed, John had persevered and soon thrived.
While he experienced racism and discrimination in Canada n, it was quite a bit better than anywhere else he had been to before.
After two years he left the Bar U and went to the nearby Quorn Ranch along the Sheep River.
The ranch had been established by the Quorn Hunt Club in Leicestershire, England shortly before John was hired.
Although it had some cattle, its primary focus was horses that would be raised for the English market.
And John Ware’s experience should’ve been worth its weight in gold t.
Once he was hired, the Quorn Hunt Club bought the best breeding horses and John was put in charge.
In May 1885, John represented the Quorn in a roundup.
This huge event included 100 riders from several other ranches, 500 horses and 15 chuckwagons that would be traveling across the southern North-West Territories for the purposes of…
as you may have guessed…
rounding up herds of wild horses and cattle that were still living on the Canadian Prairies, but their numbers were quickly dwindling.
As it turned out, this would be the last of the great Canadian roundups.
The Montreal Gazette wrote quote.
“John is not only one of the best natured and most obliging fellows in the country, but he is one of the shrewdest cow men, and the man is considered pretty lucky who has him to look after his interest. The horse is not running on the prairie which John cannot ride.” end quote.
It was the end of an era in some respects, but John was always looking to the future.
He couldn’t read or write, but he was a smart man who knew how to plan.
Before he left for the 1885 roundup, he had registered the 9999 cattle brands.
John’s plan was to use his wages plus what he had saved to buy cattle and start his own herd on his own small piece of heaven.
And by the time he was ready he was already becoming a legend
A year after the roundup, Calgary held its first Agricultural Society Exhibition, in what would later grow into the now-famous Calgary Stampede.
Cheryl Foggo says that John took part and immediately impressed everyone.
CHERYL CLIP [12:58 – 13:04] 6 seconds
After two years of saving, John had purchased his herd and opened his 9999 ranches in 1887 just north of the Quorn Ranch.
He had come a long way from enslavement in Tennessee; John was now his own boss.
And he would flourish because not only was he a gifted horseman he was a very good farmer as well.
His land was relatively dry, so he developed one of the first irrigation systems in the foothills to provide water for his crops.
Cheryl Foggo says that he was also well-loved in the region.
CHERYL CLIP [13:06 – 13:31] 25 seconds
Of course, having his own ranch was only part of the plan.
He had spent many nights on the open range, and without other cowboys around, his small ranch was very quiet and lonely.
Around 1891, he heard of a new family that had moved to the area.
The Lewis family were from Toronto and moved to start a new life as homesteaders.
Cheryl Foggo says Mildred, one of the daughters, and she immediately stole John’s heart.
CHERYL CLIP [10:03 – 10:40] 37 seconds
John was eventually invited to a Sunday dinner and before long the couple got married.
The Calgary Tribune wrote on Feb. 29, 1892. The day of the weddign
“No man in the district has a greater number of warm personal friends than the groom.”
When they rode up to their new home after the wedding, the couple saw that there was candlelight coming from the window. \
At first, John believed had broken in but itturned out their neighbours were waiting to celebrate with them.
The next few years were happy for the couple but professionally difficult.
The new railroad brought more settlers and brought an end to the open range days of the Canadian West.
There were also terrible winters followed by long droughts tha destroyed crops and dwindled granary reserves.
If that wasn’t enough, mange spread among the cattle, leading to a complete halt on the livestock trade.
Like he had so many times before, John looked to move farther north to start a new life.
The couple sold their land for $1,000 and headed to the nearby area of Duchess to settle along the Red Deer River.
In this beautiful and isolated spot, John rebuilt his herd and supported his wife and four children.
But Mother Nature wasn’t done testing JohnIn the spring of 1902, the Red Deer Riverbanks flooded, and John’s home was destroyed.
It didn’t deter him, and he built a new home on higher ground.
With each victory came another setback.
Soon after the new home was built, Mildred came down with pneumonia. John left to get medicine, but his return was delayed by a heavy blizzard.
When he finally returned, Mildred’s condition was extremely serious. She recovered, but her health was never the same.
Three years later in April 1905, she died of pneumonia and typhoid.
Crushed by the loss of his wife, John sent his children to live with their grandmother for a few months while he remained alone in his cabin to deal with his grief.
His grief was short-lived, but not for a happy reason.
On Sept. 11, 1905, while John was working d on his land, his horse hit a badger hole.
He was thrown off as his horse rolled over him.
Cheryl Foggo His sternum was crushed, and he died staring up into the autumn sky.
CHERYL CLIP [16:50 – 17:20] 30 seconds
His funeral was on Sept. 14, 1905, just two weeks after Albberta came into existenceIt was one of the most well attended in Calgary’s history.
And since his death, he’s been honoured and remembered many times over.
On Dec. 8, 1943, Ware Creek was named after him. So was a mountain ridge but it included a terrible racial slur as part of the name.
It was not renamed to John Ware Ridge until 1970.
There is John Ware Junior High in Calgary, and in 2012, Canada Post honoured him with a stamp.
A decade later, the Government of Canada designated him as a person of national historic significance.
I’ve told you about the life of John Ware, but what about the tall tales that came along with him?
When Superman was created by Canadian Joe Shuster and his friend Jerry Siegel, he could not fly but was just strong enough to lift cars and was as fast as a speeding bullet.
Over time, he morphed into a god-like being who could run at the speed of light, fly anywhere, and could literally lift continents.
John Ware went through this same transformation following his death.
Stories were told that he could stop a bull head-on and wrestle it to the ground, carry a horse on his back and lift a steer in the air with ease.
Cheryl Foggo says that while the inflating of his abilities may seem harmless, these stories are rooted in racism.
CHERYL CLIP [4:52 – 5:23] 31 seconds
John Ware does not need his abilities inflated. His life was interesting enough.
A man born into slavery, who through hard work and determination made his own destiny in a new country and became one of the most respected figures in the Alberta frontier.
That is more amazing and inspiring than any tall tale of strength.
*Sources*
- John Ware [Canadian Encyclopedia] https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/john-ware
- John Ware [Parks Canada] https://parks.canada.ca/culture/designation/personnage-person/john-ware
- Ware, John [Dictionary of Canadian Biography] https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ware_john_13E.html
