John Ware: From a Slave to an Albertan Rancher

• John Ware was a rancher who had started as a slave in South Carolina and became something of a legend in the Brooks region as tales of his horsemanship spread.  

• John was born on a plantation near Georgetown. People didn’t bother giving slaves birth certificates, so to the day he died, John was unsure of his date of birth. He figured it would have been around 1845.  

• After the Civil War ended in 1865, John found himself free to do whatever he wished, and that he did. He left South Carolina and moved to the Wild West. There he went through a variety of jobs that eventually led him up to Montana, where he caught gold fever. He realized quickly that horses and cattle were much more reliable and moved back to his life as a horse-wrangling cowboy.  

• In 1882, a man named Tom Lynch was looking for cowboys to drive cattle to Alberta, and he asked John’s friend Bill Moodie if he would. Moodie agreed, on the condition that John could come too. John returned the favour once they arrived in Alberta, and the pair started working at the North-West Cattle Company.  

• By 1890, John had chosen a prospective piece of land for his own ranch and had built a house there. 

• Around that time, John heard news of a Black family with a nineteen-year-old daughter who had just moved to the area. John plotted a way to get himself introduced to the daughter, Mildred Lewis, and on February 29, 1892, the couple was married.  

• Mildred came from Ontario and had much to learn about being a rancher’s wife, but she adapted very quickly and was soon invaluable to John. The couple had six children, Janet, Robert, William, Mildred Jane, Arthur and Daniel, who died in infancy.  

• Over the next thirteen years, the young family endured many hardships, one being the flooding of their house. 

• Mildred struggled with health concerns, especially after their youngest was born, and in 1905, she finally passed after a bout with pneumonia.  

• John was heartbroken but rallied himself until his own passing not much later on September 12, 1905.  

• The story of John Ware became wildly known in the Brooks area and beyond, and he and his family established much of the work ethic now correlated with Alberta ranchers.  

Bibliography 

John Ware. The Canadians, Hundey, Ian. Markham, Ontario, 2006. Print.