John Ware

John Ware was born a slave about 1845, a chattel, a piece of property owned by a South Carolina planter with no more rights than a cow or a pig. His "owner" sold John when he was very young far away from his family to a Texas rancher and that is where John learned the cowboying trade. He was over six feet tall and weighed about 230 pounds, all muscle. After Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in the 1860s, John stuck with cowboying. Racial prejudice abounded in Texas but John was, according to a neighbour by the name of Turner, `a man of [such] unquestioned honesty and agreeable nature...[who] boasted the rare distinction of never having been thrown from a horse, such an expert roughrider and roper' that, in John's case, the Texans discarded their southern prejudices. John rode in the great drives of Texas longhorns up to Montana and Idaho and on to Alberta. He loved Alberta and stayed, working as a hand on the Bar U and Quorn Ranches. He acquired some cattle and set up a ranch near Longview, south of Calgary. Later he moved to Brooks, Alberta. His neighbours considered him the best neighbour a man or woman could hope for and he was a sober family man. He was building up his Brooks ranch when, in 1905, his horse tripped in a gopher hole, threw John and killed him. His funeral was the biggest Calgary ever held.

Alberta's former Lieutenant Governor, Grant MacEwan, has written a book about John Ware, John Ware's cow country.