Significant Scots

[Diane Merkel]

Here is an excerpt from an interesting article about the Scots' influence on the West:

Perhaps the best-known Scottish cowboy was Jesse Chisholm, who gave his name to the famous Chisholm Trail which ran from Texas to the Dodge City shipping point, from where the steers were sent to market "back east". Another Scot of some renown was Duncan McDonald who, along with his Scots-Irish friend Billy Irvine, led a group of 11 cowboys and a herd of longhorns 1000 miles from Montana to Wyoming in the summer of 1876, exactly a century after Jesse Chisholm's grandfather had arrived in America. This too was a fateful year: McDonald and Irvine were forced into a wide detour to avoid the fallout from general Custer's defeat just weeks earlier at the battle of the Little Big Horn. McDonald Peak and McDonald Lake in Montana are both named after Duncan's father, Angus, and Duncan himself was a Gaelic speaker who would later assist the Native American Nez Perce tribe when they fought the US army in 1877.

Then there was Scotty Phillip. Born in Morayshire in 1858, he was working as a labourer in Kansas by the time he was 16. Through his marriage to a native American Indian woman he became Crazy Horse's brother-in-law and, at the time of his death in 1911, he was widely credited with having saved the buffalo from extinction thanks to the success of his buffalo ranch in South Dakota. These are just the stories of three; there were many others.

Article: tinyurl.com/wp26j