Everything about John Ware seems larger than life - stuff that legends are made of.
He was a big man, and prodigiously strong. Legend has it that he could stop a steer head-on and wrestle it to the ground. Other stories say that he could lift an 18-month-old steer and turn it on its side for branding or trip a horse by hand and hold it on its back to be shod.
John Ware was also known as a superb, courageous horseman. Ironically, he died when his horse tripped and fell, crushing its rider. His funeral was said to be the largest the young city of Calgary had seen.
Remarkable achievements, to be sure. But the most remarkable thing about John Ware may have been the fact that he was a black man who achieved respect and success at a time when people of colour were emerging from slavery in the U.S. and were almost unknown in the Canadian West.
John Ware was born a slave destined to work the cotton fields of South Carolina. Freed as a young man at the end of the American Civil War, he travelled west and learned skills and the life style of a cowboy in Texas. He took part in mass cattle drives and eventually joined a drive that arrived in what was to become Alberta in 1882.
He stayed in Canada, working for the Bar-U and Quorn ranches. He married the Toronto-born Mildred Lewis in 1892. They had six children, five of whom lived to adulthood. Arthur, their last surviving offspring, lived until May 1989.
The Ware family founded two ranches. The first was on the Sheep River, near Millarville. The second was north of Millicent, on the banks of the Red Deer River and Ware Creek, west of Dinosaur Provincial Park, where the original Ware cabin is preserved.
John Ware died in September 1905, the month and year of Alberta's emergence as a province thanks in part to his hard work, initiative and vision.
John Ware's cabin at Dinosaur Provincial Park John Ware Junior High School (Calgary)
