Chapter Four: Montana 'High, Wide and Handsome', 1890-1918

In 1890, Roderick and Mary Munro, and their family, left Scotland for the USA.  They travelled separately, Roderick going first to pave the way and Mary following behind with her six children. The steamship passage on the North Atlantic would have been a much shorter, and more pleasant, experience than the voyages by sailing ship out to the Falkland Islands that they had undertaken some 12 years before.  Arriving in the harbour of New York, they passed the recently-erected Statue of Liberty, a symbol of welcome for all immigrants to the USA.  They would have landed for formal procedures at The Battery in Lower Manhattan because the famous Ellis Island reception centre did not open for business until 1892.  Mary reputedly tied the children behind her in single file by rope for going through the disembarkation and immigration processes, to ensure that none of them got lost in the crowds. (It must have been very scary for children born and raised in the Falklands.)

It is doubtful if Roderick arrived with any offer of work in his pocket, and more likely that he and Mary set off from Scotland merely with hopes of finding a niche in the large and expanding US economy. Roderick fairly quickly found work on a farm in upstate New York, but that was only a

 
temporary measure.  Within a year the family was engaged in a lengthy train journey across much of the continent - to the 'mountain state' of Montana, where the high plains meet the Rockies.

Montana may well have been a magnet for Roderick and Mary all along. A second cousin of Roderick's (on his mother's side) was already settled there, raising livestock near Miles City, and this relative, named Norman MacLean, had some part in persuading the Munros to look westwards.  However, it is also possible that they were attracted to Montana by the high level of publicity it was attracting in the American press at the time.  It was one of the newest states in the union, having become a state only in 1889, and its open spaces, now largely cleared of the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho, were widely prized as some of the last free grazing lands in the West. Montana was also being penetrated by the Great Northern Railway, built between the Great Lakes and the Pacific by the entrepreneurial figure of James J. Hill, who advertised widely the attractions of the land alongside his railway. Hill offered low fares for immigrants willing to travel west and settle alongside the railway, especially as homesteaders. We do not know if the Munros took advantage of Hill's special fares - but nevertheless in 1891 the family pitched up at the little town of Terry, on the Yellowstone River, where the railway cut through southeastern Montana.