Montana (cont.)

Of the Munro sons, the eldest, Roderick Jr, remained a bachelor all of his days, but the youngest, Colin, married Flossie Sherwin of Ismay (to the north of Ekalaka) in 1912, and raised a family of five children.  Of Roderick and Mary's sons, the most able and ambitious appears to have been James MacRae Munro, who went into ranching on his own account and married a girl from Miles City named Marjorie Hamilton.  His standing in the community was recognised in 1917, when a new county, named Carter County, was created to administer local government in the most south-easterly corner of the state, and James was elected one of its first commissioners.  However, this promising career was tragically cut short a year later, when James was killed in a

James MacRae Munro, aged 23

riding accident.  He left behind a son, James Hamilton Munro,who had been born only months earlier and who would therefore grow up never having known his father.

Mary MacRae Munro also died in 1918 (on 8 December, aged 64).  She was a victim of the great influenza epidemic that swept the world in 1918-19.  Since first setting out on her own on a voyage to Port Stanley in 1879, she had become the matriarch of a large family - with 10 children and 19 grandchildren, plus more to come.  It was a sprawling sub-clan, which, like the flocks and herds it tended, was gradually spreading itself across the high plains of its adopted country. Mary's passing - a year after her oldest daughter and in the same year as her second son - seems an appropriate point at which to conclude the story of the founding of the main American branch of the Munros of Glen Orrin. For 1918 was also the end of the Great War in Europe, which had meant prosperity for the farmers and ranchers of the USA, and witnessed the first of two great droughts that laid low grain cultivation in Montana. After 1918, Roderick and the family would experience a different and more difficult economic and social climate. Roderick would live on for some ten more years, marrying for a second time and taking up 'buck-boarding' as a retirement pastime, before passing away on 10 April 1928, just a few months short of his 76th birthday.  The Munro surname did not, of course, survive the marriage of his seven daughters into other families, but it endured through the children and grandchildren of his two sons, James and Colin, and continues to link Ekalaka, Montana, with Glen Orrin, Ross-shire.