In 1876, this area was buffalo and Indian country. From 1876 to 1881, the U.S. Army rounded up Indians and forced them onto reservations while buffalo hunters cleared the range for the cattle boom of the Eighties. Pierre Wibaux, a native of France, arrived in Montana in 1883 after studying the cattle industry from car to packing house, and in the early days he ran one of the biggest cattle spreads in the area. Within a decade of his arrival, he had amassed a herd of 65,000 cattle and prospered from business investments throughout the region. Wibaux had boundless optimism for his adopted state and said that if a man is intelligent, has courage, and can see things clearly, he can make money. Under his guidance, the wide-open cow town of Mingusville was renamed Wibaux and became a significant cattle and sheep shipping point on the Northern Pacific Railway. When he died in 1913, his will provided a fund to erect a statue of himself in the town named for him.