Angus Dominion MacLellan

Angus Dominion MacLellan as a young man. This picture was taken at a studio in Cokato Minnesota sometime before his first marriage. Cokato is a small city 50 miles west of Minneapolis. Why the picture was taken there and not in Minneapolis is unknown.

We are now at the point in our story where people remember their ancestors. Even though I never met him, my mother had a memory of her paternal grandfather and Lee MacLellan's father: Angus Dominion MacLellan. Angus is best known for the creation of a mixing tool called the "MacLellan Mixer". But that came later in life.

Angus was born in rural Ontario in 1867, but he emigrated with the rest of his family to homestead in the Red River Valley near Pembina North Dakota. They followed the two McCabe brothers; the McCabes were close friends of the MacLellans. They all worked and farmed near Emerson, Manitoba, in Canada and then further south towards Glasston, ND.

North Dakota offered free land to those who wished to homestead, but it was not an easy life. The early settlers like the McCabes first had to find unclaimed land to grow their wheat. With what little money they had they needed to purchase supplies, oxen to till the land, and wood to build their cabins. They and the others near them struggled to get by, fighting the bitter cold winters, crop destroying hail, and the rainy spring that flooded the land and the almost non-existent roads.

A typical prairie homestead between 1862 and 1916

Thus the die was cast: I would grow up as an American, and not a Canadien.