The Wiebe family’s roots run deep at the Rocking W Ranch
The Manitoba Farm Family Recognition Program presented the Rocking W Ranch north of Morden-Winkler with its Century Farm designation this fall.
The honour comes when a farm family maintains continuous ownership of their land for 100 years or more.
“The actual centennial was in 2018,” notes Dusty van der Steen, who grew up on the property. “The farm was founded in 1918 by my great, great grandfather, Peter B. Wiebe.
“They lived in Altona, so it was quite a thing for him to purchase a parcel of land all the way in the Burwalde district, northwest of Winkler. He purchased it for his son, Peter P. Wiebe, which was my dad’s grandfather.”
Peter P. Wiebe married Margaretha Thiessen in 1919 and the couple soon after made the 30-mile trek to settle in their new home.
“They loaded up a wagon and a team of horses with all their belongings and they drove from Altona to where our homestead is now,” van der Steen shares. “It took them most of the day. They arrived just in time to unload before dark.”
Peter P. and Margaretha raised their family and farmed the land for decades, eventually passing ownership on to their son, Frank, who did the same with his own family, in turn passing it on to van der Steen’s father, Rick Wiebe.
By that time, they had branched out from crop farming into raising horses, and it was eventually named the Rocking W Ranch. The ranch quickly became known for its quality of horses and a thriving PMU business (where urine is collected from pregnant mares to produce a estrogen supplement for menopausal women).
“As it went from one generation to the next, it was less and less crop farming,”van der Steen says. “My dad didn’t really do any crop farming, aside from making feed for the horses.
“People came from far and wide to not only buy horses from the farm, but to have them trained,” she adds. “Dad was a cowboy a heart. Dad had plans to move out west to Alberta cowboy country when Grandpa and Grandma offered him the farm to keep him home.”
In addition to the PMU work, Rick Wiebe also started a thriving horse auction business that brought in horses from all over Canada and the United States.
In 2018, Wiebe started the process to apply for the century farm recognition not long after they reached the milestone, but he had to put it on the backburner after being diagnosed with cancer. He died in 2020.
In her father’s memory, van der Steen picked up where he left off and completed the necessary research for the application.
“I felt like it was important to not only honour my dad through finishing it, but also my forefathers that lived there as well,” she says. “They homesteaded in a time that wasn’t easy. And the fact that it’s been in our family all this time is an achievement.”
The ranch continues to be run today by Wiebe’s widow, Barb, as a horse boarding facility, with van der Steen active there as well with her competitive barrel racing events.
The roots she feels when she sets foot on the property run deep.
“It’ll always feel like home to me,” she says.
“As a genealogist, I have developed a sense of how important knowing your history is—what it is, how it affects you,” says van der Steen who also runs Rural Roots Genealogy, offering her sleuthing services to others looking to unearth their family’s stories. “It can be quite profound—how it all started, all of life’s trials, how my ancestors persevered here and how the land that we live on sustained them through each generation. They were so blessed, even though things were tough at times.”
There were plenty of good times as well, shares Marjorie Hildebrand, van der Steen’s great aunt.
Hildebrand, 94, was the youngest of Peter P. Wiebe’s four children who grew up on the property.
“I was born in the house that’s still standing, but it’s very old now,” she says, reflecting that a stiff wind one day is liable to blow over some of the original buildings still standing today.
Reflecting back on her childhood, Hildebrand says they all worked hard to keep the farm running.
“I grew up helping. I had to take care of the chicken population and picking up eggs and putting feed out for them.”
They lived two miles away from the nearest school, which made getting there a bit of a challenge, especially in the winter.
“We were taken by horse and buggy, or horse and sleigh,” Hildebrand recalls.
“There were three families in the area that got together to get the children to school—we had one family supplying the horses, one the wagon or the sleigh, and the other family the feed for the horses.”
She left the property when she got married, but remembers those years fondly. Hildebrand, another avid historian in the family, penned a book The Oak Tree in the ‘90s about the Wiebe history in the area to ensure it wouldn’t be forgotten by future generations.
“I felt that we needed to gather stories about what had happened during the years that we lived in Burwalde,” Hildebrand says. “My mother was still alive and my two older sisters also were a good source of information. So before they would be all gone, I felt that I could maybe put something together, and so that’s how it all started.”
Hildebrand, who was among the family members in attendance Thanksgiving weekend to celebrate the Century Farm designation, is pleased van der Steen picked up the torch left behind by her late father.
“I was very happy that Dusty made that effort to continue the work that her dad had started,” she says. “That was a wonderful gesture on her part. It’s nice to have this recognition for the property.”
