Over the pond stories: Anna's poetry heritage

Let's take up my Dad's side of the family as this is where I have had more success in my searches, unearthing a link to an award winning actress and a famous poet. Before I married into the White family my name was Browne, my Dad was Swinton Browne and my grandfather too. It is a bit of a coincidence that my Mum was born in India, and tracing back it turns out that although my Grandpa lived in the the quaint Borders village of Redpath, many of his family served in the military in India and were born there.

We have always been a family who love to write and when I spent a year in Canada age 17 my Dad wrote me a very entertaining, if slightly illegible, letter almost ever week. Until that point I hadn't really realised that his skills went so far beyond his dairy farming abilities however as we went further back through the years my brother-in-law unearthed where his talents maybe came from. Mix this up with my American ambitions and it all falls into place. “Colorado Morton’s Ride” is a poem written by Rivers Swinton Browne and Leonard Bacon, which appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature, May 16, 1925. The pair were behind cowboy ballads with Montana cowboy, Rivers Browne credited for providing the plot and local color, and Bacon the working up and versification of the work.

Further research and trawling of census records reveals Rivers Browne living in Sweet Grass County, Montana in 1920, 1930, and 1940. I felt quite emotional when I read Bacon's description of his co-author, and my relative, Rivers S Browne:

A man of high breeding and instinctive delicacy, he had been a cowboy for twenty years, and had carried horsemanship to a point where, not merely an art, it was a philosophy. Every bone in his body had been broken by some sixty kicks and other catastrophes. […] In his youth in the early nineties Browne had been horse-wrangler to many cavallardas coming up from Mexico with the longhorns purchased on the border. The duties of the son of an English general had consisted of breaking wild horses caught on the long march–so that the vaqueros might ride them. With such a job there was no middle way. Either one died or one became an artist.

So how did Rivers S Browne come to be in Montana? More delving into census records and linking up the Ancestry family tree, and we learn that Rivers is the son of Swinton John Browne, born in West Bengal, India in 1837 and serving with the 5th Punjab Infantry, with mentions of his horse being shot from under him and a medal. Swinton John Browne's death is recorded in Guildford in Surrey, UK, and how Rivers came to move from India to Montana is not clear. There are also mentions of him owning land in Canada and border-crossing records (as pictured above) show him travelling frequently between there and Montana. Next stop Bacon's papers which are apparently preserved at the university of Rhode Island's library. Another good reason for me to travel the States!

Pictured above is Les Browne, in 1932, son of Rivers S Browne, so my next task also has to be if I can find out if Leslie had any family. Leslie Browne was born in 1902 and lived his entire life in Sweet Grass County, Montana, as a farm and ranch hand, until his service in World War II. He died in 1943. Again so many connections as my childhood was filled with horses and on my bucket list is to go and be a cowboy for a few weeks...perhaps it is in my blood? Whatever happens and despite our base being in New York State, I will definitely be booking a trip to Montana to see if I can find any more members of the family.